God

Can we speak frankly?

Belief in God is dangerously deluded and wishful thinking, a collective hallucination hazardous to our health and happiness.

Isn't it?

I know belief is so ubiquitous that it's hard to think rationally about, and always has been. Consider, though, your reaction if I told you that I am in contact with extraterrestrials, according to whose precepts I order my life. At a minimum, you would view my sanity as open to question. (You wouldn't? Stop reading right here. Scientology is calling you.)

Let's think about belief in God in the same way.

Like many forms of delusion, belief in God is perceived by the afflicted to convey certain benefits. The history of humanity's seduction by those benefits is the history of religion.

First among them was relief from ignorance. Ignorance, when you have no choice but to acknowledge it, can be scary. Don't know where fire comes from? Don't understand why it doesn't rain? Don't know why your children die, or how to help them? The answer to each of these questions, and the millions that came after, was God. Ignorance lingers; even today, unresolved complexity is proffered as proof of God's existence.

Why are we here? Akin to ignorance of the natural world is ignorance of our purpose in it. Like other kinds of ignorance, the notion that there may be no answer to this question is scary. Invention of a God whom we are here to serve ends the search for meaning, and obviates the possibility that there may be none.

What happens when we die? How could creatures as beautiful as we are simply cease to be? Nothing is scarier than this. Belief in God makes acceptance of mortality unnecessary. Of course! We just go to Heaven.

Or to Hell. It's not easy to be good. Belief in God fosters the creation of a behavioral envelope only tangentially related to our natural understanding of right and wrong. Belief in a vengeful God inclines us to act within that envelope. This lesson has been lost neither on organized religion nor on the state. God offers a reason to control ourselves, and for them another means to do so if we fail.

And God is solace. Life can be hard. It's so much easier to endure injustice now when you've been promised a kingdom to come. Another fact not lost on those with a stake in earthly inequity.

But, as with all forms of delusion, the apparent benefits of belief in God are illusory, no matter how frightening it may be to give them up. And the delusion itself is pernicious.

We know this. It's impossible to be sentient in the world and not be aware of the millions upon millions who have died, and continue to die, for competing ideas of God. Nor is it possible to ignore the perpetuation of ignorance, tyranny, and discrimination in God's name. Nor to overlook the billions who suffer without resisting in the hope of a better life when they're dead.

Of all the damage caused by belief, this willingness to forgo a good life on earth may be the saddest. But the easiest in which to acquiesce. How comforting to believe that misery, disaster, and oppression are part of God's plan. Everything has a purpose. Species dying all around us? The oceans starting to rise? Nothing we can do. If God wanted those polar bears to live, he'd save them himself. But in that calculus, we're next.

In God We Trust? We should trust in ourselves, instead.