We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.
A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,”Pattiann Rogers — who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequentpresence in The Universe in Verse — offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book Flickering (public library).
HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES by Pattiann Rogers
I.
Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created within the images of the creator’s creation.
Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened to thundering clouds of hail and rain.
Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven, polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon, inside and outside a circumference in the image of freedom.
Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.
II.
Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions, images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth, deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood… let there be suffering, let there be survival.
Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be terror and tears. Let there be pity.
Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish skittering backward through a freshwater stream with all eight appendages in perfect coordination, both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.
III.
Made in the image of the moon, where else would the name of ivory rock craters shine except in our eyes… let there be language.
Displayed in the image of the rotting seed on the same stem with the swelling blossom… let there be hope.
Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly, eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling, until the right chord sounds from one brave strum of the right strings reverberating, fading away like evening… let there be pathos, let there be compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be weightless beauty.
Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves, following the mode and model of the creator’s creation, particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness, even though the unknown far away and the unknown nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill and accounting, let there be praise resounding.
Dangerous and potentially subversive! (Pixabay) Credit: Pixabay
Overview:
Conservative parents demanding the banning of books and the censorship of schools have a worldview as fragile as glass. They can’t even tolerate the idea of children hearing that they might not be who or what society tells them they are.
Which comes first: the facts or the interpretation?
To those of us raised with a rational, scientific way of viewing the world, this is obvious. You should gather as much evidence as you can, determine what conclusion it best supports, and believe that. That way, you’re best likely to hold a worldview that accurately reflects reality.
However, religious conservatives have the opposite strategy.
They say that what you should do is first, decide what you want to believe; then make the facts conform to that, either by putting a particular spin on events, or simply omitting the ones that inconveniently contradict your preferred conclusion.
This shouldn’t be a controversial or insulting statement. This is something that religious conservatives are very open about. For example, the creationist organization Answers in Genesis says so themselves.
They argue, in postmodern, post-truth fashion, that evidence never proves one worldview over another and it’s all about what assumptions you start with, so you might as well pick the one that makes you feel the best. In their eyes, a universe where God exists and promises to reward the faithful is more comforting than a godless universe where humanity is on our own, so we should believe the former rather than the latter.
The “liberty” to read what I want you to read
This is a consistent theme in the behavior of right-wing groups like the Orwellian “Moms for Liberty,” which in reality is anti-liberty and anti-free-speech. They exist for the purpose of imposing their personal political beliefs on everyone. They want to control what should be taught in classrooms and what books should be available in libraries, and they want a heckler’s veto over any course material that makes any conservative upset.
In every school district where they pop up, they want to throw out books about racism and civil rights—whether it’s biographies of civil-rights icons like Ruby Bridges or Rosa Parks, or books about racism like The 1619 Project—because it might make white students feel guilty or ashamed to learn real history.
They only want kids to hear a sanitized, whitewashed version of the past where racism was the crime of a few misguided individuals, never a reflection of society as a whole, and everything was fixed and everyone was forgiven in the end. Even if that’s not what actually happened.
For example, in York, Pennsylvania:
“I am Rosa Parks” and “I am Martin Luther King, Jr.” … were two of more than 200 anti-racism books and resources suggested by the Central York School District’s diversity education committee last year. The Central York school board vetoed the entire list. In a clip from a meeting aired by CNN, which reported on student protests of the ban, members referred to the list of reading and educational material as “divisive” and “bad ideas.”
Banned are children’s picture books, K-5 books, middle and high school books, videos, webinars, and web links, including a memoir by Pakistani writer and activist Malala Yousafzai; a book by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor; an adaptation of “Hidden Figures,” about Black female mathematicians at NASA; “Sulwe” by actress Lupita Nyong’o, about a little girl who fears her skin is too dark, and CNN’s “Sesame Street Town Hall” about racism.“His books on Rosa Parks and MLK were banned. Here’s what this South Florida author did.” Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald, 30 September 2021.
Or in Williamson County, Tennessee, which has become a hotbed of book censorship:
Community members and local advocacy organizations have come forward in disapproval of books like “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” “Separate is Never Equal,” and “George vs. George,” their argument being that teaching about the darker aspects of racism in United States history isn’t appropriate in elementary grades.
…Steenman said that the mention of a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school” too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn’t offer “redemption” at its end.“Here’s what to know about the debate over ‘Wit & Wisdom’ curriculum in Williamson schools.” Anika Exum, The Tennesseean, 8 July 2021.
In that same district, conservatives objected to teaching kids the story of Galileo, because it makes the Catholic church look like the bad guy (!).
At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun.
And, yes, they want to ban a kids’ book about seahorses, because it mentions that it’s the male seahorse that gets pregnant and gives birth:
Complainants stated during the hearing that there is “social conditioning” in the book, that there are concerns about the book and video “attempting to normalize that males can get pregnant” and the “suggestion that gender is fluid is too early” to be taught in first grade. It was stated that the book paired with the video is “indicative of an agenda”.
Please note: it’s not the book they object to, but the biological facts that the book describes. I can’t help but picture angry, censorious church ladies shielding their sons’ and daughters’ eyes from the seahorse exhibit at the aquarium. If they think seahorses are part of the LGBTQ agenda, isn’t their real complaint with God, who they believe created seahorses in this way?
This is a telling complaint, because it’s an explicit demand to censor reality so as not to conflict with ideology. If kids learn too much about the exuberant diversity of nature, it might give them the idea that our gender roles are cultural constructs and not universally applicable laws. And we can’t have that!
A crayon’s story
But I’ve saved the most absurd for last. According to this story on Daily Kos, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina has banned a book called Red: A Crayon’s Story, by Michael Hall, in response to parent complaints.
That title caught my eye because I know this book very well. I own a copy of it. I’ve read it to my son many times.
It’s a story about an anthropomorphic blue crayon who gets a red wrapper by mistake. His family, friends and teachers (who are also crayons) can’t look beneath the surface. They believe he must be red, because that’s what his label says.
When he tries to draw red things like strawberries or traffic lights, and, of course, fails… the other crayons double down. They insist that he can draw red things, if he just tries harder. They start gossiping that he must be lazy or slow or have something else wrong with him.
Eventually, he meets a friendly crayon who asks him to draw a blue picture. Having absorbed the messages society has placed upon him, he says he can’t. But the other crayon persuades him to try, and he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. At last, he finds his true color. He’s so good at drawing blue things, the beauty of his art wins all the other crayons over and makes them realize they were wrong about him.
Yes, this is the book right-wingers are up in arms about.
Now you could, if you wanted to, read this as an allegory for gay or transgender people coming out of the closet… but come on. It’s a kids’ book about talking crayons. Its moral is about being true to yourself, but that’s all. It doesn’t demand any specific interpretation. If you persist in seeing it as a story about sexuality, it’s because that’s what you bring to it. (According to the author, it’s a metaphor for his diagnosis of dyslexia.)
Imagine what this says about the mindset of the book censors. They find it deeply threatening and subversive simply to say that you might not be who or what society tells you you are. Even in a story that says nothing about sexuality or gender, they can’t tolerate that. They want to keep any hint of that idea far away from the minds of children.
If these wannabe book-burners weren’t such a threat, they would be ludicrous. It’s a sign of how porcelain-fragile their worldview is that they can’t stand to have kids even consider making up their own minds about their identity. Their only hope, as shown by their own actions, is to raise children who never ask questions and never doubt anything they’re told.
If you want to be free, you have to have an understanding of the choices. Conservatives who push book bans and rage against pluralistic education are fighting against their own stated goal.
Imagine you find yourself in a room, facing two doors.
One door is rough, weathered wood. The other is made of boards polished smooth.
There’s carved writing on both, but it’s in a language you don’t read, in characters you’ve never seen. There are chains of intricate symbols inlaid into the frames in gold and silver, but they’re utterly meaningless to you.
There’s just one thing you know. One door is the entry into a golden existence: a long life of peace, ease and good health, full of friends and love. The other opens onto a dark and gloomy road: a hard life of unhappiness, suffering, misery, loneliness, and early death.
Knowing that your fate is riding on the choice, which door would you pick?
The cosmic shell game
The correct answer—assuming you’re a rational skeptic—is that this isn’t a choice at all.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another. You have to have some background knowledge, some way to evaluate which of the options before you is better. If you could read the language carved on the doors, or if you recognized any of the symbols, you might be able to make a better-than-chance judgment about the correct one. Without this knowledge, picking either door would be a blind guess. You might as well flip a coin.
Of course, in real life, we’re in an even worse place than this pared-down hypothetical. In the real world, there are more than just two doors. There are thousands, each one densely covered with their own writing and their own symbols (notwithstanding the evangelists who think there are only two choices: “My Religion” and “Everything Else”). In addition to that, each door is surrounded by a dense crowd of people yelling that their door is the one true way to happiness and all the others are pretenders.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another.
Longtime readers may remember this as the scenario in my essay “The Cosmic Shell Game“. It’s a potent reason to distrust the truth claims of religious believers. No one can investigate all these options, and very few people even try. Instead, most people choose the faith they belong to because of an accident of birth. Their decision is effectively random, no more trustworthy than flipping a coin.
This argument doesn’t just apply to religions. It works equally well as a metaphor for philosophies, nationalities, political ideologies, and every other major life decision where making one choice forecloses others. How can anyone make any trustworthy or informed choices about anything, when the space of possibility is so large as to be unnavigable?
The lay of the land
It’s impossible to study every religion, philosophy and ideology in the universe to make a definitive ranking. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying. We’ll never have perfect knowledge, but we can always gain more knowledge. And the more knowledge we have, the better the choices we can make. It’s like trying to hike across uncharted territory. Even if you don’t have a complete map, the more you know about the lay of the land, the better able you are to find a safe path.
This goes for every field of inquiry. The more you know about history, the more you can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The more you know about science, the less likely you are to hold a belief that was already tested and disproven. The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
For best results, this knowledge should be a broad cross-section of humanity, not limited to one gender or one race or one religion or one country. It’s the same reason why diverse groups make better decisions: it’s less likely that everyone has the same blind spots, so one person will see what another overlooks. You can achieve the same effect as an individual by stocking your mind with the widest possible selection of human thought and knowledge.
That’s why pluralism is so important in education. It’s the answer to conservatives who think it’s an underhanded liberal ploy—a way to instill leftist values to the exclusion of all others. Actually, it’s just an acknowledgment of a basic fact of reality: it’s really complicated, and figuring stuff out is hard!
Knowledge sets you free
Conservatives say that freedom is their number one value, the thing they care about above all else. Fair enough. Here’s what I say to that: Freedom is only truly possible for an educated person—and the more education you have, the more free you are.
Anyone can be “free” in the wild-animal sense of pursuing immediate desires without constraint. But the truest, most uniquely human kind of freedom is the ability to make decisions that steer the course of your life. Just as in the two-doors analogy, that kind of freedom is only possible when you have the knowledge to make responsible choices. Otherwise, it’s just random guessing or blindly following the path presented by birth or society.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world.
If you had a kitchen cabinet full of cans, some of which were nutritious and some were poison—but you had no way of knowing which is which—would you boast about your “freedom” to pick any one you felt like? Of course not, because no one values the freedom of ignorance or the freedom to plunge blindly into danger. The only kind of freedom anyone wants is the freedom to choose right—whatever you believe the right choice to be.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world. It’s knowledge that gives you the power to shake off indoctrination, recognize fallacies for what they are, and choose the worldview whose claims are borne out by evidence.
As a substitute for accepting reality about climate change, evangelicals have decided that Jesus has given them ownership of the entire planet. Thus, they really ought to take care of it so he doesn’t get mad at them for breaking his gift. That sounds good—until you read the Christianese terms and conditions.
Christianese does a lot of heavy lifting for evangelicals. Everyday life becomes a godly melodrama. You aren’t the guy who carries the pastor’s stuff—you’re an armorbearer. You aren’t eating lunch, you’re breaking bread. Even a simple word-shuffle like Christ Jesus can give an insidery zhuzh to whatever you’re on about. The result can be a harmless spiritual RPG or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, bless your heart.
Now we see (some) evangelicals deploying the phrase creation care. It’s their substitute for environmental activism, a way of owning the concept and (most importantly) giving themselves permission to gut any parts of the actual meaning that they find inconvenient. Those who embrace it might not accept that humans have had anything to do with the climate’s huge changes in the modern day, but they’re still aware that not GAFF about the planet is a bad look—and they want to at least make an effort at look maintenance.
The other name for creation care, “environmental stewardship,” reveals the ideas at work here. Though this phrase isn’t technically an evangelical creation, the word stewardship conveys a great deal about evangelicals’ mindset and priorities—and what this creation care movement actually involves.
Worse, at a time when human impact on Earth’s climate grows more and more certain, this entire movement might just be a little too little, a little too late.
One degree warmer isn’t a big deal, said the homeschooling evangelical mom to her nine-year-old
A long time ago, I saw a short clip of an evangelical mother homeschooling her young son. The lad looked about nine years old and was decidedly not enthused about being filmed while engaging with substandard pseudoscience at his home’s kitchen table.
Somehow, he feigned interest in his mom’s placement of two cups of water in front of him. She’d carefully made sure that the water in the cups was exactly one degree (Fahrenheit, I assume) different.
Now, she asked him to test the temperature of the two glasses with his finger. He did so. She asked him if he could tell her which cup contained the warmer water. He could not.
“See?” she asked triumphantly. “One degree isn’t a big deal.” Then, she swooped in for the kill: Global warming is obviously fake, just some liberal ploy to, I don’t know, put oil companies out of business.
All those people saying that the Earth couldn’t get one degree warmer or bad things would happen? They were wrong. One degree is no biggie.
If so, good. Because yes, a planet that is one degree warmer is a huge freaking ginormous big deal, Homeschooling Evangelical Moms of the World. And that’s where we are now, according to several authorities: NASA, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In fact, Earth is somewhere between 1.1 degree (Celsius) warmer and 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in 1900.
But don’t you worry none! After a long period of denial that climate change was even a real thing that is actually happening right now thanks to humans, evangelicals have swung into action to take up their divinely-given role as Earth’s stewards.
Christianese 101: Stewardship (in general)
For normies, environmental stewardship is not a new idea at all. That phrase has been around for almost a hundred years. In less religious spheres, environmental stewardship is simply direct participation in conservation efforts. A 2018 paper offers some specific activities encompassed by the phrase:
The term environmental stewardship has been used to refer to such diverse actions as creating protected areas, replanting trees, limiting harvests, reducing harmful activities or pollution, creating community gardens, restoring degraded areas, or purchasing more sustainable products. It is applied to describe strict environmental conservation actions, active restoration activities and/or the sustainable use and management of resources. Stewardship actions can also be taken at diverse scales, from local to global efforts, and in both rural and urban contexts.“Environmental Stewardship: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Framework,” 2018
But in religious spheres, the phrase “environmental stewardship” takes on a very special meaning. And it all begins with the word “stewardship.”
Evangelicals often pretend that they’re just taking care of things for Jesus until he returns. That’s why they call themselves his ambassadors, even though any real ambassadors would have been recalled a dozen times if they’d done even a fraction of what evangelicals constantly do.
As part of their self-declared role as ambassadors, evangelicals pretend that Jesus is very nicely allowing his most beloved and trusted followers to manage things for him in his absence, like parents allowing small children to help with light housework so they feel involved.
In other words, evangelicals act as Jesus’s stewards.
Christianese 201: Environmental stewardship and creation care
When I said “manage things” up there, I meant absolutely everything. Evangelicals claim to believe that Jesus owns literally everything: the planet, the universe, every government on Earth, even people themselves. That’s you and me. As his ambassadors, evangelicals are therefore his stewards in managing all of the above. They steward Jesus’ property in his name and for his benefit.
So environmental stewardship means exactly what you now think it means. Some evangelicals want to make an effort not to wreck the planet, but only because they own it and want to keep it nice—for Jesus, of course.
Creation care is simply what many evangelicals call their environmental stewardship. They’re taking care of Jesus’ creation—at least until he returns to destroy it all.
If you’d like a lot more info about this distinction between secular and religious uses of the term environmental stewardship, a 2012 paper by Jennifer Welchman might be your best bet. She describes the religious overtones of the term, offers a much more detailed overview of its history as a concept than you’ll find much of anywhere else, and details the risks inherent in using it in more secular contexts. She ends with a more nuanced definition of the term going forward. So if you have a JSTOR account, I highly recommend checking it out.
(How to get a JSTOR account to access tons of amazing journal articles for free. I have no formal relationship with this site beyond being a happy account holder.)
How evangelicals first engaged with creation care
Some evangelicals responded to early calls for creation care with enthusiasm. In January 2023, Neall Pogue wrote an interesting essay about those early days for The Conversation. He asserts that from the 1960s to the early 1990s, white evangelicals largely supported “an environmentally friendly position.”
When Francis Schaeffer père adopted environmentally-friendly views in the late 1960s, the stage was set for white evangelicals to follow suit. He was hugely influential with that crowd and would eventually lend a hand in engineering their anti-abortion culture war. (Before then, abortion wasn’t on evangelicals’ radar. They saw it as a backward Catholic thing.)
So when Schaeffer spoke on environmental stewardship and wrote books and essays urging evangelicals to adopt those ideas, evangelicals listened to him. Even Southern Baptist ministers adopted his suggestions.
By the 1980s, Pogue tells us, evangelical homeschooling resource companies like Abeka Book praised environmentalist ideas and leaders. Their materials also cautioned against the impact that capitalism could have on the environment.
In 1988, when Pat Robertson bowed out of the presidential race that year, he gave his version of the classic “City on a Hill” speech. Whereas Ronald Reagan’s idealized City had emphasized free trade, busy ports, and harmonious diversity, Pat Robertson’s resembled an extended, idealized evangelical family. And that family specifically enjoyed clean water, pure air, healthy soil, and a robust ecology.
The second phase of creation care should have given evangelicals whiplash—but it sure did not
By the 1990s, though, the political climate in evangelicalism had changed dramatically. Evangelicals now largely completely embraced both the culture wars and very conservative political and social positions. Their leaders had completely politicized them. They even trampled and drove away anyone who thought differently.
This time on the merry-go-round, evangelical leaders needed their flocks to hate environmental stewardship, not embrace it. Their reasons were twofold:
First, so the flocks would reject liberal politicians who were overwhelmingly pushing hard for environmental protection measures, along with liberal causes themselves.
Second, so the flocks would reject any ideas that might lead to changes that would negatively affect conservative donors to Republican politicians.
The anti-abortion culture war had already demonstrated that evangelical leaders could reliably deliver scads and reams of evangelical votes to conservative politicians and causes. Those leaders simply used that culture war’s rails to deliver the same kind of misinformation—this time, it simply concerned climate change instead of human rights and gynecology.
It worked, and it worked remarkably swiftly. Evangelicals were, by now, very comfortable with not only completely reversing course at their leaders’ urging, but also with forgetting they’d ever held any other position.
But creation care still, uh, found a way
I can tell you with both a quickness and a certainty that my old crowd of fundamentalists almost completely rejected environmentalism in the late 80s and early 90s. I didn’t even know that evangelicals had once thought any differently.
In fact, I had a Pentecostal friend in college who got so annoyed with Earth Day celebrations on campus that he told everyone he was going to buy a gigantic diesel pickup truck, pursue an almost-entirely beef diet, and eat a lot of beans for the rest of his life—for their intestinal effects, geddit? He didn’t do any of that in reality, but dang, that’s some real stewardship!
In the United States, air pollution alone kills an estimated 200,000 people each year., Approximately 6,000 unborn children die from soot (fine airborne pollution) in the U.S., while another 10,000 are born premature from soot exposure. Additionally, a Lancet Commission on Pollution and Human Health found that in 2015, pollution resulted in over 9 million deaths worldwide. This represents 3 times more deaths than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined and 10 times more deaths than all forms of violence and conflict. Pollution’s threat to life continues and is projected to at least double by 2050 unless we act.
As pro-life Christians, our mission demands that we defend life in every way. Our faith and our values will never be compromised.Creation Care Statement on Development (archive)
Francis Schaeffer clearly has a lot to answer for.
The culture wars wreck everything, even creation care
By the Aughts, though, climate change was starting to become a big topic. More and more, the scientific consensus looked not only compelling but overwhelming. And some evangelicals accepted their assertions.
But by now, evangelicals had begun their big decline in membership and cultural power. They were far more sensitive to their growing vulnerability to their many enemies.
If you ever saw that classic Key & Peele sketch about President Obama goading Republicans into supporting all kinds of liberal causes by pretending to reject them, then know that the same thinking governed evangelicals at the time.
“Ain’t I a stinker?”
Whatever leading scientists asserted, evangelicals seemed to delight in rejecting. That definitely included climate change. Rejecting any care for the environment had become as certain a belief marker as opposition to legal, accessible abortion was.
Creation care emerges from the ashes
In 2006, almost 100 evangelical leaders signed a major statement about global warming. These included Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, which just got booted from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for being friendly to the idea of women pastors. The letter, addressed to the NAE, asked its leaders to support legislation that would help ease global warming. To support their requests, the signers met with various congress members and ran advertisements supporting climate change science and environmentalism.
However, an opposition group soon formed to push back against this letter’s requests. The opposition included Richard Land, the leader of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Notably, the organizer of this opposition effort, E. Calvin Beisner, said he felt driven to do it because he denied climate change science:
He said Tuesday that “the science is not settled” on whether global warming was actually a problem or even that human beings were causing it. And he said that the solutions advocated by global warming opponents would only cause the cost of energy to rise, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor.“Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative,” New York Times, 2006 (archive)
(Yes, because extremely conservative, science-denying white evangelicals have always been so very very very concerned with the plight of poor people.)
In 2008, creation care gained a whole new set of supporters.
Nowadays, Jonathan Merritt is a big-name religion writer and the son of an SBC pastor who is, in turn, one of the denomination’s former presidents. But back in the Aughts, when he was just a seminary student, Merritt spearheaded the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI). In 2008, the new group released a powerful statement:
We have recently engaged in study, reflection and prayer related to the challenges presented by environmental and climate change issues. These things have not always been treated with pressing concern as major issues. Indeed, some of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that these are real problems that deserve our attention. But now we have seen and heard enough to be persuaded that these issues are among the current era’s challenges that require a unified moral voice.
Merritt’s declaration garnered 45 high-profile SBC signatures, including his dad’s, that of the SBC’s current president, Frank Page, and that of the president of Merritt’s seminary, Danny Akin.
Despite its name, though, the SBECI was not an official endeavor of the SBC itself. And it revealed that Southern Baptists weren’t at all unified behind the idea of creation care as a priority—or even as a real necessity.
When money gets involved, creation care stops mattering
Then, in 2010, Daily Mail famously reported on John Shimkus, then a Republican Congressman from Illinois. That year, Shimkus campaigned to chair the House Energy Committee despite being a climate change denier. In fact, he thought Jesus had implicitly promised humans that they’d never destroy the planet because Jesus had already claimed that privilege for himself. Naturally, Shimkus not only won the position but also became the Republican Leader of the committee’s Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee.
And if you’re wondering, the current Chair of the Energy Committee since January 2023 is Cathy McMorris Rodgers…
… Who is a Creationist and therefore a denier of all established biological science.
In a way, though, these ferocious examples of pushback against climate change only highlighted how inevitable the movement was among the most important demographic of all:
The newest crop of voting-age Americans, especially those who still affiliated with evangelicalism.
Creation care gains a foothold in Gen Z
Despite older evangelicals’ now-decades-old rejection of creation care, gradually younger evangelicals adopted its ideas. A year or so ago, a writer for Wayland Baptist University explained the school’s fairly-new recycling program with this strong statement:
[M]any Christians today believe the environment (God’s creation) is an exploitable commodity, given to us to use as we see fit. Christian environmental stewardship, also known as “Creation Care” takes a different view, reminding us that we cannot honestly declare that we love God, nor love Jesus, while at the same time destroying His creation, which He declared to be good and exists to glorify Him.Wayland Baptist University Green Initiative, “Biblical Foundations for Christian Environmental Stewardship” (archive)
A photo of the program’s volunteers taken last year reveals some very youthful, smiling faces. I’m not surprised to see them, either. In 2021, Pew Research discovered that Gen Z tends to feel the most strongly—and to take action most often—about climate change than earlier generations have. Millennials got that ball rolling years earlier. It could well be that when their older Christian leaders refused to join them in their concerns, that became a sticking point for Millennial Christians.
No no, Padre, tell us more about how sour those grapes must be.
I bet they’re totally sour.
Why Christian leaders have to talk like that
Generally, the big-name evangelical Christian leaders have not changed at all from their mid-1990s course. They’re still lip-locked with Republican priorities, still tasked with delivering votes to Republican politicians and causes, still flogging misinformation through the culture war’s established rails.
Very clearly, Republicans still need evangelicals to reject any progress regarding the environment. And so that is exactly what evangelical leaders are telling the flocks to do.
But a few have broken ranks. I spotted some of them on a 2020 editorial. In it, these pastors discussed grants for solar panels for churches through their new group Creation Care Partners. In a separate interview with Christianity Today, one of the editorial writers, Bob Whitaker, had this to say about why he’s involved with the group:
“This whole thing for me has been a bit of a conversion,” said Whitaker, who has pastored at Evangelical Community Church for 22 years. “I didn’t grow up thinking this way. I didn’t begin serving this church with this mentality…. Among evangelicals—churches, pastors, even theologians—we’ve focused on the salvation of the soul to the exclusion of other parts I now consider to be part of the Good News.”
His change was gradual—an expansion of his understanding of how the gospel applies to everyday life and a growing sense that God’s people should treat the earth not as consumers but as caretakers.“Creation Care Movement Takes Action with Solar Panels and Petitions,” Christianity Today, 2020 (archive)
Looking at his church’s website, it becomes abundantly clear that he’s got a lot of younger Millennial and Zoomer congregants going there. Mystery solved!
And now, just look at that horse run!
Perhaps because of the pandemic, creation care seems like it’s everywhere in 2023. Here’s a very small sampling of creation care events and happenings that are either going to happen or that have occurred already this year:
During Lent 2023 (from late February to early April, basically), an interfaith group offered an entire Lenten Creation Care calendar full of activities that Christians could do to help with climate change.
In May 2023, the Creation Care Committee of the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church issued a “Creation Care Resolution.” It offered some far-reaching recommendations that the committee hopes the denomination will accept.
2023 EDRI Conference for Creation Care (September 2023). If you’re wondering, EDRI stands for Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. This is the second year they’ve had this conference. This year, they’ll focus on “environmental justice.”
BioLogos Creation Care Summit (October 2023). BioLogos famously consists of evangelicals who reject Young Earth Creationism.
The Catholic Climate Covenant (“Care for Creation; Care for the Poor”) offers a bunch of resources on their page regarding creation care. Among these is an essay from Pope Francis concerning ecology.
Creation Care: It’s What’s For Dinner™.
The problem with creation care
So here we are, with younger evangelicals loving creation care and many older ones still rejecting the idea that climate change is even a thing that humans have caused and need to fix now.
Even if evangelicals as a whole finally get on board with what creation care advocates want, there’s still one huge, glaring dealbreaker problem with the idea:
Creation care will never be anything but completely optional for evangelicals.
The situation reminds me of being in grade school in the American public school system. Whenever the school got new textbooks, teachers begged students not to trash them.
Some students listened (like, ahem, me—a sweet, dreamy, quiet little girl who already treasured books) and took perfect care of these perfect new textbooks. Others didn’t quite achieve that standard. And a few trashed the books on principle, because what exactly was the school gonna do to them if they did? Fine their parents? It’s not like they’d ever suffer any penalties themselves.
That’s exactly what’s going on here with creation care.
If evangelicals choose to reject creation care, it’s not like Jesus will do anything to them. They’ll still go to Heaven, after all. Creation care is purely optional, just like every other behavioral demand evangelicals make of other evangelicals. It’s not like anyone’s going to do anything to them if they ignore the demand.
If evangelicals are not forced to do the right thing, they have shown us time and again that they simply will not do it. In fact, they’ll do its opposite if they can. Wanting their grandchildren to have a clean, livable planet doesn’t matter, either, to the large number of evangelicals who believe that Jesus will kick-start the Endtimes before too long.
They might as well drive huge diesel pickup trucks and eat steak every day—along with a lot of beans.
I think Anselm’s dictum “faith seeking understanding” is to be understood in the history of theology and philosophy to be equivalent to “Faith Seeking Confirmation.” If that’s how it’s historically used then that’s what it means. Below is an updated edit from chapter 2 of my my book, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End.
There is a common theme among St. Anselm’s work and the work of other obfuscationist theologians and philosophers that needs to be highlighted. It’s called faith seeking confirmation. We see this in Anselm with regard to his new atonement theory and his ontological argument.
Anselm therefore is exhibit “A” in defense of what atheist philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.”1 If I could pick one sentence, one aphorism, one proverb that highlights the main reason philosophy of religion (PoR) must end, it’s Law’s. I’ll call it Law’s law of faith.–Begin Excerpt:
Faith Seeking Confirmation
Anselm’s most enduring legacy just might be his statement, credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order that I may understand”), or in its most famous form, Fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).26 While others have expressed this idea, the point is that people first believe then seek to understand. First they believe then they seek data. First they believe then they seek to confirm their beliefs. No one in the history of the confessional church probably said anything different, or if they did, faith was surreptitiously smuggled in the back door. Few if any Christian intellectuals ever said “understanding seeks faith,” because the obvious sequitur is that if they achieved understanding they wouldn’t need faith. Seeking confirmation of one’s religious faith rather than truth reverses what reasonable people should do with one’s religious faith. In fact, it goes against science since science is based on the search for truth. So in this sense, faith should be recognized as a known cognitive bias sure to distort any honest inquiry into the truth, confirmation bias.
In 1987 a large-scale US antinarcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America launched. It featured two televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign. The original thirty-second ad showed a man who held up an egg and said, “This is your brain.” Then he showed a hot frying pan and said, “This is drugs.” Then he cracked the egg and put it in the pan. It immediately began to cook. He brought the pan closer to the camera and said, “This is your brain on drugs.” He ended the PSA by saying, “Any questions?” It was a very powerful commercial.
I want people to consider the drug metaphor for faith, taking our cue from Karl Marx, who described religious faith as the opiate of the people. When you think of the commercial you need to hear the actor say, “This is your brain on faith.” That’s what I think. Here then are five ways faith makes the brain stupid:
1. Faith causes the believer to denigrate or deny science. 2. Faith causes the believer to think objective evidence is not needed to believe. 3.Faith causes the believer to deny the need to think exclusively in terms of the probabilities. 4. Faith causes the believer to accept private subjective experiences over the objective evidence. 5. Faith causes the believer to think faith has an equal or better method for arriving at the truth than scientifically based reasoning.
Any questions?
Christian, before you mindlessly quote mine from the Bible or the theology based on it, consider what you think of other brains on faith, like those of Scientologists, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, pantheists, and so on. Clearly you think their brains are on the opiate of faith just as I do. Watch some videos about these other faiths. Study them. Talk to practitioners of them. Try to argue with the best representatives of them and see if you can penetrate their brains with reason and science. Can’t do it? Why? Why do you think their faith makes them impervious to reason and your faith does not make you impervious to reason?
I had a discussion with a person of faith not long ago where she said there was nothing I could ever say to change her mind. I simply replied that no scientist would ever say such a thing. I went on to say she should think like a scientist and recommended that she read Guy Harrison’s chapter in my anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science, titled, “How to Think Like a Scientist: Why Every Christian Can and Should Embrace Good Thinking.” I recommended it because thinking like a scientist is the antithesis of thinking with the drug of faith on one’s brain.
Scientifically minded people argue we should reason like a scientist. Believers in different faiths will demur, saying we cannot justify our own reasoning capabilities, since we accept the fact of evolution. I think my evolved brain can make reliable (though not perfect) judgments based on the evidence of course, and that should be good enough. But ignoring this for the moment, what if these believers are correct? Then what? It gets them nowhere as in no-where. They still cannot settle their differences because they are left with no method to do so. They will argue for faith over reason, which leaves them all back at the starting gate, with faith. They are special pleading and that’s it, thinking that if they can deny reason in favor of their particular faith then it follows their particular faith ends up being the correct one. No, if they deny reason in favor of faith the result is there’s no way to settle these disputes between people of different faiths. My claim is that religions debunk themselves and because this is clearly the case, the only alternative to know the truth about the world is through scientifically based reasoning.
The fact that I can say nothing to convince most of them of this is maddening. They are impervious to reason, almost all of them. This is what faith does to their brains.
Randal Rauser is an associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada. He and I coauthored a debate-style book together titled “God or Godless?”27 He is a Christian believer. I cowrote the book to reach any honest believers since I consider him impervious to reason. I could say it of any Christian pseudo-intellectual to some degree, depending on how close he or she is to the truth (liberals are closer than progressive evangelicals who are closer than fundamentalists). I admit Rauser reasons well in other areas of his life unrelated to his faith. He could even teach a critical thinking class. So he’s rational, very much so. But like all believers his brain must basically shut down when it comes to faith. When it comes to faith his brain must disengage. It cannot connect the dots. It refuses to connect them. Faith stops the brain from working properly. Faith is a cognitive bias that causes believers to overestimate any confirming evidence and underestimate any disconfirming evidence. So his brain will not let reason penetrate it, given his faith bias. Some people have even described faith as a virus of the brain (or mind). It makes the brain sick. Maybe Marx said it best though. It’s an opiate, a deadening drug.
Alvin Plantinga has argued that what’s essential to have a “warranted belief” is “the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment.” I actually think he’s right. But faith, like an opiate, causes the brain to stop functioning properly in matters related to faith. Christian apologetics is predicated on a host of logical fallacies. Take away the logical fallacies they use in defense of their faith and they wouldn’t have any arguments left at all. They certainly don’t have good objective sufficient evidence for what they believe. A critical thinker like Rauser, who thinks more rationally than most others in every area unrelated to his faith, cannot see this, but it is the case. Now why can’t Rauser see this? Why can’t he come to the correct religious conclusions? Why can’t he think rationally about his faith? Because his faith, like an opiate, will not let him. The opiate of faith deadens those areas in his brain that are related to his faith. Rauser surely sees this with regard to other believers in different religious faiths. He will say the same things about them that I say about him. But he refuses to see the same drug deadening his own brain. Once again, faith is a cognitive bias, a virus of the mind, an opiate. It prevents people of faith from connecting the dots.
Rauser admits that like everyone else he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree. Well then, why won’t he apply the antidote, which is to require sufficient objective evidence for what he believes? That’s the only way to overcome the cognitive bias of faith, the only way to kill that virus in his mind, the only way to nullify the opiate of faith, and the only way to stop being swayed by his own motivated reasoning. Yet he questions the need for sufficient objective evidence apart from a private subjective ineffable feeling. Who in their right mind would do this after admitting he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree? No reasonable person, that’s who.
Subjective private ineffable religious experiences offer believers the most psychologically certain basis for believing in a particular divine being or religion. When believers have a religious experience it’s really hard, if not psychologically impossible, to argue them away from their faith. How is it possible then for believers who claim to have had such experiences to look at those experiences as an outsider might? We can point out the mind often deceives us and provide many examples of this phenomenon (brainwashing, wish-fulfillment, cognitive dissonance). But believers will maintain their particular religious experience is real because it was experienced, despite the odds their brain is deceiving them. We can point out that countless others of different faiths all claim to have the same type of religious experiences, whether they are Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, or Jew, but believers will still say their experiences are true ones (or veridical), despite the odds that what others believe as a result of their experiences makes it seem obvious they could be wrong too (and vice versa).
Sometimes in the face of such an experiential argument I simply say to the believer, “If I had that same experience I might believe too. But I haven’t. So why not? Why doesn’t your God give me that same religious experience?” At this point the believer must blame me and every living person on the planet for not being open to such a sect-specific religious experience. Depending on the religious sect in question that might include most every person, 7.4 billion of us and counting. But even this realization doesn’t affect believers who claim to have had such religious experiences. Calvinists among them will simply say, “God doesn’t want various people to have a saving religious experience.” It never dawns on any of these believers what this means about the God they worship, that only a mean-spirited barbaric God would send people to an eternal punishment because that same God did not allow them a certain type of religious experience.
Believers will always argue in such a fashion in order to stay as believers. No matter what we say they always seem to have an answer. What they never produce is any cold hard objective evidence, convincing evidence, for their faith claims. Ever. They are not only impervious to reason. They are also impervious to the evidence. They even see evidence where it doesn’t exist because they take the lack of evidence as evidence for their faith. When it comes to prayer they count the hits and discount the misses.
There is only so much a person can take when dealing with people who have lost touch with reality. Must we always maintain a patient attitude when we already know their arguments? Must we always respond in a dispassionate manner to people who are persuaded against reason to believe something delusional? We know this about them based on everything we know (i.e., our background knowledge). They are pretending to know that which they don’t know when they pretend to know with some degree of certainty their faith is true. If it’s faith, how then can something be known with any degree of probability at all, much less certainty? Faith by definition always concerns itself with that which is unsure. Something unsure involves lower probabilities. So faith is always about that which has lower probabilities to it. So again, how can something based on faith be known with any degree of certainty? It can’t, and only deluded minds think otherwise, minds that are impervious to reason and evidence. We can only hope they can function in life. It can be quite surprising they can.
Concluding Thoughts
Anselm of Canterbury’s key theological contributions in philosophy of religion highlight what reasonable people see as the need for philosophy of religion to end. He holds a preeminent place among the best philosophical theologians the Church ever produced. And yet, as we’ve seen, even among the best of the best there’s nothing here but rhetoric without substance based on his faith and the social climate of his day. His best contributions didn’t solve anything. Almost no one accepts his atonement theory today. His idiosyncratic perfect-being conception was based on nothing more than special pleading on behalf of his parochial Western concept of god. His ontological argument does not work either. Further, we’ve found that when Anselm’s perfect being is compared to the biblical god Yahweh and his supposed son, it doesn’t make any sense nor can it be reconciled. So the only reason to study Anselm seems to be one of historical curiosity. Anselm’s key contributions did not advance anything since we are no closer at getting to objective knowledge about anything than we would be if he never wrote a thing. When it comes to the history of philosophy he made no contributions that furthered understanding, the very thing he sought to do.
It does no good to say we’ve learned from Anselm what is false and cannot be defended, as if by learning what isn’t the case he advanced our understanding. He sidetracked our understanding for a millennium. He was doing obfuscationist puzzle-solving theology unrelated to the honest desire to understand. If we proportioned our intellectual assent to the probabilities based on sufficient evidence (per Hume), we would know all we need to know to know that Anselm and many other unevidenced beliefs are false and cannot be defended.
Karl Barth, considered one of the greatest theologians of the last century, who rejected natural theology with a big fat “Nein,” argued Anselm’s ontological argument was an example of his faith seeking understanding, rather than an argument proving God exists. Anselm did not seek to “prove” the truth of the Christian faith, Barth argued, but to understand it.28 Anselm’s ontological argument in chapter 2 of the Proslogion comes after asking God for help to understand his faith in chapter 1. There he prays, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, — that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Then just before developing the argument in chapter 2, Anselm prays, “Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe.” So while there is disagreement about what he was doing, Anselm at least tacitly acknowledges his argument comes from faith rather than leading to faith. And that’s exactly what we find. The ontological argument depends on his Christian faith, which subsequently seeks to confirm his faith, what he already believes about his parochial god. There’s a recognized informal fallacy here I’ve mentioned a time or two. It’s called special pleading. It’s also the mother of all cognitive biases, something to avoid if we want to know the truth.
Philosophers of religion who have dealt with Anselm’s argument and developed their own versions of it, such as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga, should take note. They don’t know their own theology. Or, perhaps more correctly and importantly, they fail to realize they’re doing the same thing Anselm did. He sought after arguments that confirmed his faith rather that seeking out sufficient objective evidence for his God.
What we’re led to conclude is that the problem of philosophy of religion stems from faith. If faith is trust then there is no reason to trust faith. Anything based on faith has lower probabilities to it by definition. Christian pseudo-philosophers do no more than build intellectual castles in the sky without any solid grounding to them. There doesn’t seem to be any good principled reason for not getting fed up with the pretend game of faith with its ever-receding theology.
There have always been non-believers. But for the first time in recorded history, there are now numerous societies with a majority of people who don’t believe in God.
According to an analysis of the best internationally-available data by Isabella Kasselstrand, Ryan T. Cragun, and me, published in our new book Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, the seven democratic countries in the world today with more atheists, agnostics, and assorted nontheists than God-believers are Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.
Of course, not every nonbeliever in these nations actively or personally identifies as an atheist or agnostic, per se—the former label is heavily stigmatized, while the latter is relatively obscure in certain cultures. But the percentage of the population in each country that answers “no” when asked if they believe in God is as follows:
Sweden – 63.9% Czech Republic – 61.6% South Korea – 59.4% Netherlands – 56.3% Estonia – 54.3% Norway – 52.7% United Kingdom – 51.6%
While there may be similar or even higher percentages of nonbelievers in other nations such as China or Vietnam, we ought not consider them because they are unfree dictatorships where the atheistic government actively polices, prohibits, and represses religion; in such societies, people have a fear of expressing their true religious beliefs, and thus, survey data is suspect. But in open, free democracies where being neither openly religious nor openly secular provokes the government’s wrath, answers to surveys are much more valid and reliable.
Why these seven?
Why are these seven nations so secular?
Each country has its own unique history that contributes to low levels of theism. For example, the UK is the birthplace of Charles Darwin, whose ideas regarding evolution have been detrimental to Christian faith. Anti-clericalism has been a significant strain of Czech nationalism going all the way to the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. Estonia experienced 50 years of Soviet occupation, during which time religion was squelched, and it never rebounded, even after the fall of the USSR. In South Korea, the educational system places a strong emphasis on scientific knowledge and technology, with little attention paid to religion.
But regardless of each country’s idiosyncrasies that may have contributed towards their high degree of irreligion, they have all experienced some combination of the following: greatly improved levels of social welfare, societal well-being, and existential security; increased degrees of wealth and prosperity; increased levels of educational attainment; a significant transition from a traditional, rural, non-industrial society to a contemporary, urban, industrial (or post-industrial) society; increased rationalization, whereby the ordering of society based on technological efficiency, bureaucratic impersonality, and scientific and empirical evidence. As our research shows, these factors are all strongly conducive to increased secularization in society.
How are they faring?
It has long been a staple of conservative propaganda that if a society loses its religion, things will go to shyte. And even some on the left buy into this nonsense; earlier this month, New York mayor Eric Adams blamed America’s never-ending school shooting epidemic on a lack of religion. “When we took prayers out of schools,” he proclaimed, “guns came into schools.”
Of course, as I have been arguing for over a decade now, if godlessness led to national depravity or high rates of violence, then we would expect to find those countries that are the least religious to be the most horrible, impoverished, unhealthy, and crime-ridden. But we find exactly the opposite correlation. These seven most godless democracies provide excellent examples, as they all boast high levels of societal health and well-being, high GDPs, extremely low rates of violent crime, almost no school shootings, superior healthcare, and more. Consider Norway, where Christianity has plummeted in the last half-century, with rates of belief in God, church attendance, and church membership at all-time lows – and yet Norwegian society is simultaneously characterized by fantastic schools, health care, elder care, access for the disabled, gender equality, economic prosperity, as well as very low rates if murder.
Indeed, five of these seven highly secular nations rank in the top 20 on the United Nations’ Human Development Index. The remaining two, Estonia and the Czech Republic, come in at 31 and 32, respectively.
It is not that these majority-non-believing nations are thriving because of their godlessness; there are too many variables at play to establish such causation. But as to the right-wing article of faith that godlessness leads to social depravity – that thesis can be flatly rejected.
Also, it should be noted that these societies are not utopias. They all have their problems. The northernmost nation of the UK, Scotland, is currently struggling with a dangerous drug epidemic. South Korea’s birth rate is shockingly low. Sweden is struggling with immigration issues. Affordable housing is in relatively short supply in the Netherlands. And so on. But compared to the vast majority of countries in the world, when looking at nearly every single indicator of societal well-being, these secular seven are doing extremely well, overall. Heck, according to the US News and World Reports rankings of top countries with the best quality of life, Sweden ranks at #1, Norway #5, Netherlands #8, the UK #12, South Korea #24, Czech Republic at #27, and Estonia at #42. Clearly, going godless does not result in national dystopia.
Godlessness goes global
Our analysis found that there are many other countries where almost half of the population does not believe in God, such as France, Denmark, Australia, Finland, and New Zealand. Given current trends, we expect these nations to join the pack of majority-godless nations in the next decade or so. And while the US is quite far from such a state of irreligiosity, belief in God has nonetheless been dropping significantly: the percentage of Americans who believe in God has dropped from 98% in the 1950s to 81% today. Among Americans under 30, it is down to an unprecedented 68%.
The term “village atheist” was common parlance a while back, suggesting that in every village, there was always some single curmudgeon who didn’t believe in god. Well today, we can longer accurately speak of the village atheist. Rather, we must accept the increasing reality of villages with many atheists. And not just villages, but towns, cities, and countries all around the globe.
After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers—my focus in what follows—I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion. Besides, one of the greatest challenges is to change minds, and I like challenges. Plus, I’ve learned a great deal by attempting this important underappreciated task.
If you choose to follow in my footsteps, begin where you are. You may not feel qualified. But you can question. If you do that, you’ll do well. Nonbelievers are first and foremost questioners, doubters, skeptics. We are nonbelievers because we are more willing than most to question everything. You can’t go wrong in doing that. There are plenty of beliefs that are not just wrong, but palpably wrong. Question them. As you get better at asking questions, learn to use the Socratic method. Use leading questions to help believers begin to doubt their certainties.[1]
I understand the cognitive bias known as the backfire effect. It shows that challenging believers with facts makes most of them dig in deeper, causing them to double down in defense of their faith. If their faith survives, their faith is strengthened. While ridicule and satire have an effect on groups of people[2], keeping personal encounters friendly will be more effective with people that you talk to. We never know if the seed sown might eventually blossom into a changed mind. Most believers cannot be reasoned out of their faith because they were never reasoned into it, but this is still the best that we can do. With enough encounters it might have a cumulative effect, especially if the believer experiences a crisis in his/her life.[3]
Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees. So there’s much to inform them about. As you proceed, inform them about what you know, whatever that is. You will learn as you go. Study as you go, too. The more that you know, the better that you’ll do.
(1) I would start in some cases by informing believers of the role cultural indoctrination plays in the adoption of Christianity, and why it’s an unreliable guide for adopting the correct religious faith, if there is one. Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.
(2) I would inform believers how hard it is to break free from one’s cultural indoctrination, like quitting smoking but much harder. Research professor of psychology Jonas Kaplan did a study of the human brain and concluded: “The brain can be thought of as a very sophisticated self-defense machine.” He added: “If there is a belief that the brain considers part of who we are, it turns on its self-defense mode to protect that belief.” Accordingly, “the brain reacts to belief challenges in the same way that it reacts to perceived physical threats.”[4] To honestly seek the truth we must determine to disarm the brain. Analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is to recognize that we have a brain problem. It won’t allow us to entertain facts that disrupt our comfort zone, our tribalistic beliefs. It will do everything it can to reject them.
(3) I would inform believers about the cognitive biases that act like viruses on our brains. They adversely affect the ability of our brains to honestly evaluate our religious cultural indoctrination. Just knowing this is significant. Knowledge serves as a vaccine. It helps disarm the brain.
Confirmation bias is the mother of all cognitive biases. We are in constant search of confirmation; hardly ever do we seek disconfirmation. We reject and dismiss out of hand what does not comport to existing beliefs, and easily embrace that which does. There are other relevant biases, like anchoring bias, in-group bias, belief blind spot bias, belief bias effect, illusory truth effect, agent detection bias, objectivity illusion bias, the ostrich effect, hindsight bias, and so on.
These biases lead us to reason fallaciously. Believers are susceptible to fallacies like tu quoque (“You too!”—an appeal to hypocrisy/whataboutism), possibiliter ergo probabiliter (“possibly, therefore probably”), straw man/person, argument from ignorance, appeal to popularity (ad populum), equivocation, false analogy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), cherry picking, hasty generalization, circular reasoning, red herring, non sequitur, and especially special pleading.
(4) I would inform believers that the only way to disarm the brain (yes, basically the only way) is to adopt the perspective of a nonbeliever, an outsider to our indoctrinated religious beliefs. More than anything else, this can help the brain avoid cognitive biases in the honest search for truth. It will help force the believer’s brain to follow the objective evidence wherever it leads. Treat your own religion the way that you treat all other religions, with no double standards and no special pleadings. Assume that your own religion has the burden of proof. See if your faith survives.[5]
(5) At this point inform believers about their holy book and the theologies built on it. Most believers don’t read their Scriptures, or understand the doctrines of their sect-specific faiths. So encourage Christians to read the Bible. Have them read Judges 19-21 to see what the god of the Old Testament instructed the Hebrews to do. Then ask why anyone should trust anything that these bloodthirsty barbarians wrote down. Also ask them why that god commanded genocide and child sacrifice.[6]
The Bible debunks itself.[7] It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil (the first widely accepted atonement theory).
(6) Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.[8]
(7) Inform believers about science and how it works. It’s answering the very mysteries that produce religious belief in the first place. The fewer mysteries that we have in the world, then the less we feel the need to believe.[9] The crowning discovery of science is evolution. On this issue, as with everything that I’m saying, it helps to provoke believers to do further research. Ask them what would make Richard Dawkins say:
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact…. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired…. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact…. No reputable scientist disputes it.[10]
Be sure to point out the implications of evolution: that there was no Adam & Eve, no original sin, and no need for a savior.
(8) Inform believers about the need for objective evidence in support of the miracle claims in the Bible.[11] There is no objective evidence for any of them, just a few ancient testimonies that we cannot verify.[12]
The way to honestly evaluate miracle claims is to focus on clearly obvious concrete test cases like a virgin-birthed deity.[13] It’s not to construct hypothetical miracle scenarios, to wrestle with questions over what we consider to be objective evidence, or to specify the exact demarcation point between ordinary claims and extraordinary ones.
For instance, believers will claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for what counts as extraordinary evidence. To cut to the chase, I respond that I know what does not count as extraordinary evidence. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count, nor does circumstantial evidence or anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings or experiences or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence; nor do tales told by someone who tells others that his writings are inspired; nor does putative divine communication through dreams or visions. Once these facts are acknowledged, call on believers to do the math. Just subtract and see what’s left.
(9) Inform believers about statistics. Statistician David Hand shows us that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He is not a believer in supernatural miracles, though. “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.”[14] There is a growing list of books making this same point. Extremely rare events are not miracles. Period. We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.
(10) Inform believers about the problem of horrendous suffering. This evidence is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent God as is possible.[15] The way to honestly evaluate the compatibility of God and horrific suffering is not to specify the exact demarcation point when the suffering in our world is too much to coexist with a perfect deity. Nor is it to fuss much about whether God and horrendous suffering are logically impossible. Those questions are interesting, but in order to honestly evaluate this difficulty, the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive numbers of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.
Notes
[1] See Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013). Anthony Magnabosco does this on a regular basis.
[14] David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 197-199.
[15] See Loftus (ed.), God and Horrendous Suffering (Denver, CO: Global Center for Religious Research, 2021).
I’m going to be discussing soon some of the things that appear to be “misremembered” about Jesus in our early sources, but first it’s important to emphasize some of the hugely critical positive things about memory – like, that most of the time we get it basically right. Depending, of course, on what “basically” means!
Let me make a point that may not be clear from what I have said so far about the psychology of memory. In stressing the fact – which appears to be a fact – that memories are always constructed and therefore prone to error, even when they are quite vivid, I am not, I am decidedly not, saying that all of our memories are faulty or wrong. Most of the time we remember pretty well, at least in broad outline. Presumably, so too did eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. As did the person who heard a story from an eyewitness may well have remembered in broad outline he was told. And the person who heard a story from a neighbor whose cousin was married to a man whose father told him a story that he heard from a business associate whose wife once knew someone who was married to an eyewitness. Probably in the latter case – which, as far-fetched as it sounds, may be pretty close to how most people were hearing stories about Jesus – a lot more would have been changed than in the case of an eyewitness telling someone the day after he saw something happen. But my basic point here is that despite the faults of memory, we do obviously remember a lot of things, and the fundamental memories themselves can often be right.
This is a commonplace in the psychological study of memory. We tend to remember the “gist” of an experience pretty well, even if the details get messed up. You may not remember correctly (despite what you think) where, when, with whom, or how you heard about the Challenger explosion, or the results of the O. J. Simpson trial, or even (this is harder to believe, but it appears to be true) the attacks of 9/11. But you do remember that you heard about the events, and you remember that they happened.
As we will see, this is an important point, because there are gist memories of Jesus recorded in the New Testament Gospels that are almost certainly accurate. At the same time, there are a lot of details – and in fact entire episodes – that are almost certainly not accurate. These are “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen. They are distorted memories.
Still, many of the broad outlines that are narrated in the Gospels certainly happen. Much of the gist is correct. One big question, then, is just how broad does a memory have to be in order to be considered a gist memory? Different scholars may have different views about that.
John Dean as a Test Case
A famous example can demonstrate my point. There is a much cited study done of both detailed and gist memories of a person who claimed to have, and was generally conceded to have, a very good memory: John Dean, White House Counsel to Richard Nixon from July 1970 to April 1973.
During the Watergate hearings Dean testified in detail about dozens of specific conversations he had during the White House cover up. In the course of the hearings he was asked how he could possibly remember such things. He claimed to have a good memory in general. But he also indicated that he had used later newspaper clippings about events in the White House to refresh his memory and to place himself back in the context of the events that were described. It was after he publicly described his conversations with Nixon that the White House tapes were discovered. With this new evidence of what was actually said on each occasion, one could look carefully at what Dean had earlier remembered as having been said, to see if he recalled both the gist and the details correctly.
That’s exactly what the previously mentioned Ulric Neisser did, in an intriguing article called “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study.” Neissser examined two specific conversations that took place in the Oval office, one on September 15, 1972 and the other on March 21, 1973, by comparing the transcript of Dean’s testimony with the actual recording of the conversation. The findings were striking.[1] Even when he was not elevating his own role and position (as he did), Dean got things wrong. Lots of things wrong. Even big things.
For example, the hearing that involved the September 15 conversation occurred nine months later. The contrast between what Dean claimed was said and what really was said was sharp and striking. In Neisser’s words:
Comparison with the transcript shows that hardly a word of Dean’s account is true. Nixon did not say any of the things attributed to him here…. Nor had Dean himself said the things he later describes himself as saying…. His account is plausible but entirely incorrect…. Dean cannot be said to have reported the ‘gist’ of the opening remarks; no count of idea units or comparison of structure would produce a score much above zero.[2]
It should be stressed the Neisser does not think Dean was lying about what happened in the conversation in order to make himself look good: the conversation that really happened and the one he described as happening were both highly incriminating. So why is there a difference between what he said was said and what was really said? Neisser argues that it is all about “filling in the gaps,” the problem I mentioned earlier with respect to F. C. Bartlett. Dean was pulling from different parts of his brain the traces of what had occurred on the occasion and his mind, unconsciously, filled in the gaps. Thus, he “remembered” what was said when he walked into the Oval Office based on the kinds of things that typically were said when he walked into the Oval Office. In fact, whereas they may have been said on other occasions, they weren’t on this one. Or he might have recalled how his conversations with Nixon typically began and thought that that was the case here as well, even though it was not. Moreover, almost certainly, whether intentionally or sub-consciously, he was doing what all of us do a lot of the time: he was inflating his own role in and position in the conversation: “What his testimony really describes is not the September 15 meeting itself but his fantasy of it: the meeting as it should have been, so to speak…. By June, this fantasy had become the way Dean remembered the meeting.”[3]
Neisser sums up his findings like this: “It is clear that Dean’s account of the opening of the September 15 conversation is wrong both as to the words used and their gist. Moreover, cross examination did not reveal his errors as clearly as one might have hoped….. Dean came across as a man who has a good memory for gist with an occasional literal word stuck in, like a raisin in a pudding. He was not such a man.”[4]
And so, whether Dean had a decent gist memory probably depends on how broadly one defines “gist.” He knew he had a conversation with Nixon. He knew what the topics were. Nonetheless, he appears not to have known what was actually said, either by Nixon or himself.
In this instance we are talking about an extraordinarily intelligent and educated man with a fine memory, trying to recall conversations from nine months before. What would happen if we were dealing with more ordinary people with average memories, trying to recall what someone said maybe two years ago? Or twenty? Or forty? Try it for yourself: pick a conversation that you had two years ago with someone – a teacher, a pastor, a boss. Do you remember it word for word? Even if you think you do (sometimes we think we do!) is there any actual evidence that you do? It is important to emphasize what experts have actually learned about memory, and distorted memories. Leading memory expert Elizabeth Loftus and her colleague Katherine Ketcham reflect on this issue: “Are we aware of our mind’s distortions of our past experiences? In most cases, the answer is no. As time goes by and the memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember.”[5]
These comments are dealing with just our own personal memories. What about a report, by someone else, of a conversation that a third person had, written long afterwards? What are the chances that it will be accurate, word for word? Or even better, what about a report written by someone who had heard about the conversation from someone who was friends with a man whose brother’s wife had a cousin who happened to be there – a report written, say, several decades after the fact? Is it likely to record the exact words? In fact, is it likely to remember precisely even the gist? Or the topics?
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-7 was recorded about fifty years after he would have delivered the sermon. But can we assume he delivered it? If he did so, did he speak the specific words now found in the Sermon (all three chapters of them) while sitting on a mountain addressing the crowds? On that occasion did he really say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” and “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” and “Everyone who hears these words of mind and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on a rock”? Or did he say things sort of like that on the occasion? Or did he say something sort of like that on some other occasion – any occasion at all? Which is the gist and which is the detail?[6]
Or what about episodes from Jesus’ life, recorded, say, forty years later? Was Jesus crucified between two robbers who both mocked him before he died six hours later? Are those details correct? Or is the gist correct? But what is the gist? Is it that Jesus was crucified with two robbers? Is it that Jesus was crucified? Is it that Jesus died?
[1] Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study,” Cognition 9 (1981) 1-22.
[5] Elizaeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the eyewitness, and the Expert who Puts Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 20.
It is flat-out amazing to me how many New Testament scholars talk about the importance of eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus without having read a single piece of scholarship on what experts know about eyewitness testimony. Some (well-known) scholars in recent years have written entire books on the topic, basing their views on an exceedingly paltry amount of research into the matter. Quite astounding, really. But they appear to have gone into their work confident that they know about how eyewitness testimony works, and didn’t read the masses of scholarship that shows they simply aren’t right about it.
Here’s how I begin to talk about eyewitness scholarship in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).
******************************
In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.[1] In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out. One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics. Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that. The first one replied that he had been insulted. A fight ensued and a gun was drawn. Prof. Liszt tried to separate the two when the gun went off.
The rest of the students were aghast. But Prof. von Liszt informed them that the event had been staged.
He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen. The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled, others a week later. The results of these written reports were surprising and eye-opening. This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony.
Prof. Liszt broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance, into a number of stages. He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence, step-by-step. The most accurate accounts were in error in 26% of the details the reported. Others were in error in as many as 80%.
As you might expect, research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony has developed significantly over the years since this first rather crude attempt to establish whether it can be trusted to be reliable. Scholarship in the field has avalanched in recent decades. But the findings are consistent in one particularly important respect. A report is not necessarily accurate because it is delivered by an eyewitness. On the contrary, eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.
There have been many books written about whether the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by authors relying on eyewitnesses. Some of these books are written by very smart people. It is very odd indeed that many of them do not appear to be particularly concerned with knowing what experts have told us about eyewitness testimony.[2]
This chapter is focused on two questions. Are the Gospels based on stories about Jesus that had been passed around, changed, and possibly invented by Christian storytellers for decades before being written down, or were they written by eyewitnesses? If they were written by eyewitnesses , would that guarantee their essential accuracy? We will deal with the second question first.
Research on Eyewitness Testimony
Psychological studies of eyewitness testimony began to proliferate in the 1980s, in part because of two important phenomena related to criminal investigations. The first is that people started recalling ugly, painful, and criminal instances of sexual abuse when they were children.[3] These recollections typically surfaced during the process of therapy, especially under hypnosis. Both those who suddenly remembered these instances and the therapists treating them often maintained that these repressed memories explained why the patients had experienced subsequent psychological damage. Some of these reports involved incest committed by relatives, especially parents; others involved abuse by other adults, for example in child care centers. As reports of such memories began to proliferate, some psychologists started to wonder if they could all be true. Some were obviously real memories of real events. But was it possible that others were not true memories at all, but false memories that had been unconsciously implanted during the process of therapy? It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, which creates enormous complexities and problems for all parties: the victim or alleged victim, the therapist, the accused adults, and the judges and juries of the legal system.
The other phenomenon involved the use of DNA evidence to overturn criminal convictions. Once DNA became a reliable indicator of an accused person’s direct involvement in serious crimes, such as murder or rape, a large number of previous convictions were brought back for reconsideration. Numerous convictions were overturned. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has recently indicated, in about 75% of these reversed judgments, the person charged with the crime was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony.[4] What is one to make of such findings? In the words of a seminal article in the field: “Reports by eyewitnesses are among the most important types of evidence in criminal as well as in civil law cases… It is therefore disturbing that such testimony is often inaccurate or even entirely wrong.”[5]
This particular indictment emerged out of a study unrelated to DNA evidence. It involves an interesting but tragic case. On October 4, 1992, an El Al Boeing 707 that had just taken off from Schipfol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines. The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it. The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer. The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed. The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.
Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country. Among the questions was the following: “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55%) said Yes, they had seen the film. Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students. In this instance, 62 (66%) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film. There was just one problem. There was no film.
These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film. Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras. The only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time, in expectation of an imminent crash. And yet, between half and two-thirds of the people surveyed – most of them graduate students and professors – indicated they had seen the non-existent film. Why would they think they had seen something that didn’t exist?
Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed said about what they actually saw on the film, for example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or at vertical and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later. None of that information could have been known from a film, because there was no film. So why did these people remember, not only seeing the crash but also details about how it happened and what happened immediately afterward?
Obviously they were imagining it, based on logical inferences (the fire must have started right away) and on what they had been told by others (the plane crashed into the building as it was heading straight down). The psychologists argued that these people’s imaginations became so vivid, and were repeated so many times, that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something. They thought they were remembering it. They really thought that. In fact they did remember it. But it was a false memory. Not just a false memory one of them had. A false memory most of them had.
The researchers concluded: “It is difficult for us to distinguish between what we have actually witnessed, and what common sense inference tells us that must also have been the case.” In fact, commonsense inference, along with information we get by hearsay from others, together “conspire in distorting an eyewitness’s memory.” Indeed “this is particularly easy when, as in our studies, the event is of a highly dramatic nature, which almost by necessity evokes strong and detailed visual imagery.”[6]
The witnesses to the life of Jesus certainly were recalling events “of a highly dramatic nature” – Jesus’ walking on the water, calming the storm with a word, casting out a demon, raising a young girl back to life. Moreover, these stories certainly evoked “strong and detailed visual imagery.” Even if such stories were told by eyewitnesses, could we trust that they were necessarily accurate memories?
[1] This episode is recounted in Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996) pp. 20-21.
[2] The best known and very large study is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
[3] See Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).
[4] Daniel L. Schacter, “Constructive Memory: Past and Future,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14 (2012) 7-18.
[5] Hans F. M. Crombag, Willem A. Wagenaar, Peter J. Van Koppen, “Crashing Memories and the Problem of ‘Source Monitoring,’” Applied Cognitive Psychology 1 (1996) p. 95.
Lately Daniel Mocsny wrote a few separate comments for us. Here are some of them. Enjoy!
At risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I suggest that someone who deconverts from a religion and then easily reconverts probably wasn’t entirely deconverted in the first place. And the converse applies as well: a religion may attract new converts who quickly “backslide.” Religious hucksters are aware of the backsliding tendency, so they have systems in place to combat it, such as regular church attendance, and creating an entire religious environment for their marks to inhabit. A new convert is like a seedling plant – it has not reached its adult size yet and is much more vulnerable to drought and plant predators. A church may have training courses for new converts, to catch them up on the brainwashing they missed. Atheists tend to have none of that infrastructure, as we don’t normally have our own atheist churches or local communities. This may be part of the reason that religion began declining in the USA after the Internet became widely available – now we have online atheist / freethinker communities. Atheism doesn’t have to be an entirely do-it-yourself exercise now.
Removing religion from one’s brain may be like pulling weeds from your lawn. Failing to dig out every last weed root results in weeds quickly resprouting. It takes multiple sessions of weed-pulling to get all the weeds, and even then new weed seeds are constantly arriving on the wind or in bird poop, so occasional maintenance is an ongoing need.
The falsehoods of religion have been honed by thousands of years of selection – the religions that emerge from cutthroat competition tend to have the “stickiest” lies. Overcoming them, after a lifetime of brainwashing, may require a lot of cognitive work. Reading atheist books such as those written or edited by John Loftus is a big part of this. Unfortunately, many people rarely read books, or when they do, they read useless fiction, or disinformation.
Many religions declare threats for people who doubt them. Often the threats are more immediate, such as angry gods sending plagues, storms, or hostile human enemies unless we placate them with sacrifices. The concept of an eternal afterlife of unending torture at the hands of the loving God is an idea that evolved gradually. See Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (2020) to learn how the concept gradually evolved within the Abrahamic tradition.
The Outsider Test for Faith always applies, of course. Probably no one among the world’s two billion Christians has ever lost sleep over the Muslim Hell, and conversely I doubt that any Muslims worry about the Christian hell. I would agree that most of the time you can’t argue an incorrect idiot into being correct, and you certainly cannot add a point to anyone’s IQ by arguing with them. But (and this is a but big enough to warrant Sir Mixalot’s scrutiny) it’s hard to win a war without showing up. The disinformation machine doesn’t worry about the difficulty of changing people’s minds. It understands that repetition is the most potent form of persuasion. Trump for example was able to fool about 30% of Americans into disblieving in our elections. For most of American history, there was no widespread doubt about our elections. People often didn’t like the outcome, but they understand that elections really do reflect the will of the people. Trump was able to destroy over 200 years of that belief in a few short years.
Christianity in the USA is losing about 1% of market share per year. So it’s clear that somebody is getting through to idiots with the voice of reason. Maybe we can speed that up a little by getting and staying in the game. Fox News doesn’t need to be the only voice they hear.
During the… COVID-19 pandemic, religious people complained loudly about the lockdowns that denied them their weekly churchy fix. Religious people have an ongoing need for group reinforcement. In contrast, once you learn some science, you don’t have to keep going back to science class every week to keep yourself convinced. Atheists may have griped about lockdowns too, but not because isolation in any way threatened to change their beliefs.
Inside every religious believer is a latent unbeliever waiting to manifest. In the modern environment, any number of potential triggers for change are constantly present. If outside influences like prayer or meddling gods cannot be excluded, then science cannot proceed – it won’t work. The same experiment will get different results depending on who was praying somewhere in the world, or on the whim of some god. Science doesn’t just assume that we only use natural explanations, it actually requires that only natural phenomena exist. Otherwise you can’t reliably replicate a result. Replication is fundamental to science, and even more important for industries built on science, which replicate the same products billions of times.
Thus the very existence of science is strong evidence against the kinds of gods people worship – gods who intervene routinely in the natural order. The burden of proof is therefore on the theist to explain how we can have science and smartphones that undeniably exist, and at the same time we have their God whose existence and behavior would make science impossible. The plain fact that during the past two centuries the intellectual elite (i.e., those who actually have some claim to expertise on matters of religion, philosophy, and science) have indeed become overwhelmingly skeptical in regard to the existence of a “conscious Creator.”
Joshi doesn’t present statistics, but it is at least anecdotally obvious that there are numerous fields of science and scholarship that are toxic to faith. The result is that people who acquire expertise in any of these fields, let alone several or all of them, rarely emerge with faith intact. At the barest minimum, the intellectually competent believer has to triangulate their way into some sort of liberal faith stripped of the most blatantly incorrect faith claims (such as Young Earth Creationism). But even the liberal believer must keep their eyes at least half-shut on their residual superstition.
If everybody could know what the intellectual elites know (that is, what the people who actually read a lot of books know), then religion would recede to the status of an oddball hobby like stamp collecting. —By Daniel Mocsny.
by 
by 
by 
The Pencil-Driven Life 