There's been a lot of talk by elected and unelected demagogues lately about the necessity of religion for public morality. Some people would say that it's absurd that this morality talk is mostly filler in between the usual talk about who we should kill and how to best put the screws to the helpless and weak. I'm going to take the opposite position and say that it's not absurd at all because religious morality produces inhumanity, and it does so by design.
The reason I have always been completely unconvinced by the argument that religion is necessary to tell the difference between right and wrong is that as a five-year-old child in Sunday school, we were taught (among other horrors) the story of Samson, an extraordinarily gullible, stupid man with a penchant for bizarre acts of violence who finally pleased his god by committing a spectacular murder-suicide. I thought then -- and have seen no reason to change my mind since -- that if God Himself can't tell the difference between right and wrong even when the choice is presented in the starkest, most over-the-top, cartoonish way possible, I should ignore His advice and keep a close eye on his followers.
It was a real relief when they let us kids attend a grownup sermon. The preacher called on the presence of God and the only thing that changed was that it was briefly quiet enough to hear the insects and birds singing outside in the real world. No sky-filling nightmare homicidal fathers, no rain of fire, no genocidal floods, not even the odd parishioner being turned into a pillar of salt for the sin of curiosity. There were just a bunch of people waiting for the creepy guy up at the front to start talking again.
And then the plates were passed to collect money for God's protection racket. We were told this would pay to send other creepy people to Africa to teach savage black cannibals to stop eating each other. I was kind of suspicious of this because there were no black people in our church and, in fact, only a few in the whole county, and they seemed too terrified to speak, never mind to eat people. And who would they eat? The bitter, pinched old women teaching Sunday School? Ew.
If you were dumb enough to ask -- and I have always been dumb enough to ask -- the Old Testament was excused by the New Testament, but that really only made it worse. The Old Testament God was a terrifying sadistic serial killer, but then He suddenly became chillingly nice, dressed up as a human being, and went to considerable lengths to bait the local savages so they would nail him to lumber and let him bleed to death so he could forgive us for things we were guilty of before we were born, provided we were very, very sorry and participated in a weekly ritual of simulated cannibalism. This made no sense to me -- and I'm sure it confused the heck out of the African cannibals we were always raising money for -- but it did remind me of my friend Lee down the street, or rather, it reminded me a great deal of his abusive parents. His father in particular was a very godly man.
There did seem to be a smattering of people who professed religious beliefs and were nice anyway. I never got a good explanation for that out of them. Apparently, one was expected to pick some parts of the Bible to follow and others to ignore. On a certain level, this made sense, because you certainly couldn't be kind and generous and a homicidal maniac at the same time. But it was all true, mind you. Some parts of it were just metaphorical. This satisfied me until I was old enough to understand what "metaphor" meant: using one thing as a symbolic stand-in for another. No one could tell me what any of the metaphorical parts stood for, especially where the parts they most wanted to ignore were concerned. Like the Flood in Genesis, when God killed everyone on Earth, including their infant children, for not obeying laws he didn't get around to telling everyone about until Exodus. What could that possibly stand for?
Later, I realized they were just scared. I could understand that. We had all been taught, as soon as we could understand a little English, that we had to love this terrible monster, and if we failed to love him or so much as doubted anything we were told, we would be set on fire forever. And we all gathered around once a week to hear another story about how terrible the monster was, except this one occasion when he sort of decided to be nice before skipping town and leaving the show in the hands of people who decided that the Old Testament was too tame and wrote the Book of Revelation, which was so scary that even the adults only had to hear about it every now and then.
I lucked out in the oddest way in my own childhood. That mostly-white county I attended church in was just up the coast from Cape Canaveral (then, temporarily Cape Kennedy), and it was the 70s, so you could see the gigantic Saturn V rockets rising on real pillars of flames right up through the obviously unreal "firmament" on their way to the Moon. Under the sand, Florida is mostly limestone, so fossils hundreds of millions of years old were so common they were used as gravel on my school playground. The Leakeys were still making headlines unearthing the bones of our extinct pre-human ancestors in Olduvai Gorge in Africa, entirely unmolested by savage black cannibals. The librarian in my public elementary school refused to let me check out books on dinosaurs because it was against the Bible, but the city library let me check out as many as I wanted. The creepy guy harvesting the plates of cash at church was way out of his league.
Almost four decades later, it's obvious to me that the Bible was written by some of the worst people in the world: killers, slavers, invaders, torturers, rapists, abusers of women and children. And they were not at all shy about it. They wrote all of their awful deeds down in the Bible in exhaustive detail, and being malignant narcissists on top of being sadomasochistic maniacs, they made up a god in their own image to discourage anyone from even daring to hope they could escape from them, and commanded their victims to terrify their own children into obedience to these psychopaths and their sock-puppet monster god.
First, stop being afraid. Moses is dead. Jesus, if he even really existed in the first place, is also dead. The first chapter of the Book of Genesis doesn't have a single true statement in it, and it goes downhill from there.
Second, stop inflicting religion on helpless children. It's an awful thing to do. It's arguably one of the very worst things anyone can do. Tell them the truth instead. Tell them that when the human race was basically all ignorant children, we were taken advantage of by bad people, taught to hate ourselves, and taught to be afraid to seek help. We still have people like that. We make them check into offender registries and put signs on their houses so children will know to steer clear of them. But since the childhood of the human race, we have learned what the universe is really like, and we are now smart and brave enough to stand up against manipulative liars, especially for the sake of our children.
And third, remember those Saturn V's? Not long after I watched the last of them carry Skylab into orbit, the evangelicals and the racists joined forces with the militarists to put Ronald Reagan in power. They've spent the last thirty-five years dismantling the achievements of civilization and openly demanding a return to the days when people blindly obeyed God (or, actually, his creepy representatives) and couldn't tell the difference between right and wrong even when it was obvious to a small child. We can tell them to go fuck themselves. The Moon is still out there, and beyond it, a Universe that is bigger than we can even imagine, with strange physical laws -- the speed of light, in this case -- that allow us to build telescopes that literally look backwards through time tens of billions of years to before the Earth and Sun existed. And you know what? It wasn't formless and void. And it was never, ever dark. It has always been full of light. Don't close your eyes to it.