Escaping the Threat of Hell
For perhaps the hundredth time over the past year or so, I’ve been asked by a new atheist how to get over the fear of hell. As anyone who’s ever been indoctrinated into Christianity understands, the fear of hell is a powerful emotion, and even all the logic in the world is sometimes insufficient to rid the mind of those nagging “what if” questions. Since I’ve been writing a lot about morality recently, I think I’ll take a few minutes to explain just why the concept of hell itself is morally bankrupt and completely incompatible with a loving God. Furthermore, I’ll explain why it’s pointless to live in fear of hell, regardless of whether there is a god or not!
Before getting into the argument itself, I will remind the reader that morality is simply the box into which we put interactions between beings. When an action of ours has an impact on another being, we can judge that action based on its effect. This is morality in a nutshell. God, if he exists, is a being with agency. That is, it intentionally causes things to happen. Those caused events have an effect on other beings — namely humans — and so can be placed into the box with every other moral concept.
Ok, so on to hell. Hell is described as a place of punishment for those who do not accept Jesus as their lord and savior. For the time being, it isn’t really important what type of punishment it is, only that it is unpleasant to some degree or another. What is terribly important is that hell is eternal, and there is no hope of escape or pardon. With this in mind, let’s examine the concept in detail.
Think for a moment about why we punish children. All punishments fall into four categories: Instruction, rehabilitation, protection, and retaliation. We should note that the threat of punishment is not the same as punishment. The threat of punishment can be used as a deterrent. We hope that just by promising to do something bad to someone if they do a certain thing, we will prevent them from doing it. We could make the argument that the threat of hell is a deterrent against not accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior, but this argument breaks down rapidly. If the threat of hell is meant to deter us from disbelief, then we are essentially being presented with the threat of hell as evidence for Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior! This must be so, because belief is not a decision. It is a state. I cannot choose to believe that I have no hands, for instance. I have overwhelming evidence that at this very moment, my hands are feverishly typing away at a keyboard, and that I have just recently scratched an itch on my left ear with the fifth finger of my left hand. For a threat to have meaning, it must be believed. If I say that you, gentle reader, will be struck by lightning that I have sent through your computer monitor if you do not wire ten thousand dollars to me in the next ten minutes, you are very unlikely to send me any money because there is no credible reason for you to believe my threat.
Similarly, the threat of hell has no particular weight upon those who do not believe that it exists. Since it is supposedly designed specifically as punishment for the crime of not believing that it exists, we must admit we’re faced with a circular argument. The threat of hell is not sufficient evidence to pursuade someone to believe in it if they don’t believe in it. The threat of hell only has relevance to those who believe that Jesus exists, but since they believe that Jesus exists, they are presumably in no danger of hell! In effect, if hell exists, it is only a danger to those who do not find the threat of hell to be a deterrent to nonbelief!
Let me make sure that this point is completely clear. The threat of hell only bears any weight for those who believe the threat to be credible. It is not designed to convert the unbelievers. After all, unbelievers don’t believe, so the threat is empty to them. It is designed to scare believers into obedience. If nothing else, we ought to be able to discard the notion of hell based only on this observation, but let’s not be hasty. Let’s examine the actual punishment, not just the threat of it.
When we scold a child for getting too close to a hot stove, we are attempting to protect him from being injured, and we are trying to give him the knowledge that stoves are dangerous. If a child has been scolded and returns to the stove, loving parents will often make him go to timeout, or perhaps forgo a trip to the toy store. The unpleasant consequences of his actions are designed to make him a better, safer person.
When we put a criminal in jail for five years, and then release him back into society, it is in the hopes that the negative experience of going to jail will deter him from committing the same or similar crimes again. We hope that the punishment has rehabilitated him such that he will be a better member of society for the rest of his life. When we put a criminal in jail for life with no hope of parole, it is because in our judgment he is incapable of living peacefully in society, and is a real and present danger to other citizens. In fact, he is such a danger that the only way to ensure the safety of other innocent citizens is to prevent him from ever coming in contact with them.
Sometimes, punishment is not constructive. It is revenge, pure and simple. In reality, we should probably not even call this punishment, but it is often presented as such by those exacting it upon others, so we must address it in this context. There are times when we humans hurt other people to make ourselves feel better. If someone has wronged us, we don’t wish to make them a better person. We just want to make them hurt because they hurt us. It’s important to note that a loving parent would punish their child for exacting revenge or retaliation on someone. Revenge for revenge’s sake is nearly universally recognized as a bad thing, as it is just perpetuating pain without contributing any good to the world.
So, which one of these things is hell? It cannot possibly be for instruction or protection. Since there is no way for the inmates to ever get back into society, there is no way that the knowledge of hell’s reality can serve any purpose for the person in hell. Likewise, it’s absurd to suggest that the person in hell is being protected from some danger.
But what about protecting others? Hell certainly separates the evil from the good, if we are to believe the Bible. Might it be that separating the evil from the good is done for the protection of believers, in the same way that we lock up some criminals for life? Unfortunately, no. Even this explanation does not wash, for the people in hell are already dead. They are no danger to any believer, and never will be again. If they are simply winked out of existence, the effect for believers is the same. Their eternal existence, separate from believers is not in any way different than if they simply did not exist any more, for in either case, they can have no effect on believers, either those on earth or in heaven.
In short, there is simply no benefit to either believers or the nonbeliever if hell exists. If it serves no function for humans, the only possibility left is that it serves a function for God. Is it possible that we’ve overlooked some “greater good” in the universe — something about the eternal punishment of unbelievers that contributes to goodness by giving benefit to god himself? If we answer this question honestly, we must conclude that if God does in fact gain anything from hell, it can only be pleasure. The God of the Bible needs nothing for he lacks nothing. He has the power to do anything that suits his whim, and to create anything at all that he should ever desire. There is nothing that any entity could do for God that he cannot do for himself. However, if God desires pleasure, and derives it from putting people into eternal punishment with no hope of reprieve, we could say that there is a purpose in the existence of hell.
Is that a good purpose? Again, if we are honest, we must say that it is not. It is inflicting pain upon another without contributing to the greater good. It is revenge without rehabilitation, instruction, or protection. It is designed by the designer with the sole purpose of giving himself pleasure.
Perhaps this god and this hell do exist, but if they do, is God loving? Is he worthy of love, admiration, or respect? Clearly not. He is worthy of derision, scorn, and hatred. He is the ultimate evil force in the universe. Luckily, there is no evidence whatsoever that such a being exists, so we need not lose much sleep on the idea. Even so, let’s suppose for a minute that we are convinced that God exists, and he is the ultimate evil in the universe. We might be persuaded that becoming a Christian is still the correct logical decision, for it must be better to spend eternity in paradise with an evil tyrant than to spend eternity in hell as a matter of principle.
Alas, this logic also fails, for if we have acknowledged that God is the ultimate evil in the universe, what possible reason could we have for believing that he has been honest with us about the standard by which hell or heaven is awarded to humans? In fact, why would we not immediately suspect that the ultimately evil God who created hell would also attempt to trick as many people as possible into sending themselves to hell? If he gains pleasure by perceiving the existence of people in hell, would not more people in hell provide more pleasure? It would be in his best interest to send as many people to hell as possible, and the best way to do that would be to trick us into d0ing exactly the thing that would send us to hell! But then, if I can figure this out, can I not also guess God’s logic and suppose that he means me to discover his motive? If that is the case, doesn’t it mean that the logical thing for him to do would be to tell the truth about how to get to heaven? For if I discover his motive, I should suspect that he is also wise enough to anticipate my discovery and reverse the playing field yet again so that I will be tricked into going to hell in spite of my discovery.
As you can see, this is an endless circle wherein one can never reach a conclusion about what is the correct way to get to heaven. Any guess we make is equally likely to send us to hell. Once we’ve realized this, it should dawn on us that the ultimate evil being would be best served by not creating heaven at all, but creating only hell and sending everyone there, regardless of their actions during life. Why, if he derives pleasure from sending people to hell, would he deny himself pleasure by allowing some people entry into heaven? Perhaps he derives pleasure from allowing people into heaven. If this is so, then the pleasure he derives is either equal or unequal to the pleasure he derives from sending people to hell. If the pleasure is equal, then there is no functional difference for God between sending people to hell and sending them to heaven. We are left with the conclusion that only malevolence would lead God to send anyone to hell under these circumstances. If there is a difference, we should expect that God would not bother sending anyone to the place which provides him less pleasure. If he does anyway, we can only conclude that his decisions are arbitrary and inscrutable.
In short, the existence of hell logically dictates a God that does not conform to any possible definition of “good.” This in turn dictates that humans can literally have no confidence in any decision they make during this life. Either they will go to hell or they will go to heaven, and there is absolutely nothing they can do to alter this fact, nor is there any way they can hope to ensure themselves a spot in one or the other. In other words, if hell exists, then our knowledge of it is completely and utterly irrelevant to our lives. Even if we believe in hell, we can rest easy at night knowing that we are utterly helpless to determine our own fate. What will happen will happen, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.
Of course, if we are going to believe that, we might as well believe that hell does not exist, for the outcome will be the same, and we shall be happier not believing. I suggest to you, gentle reader, that the absurdity of the paradox is enough evidence that we can reasonably conclude that neither hell nor a God who would create hell exist. This certainly doesn’t prove that some other afterlife does or does not exist, but it does allow us to eliminate the Christian God and the Christian hell from our list of possibilities and move on to a more pleasant topic.
Kin Selection and Favoritism
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The thing is, it’s not quite that simple. Parental certainty in humans is asymmetrical. That is, both parents are not equally certain of their parenthood. Females are always certain their child is their own. It literally came from their body as a child, and so there is no doubt.** Males, on the other hand, might be certain that they donated sperm, but they can never be completely certain that some other man didn’t also donate sperm. The ferocious male jealousy we’re all familiar with is largely hypothesized as a genetic adaptation designed to create as much certainty as possible in males. After all, a male who spends all his resources on someone else’s child is not going to pass his own genes on. Those who jealously guard their females after insemination are far more likely to be the father, and therefore, far more likely to have their genes survive.
Given this knowledge, it ought to stand to reason that there would be a hierarchy of investment in offspring. The mother should be the most devoted, and the father should be somewhat prone to abandonment, particularly if there are other indicators that his parenthood is in doubt. Anecdotally, we can all see that this is true. There simply aren’t any movies on Lifetime (Television for Victims) about asshole mothers who abandon their children, leaving their father to work two jobs. ”Deadbeat Mom” simply isn’t in our vocabulary, while everyone has heard of “deadbeat dads.” To be sure, there are mothers who abandon their children, but it’s extremely rare compared to the number of males.
Beyond the anecdotal evidence are numerous studies which line up very nicely with the prediction. (Remember, in science, the ability of a theory to make precise predictions is one of the most reliable indicators of its accuracy.) Mothers do invest significantly more in their children than fathers, across all cultures, and across history.*** Fathers are significantly more likely to abandon offspring.
While this is compelling, if the theory of kin selection is true, we ought to see the pattern continue. Grandparents ought to show a marked preference for grandchildren whose parentage is certain. Here is where a certain amount of cognitive dissonance might set in. We all know that if you ask any grandparent, they will tell you that they love all their grandchildren equally. It’s part of the Grandparent’s Handbook. But before we toss the hypothesis to the curb, we need to remind ourselves that our genes don’t care if what we believe about ourselves is true. They only care if what we do is conducive to reproductive success. From the point of view of a gene, it would make sense for a grandparent to believe one thing and do another. For the purpose of social unity and family harmony, the appearance of impartial grandparents would be a great benefit. However, for the purpose of carrying on individual genes, there should be a marked difference in affection and altruism.
A new study by David Bishop, et al, has given new force to this explanation. Interviews with grandparents did indeed give the impression that grandparental investment was equal among all grandchildren. However, when it was examined from the point of view of grandchildren, a clear linear relationship became apparent, and it lined up very nicely with the prediction of kin selection theory. Where parenthood was certain, grandparental prosocial behaviors were the highest. In other words, your mother’s mother is most likely the most altruistic of your grandparents, while your father’s father is the least. (Your mother’s mother is certain that her daughter is hers, and your mother is certain that you are hers. Your father’s father is uncertain that your father is his, and your father is uncertain that you are his.) In fact, the results lined up exactly with the expected progression – MoMo, MoFa, FaMo, FaFa, for Mother’s Mother, Mother’s Father, Father’s Mother, and Father’s Father, respectively. This is precisely the descending line of parental certainty.
Once again, we see with vivid clarity that our concept of free will is not as defensible as it initially seems. Sure, grandparents believe they love their grandchildren equally. Sure, they want to be fair. But they aren’t. Our natures are just as ingrained in us as those of any other animal. All the philosophy in the world can’t change the fact that we believe things about ourselves that simply aren’t true, and we act in accordance with our genes, whether we are aware of it or not.
At this point, clever readers might stumble upon a rather odd notion. Many ad hoc explanations for human morality don’t make a lot of sense when it comes to children’s welfare. Let’s take evolution out of the equation for a moment. We all just take for granted that parents love their own children more than other people’s children, but why should that be so? This is actually a very hard question to even ask, for it is so “obvious” to us that it’s hard for us to step outside the box. Let’s try a thought experiment to see if we can make it more clear. Suppose for a moment that you were going to design a group of self-replicating robots, and your goal was to grant each individual robot the best possible life. (Wouldn’t a loving creator do this?) Suppose you had a hundred robots, and they could each make one copy of themselves in their own lifetime. If you took parentage out of the equation, and designed them so that each of the hundred robots cared equally for all the offspring, you would ensure that there would be no favoritism, and it would be in the best interest of each “parent” to make sure that resources were divided exactly equally among all the “children.” On the other hand, if you made each parent solely responsible for its own offspring, it would pay each parent to acquire as many resources as possible for its own offspring, even if it meant stealing from or even killing rivals to acquire their resources. The result would be great inequality.
Now, can you see how this works for humans? If there is some magical “human morality” that is separate from us, why are we so fiercely loyal to our own children? Why don’t the richest parents give equally to all the other poor children in town? Again, it seems so patently obvious that we love our own children because they’re ours that it never occurs to us to ask why that should even matter! The only answer that makes any sense is that it’s our genetic legacy that matters. In protecting our children, we are literally protecting ourselves, for we are our genes.
What does all this mean? To be honest, I’m finding this a difficult question to answer. It’s one thing to find practical use for some aspects of evolutionary psychology. For this, it’s not as clear cut to me. Perhaps this knowledge could potentially help ease conflict between grandchildren, or between parents who are angry with their inlaws. Maybe it will help some people to come to grips with the discrepancy between the children’s stories and the reality of their lives. I really don’t know. What I do know is that true knowledge is power, and even if we don’t immediately see where it fits into the whole puzzle, it’s better to know than not, and more knowledge is never a bad thing. If nothing else, perhaps it has been helpful to step outside of the human box for a moment and see just how strange some of our most “obvious truths” are when we take our own instincts out of the equation. Perhaps more important is that we can see yet again how ridiculous are the claims of the religious when compared to the genuine explanations offered by science.
* Actually, it’s not. Incest can create a larger than 50% genetic investment in offspring, but the detrimental effects of incest far outweigh the ad hoc benefit of creating greater parental investment, so the point is largely irrelevant.
** Of course, modern medicine has introduced a degree of doubt with various fertilization procedures, but this too is irrelevant to our evolutionary drives, as the incidence of true uncertainty have been so infrequent, and have only occurred within the past several generations — not nearly enough time for evolutionary adaptation.
*** The reader must be cautioned against suggesting that evolutionary anomolies such as enormous harems and baby farms are proof against the hypothesis. Remember that human history spans hundreds of thousands of years, and the most vibrant of these institutions lasted for a few generations.
Related articles
- Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again (boston.com)
- “Where Does Good Come From? – Edward O. Wilson Upends Biology, Again” and related posts (integral-options.blogspot.com)
Indoctrination and “losing the faith”
One of the things that was drilled into me as a child was that I needed to attend church frequently so that I would not fall away from the faith. I was warned vividly (and often) that every member of the body of Christ was in danger of giving in to the “wisdom of the world” and succumbing to their evil human nature. Frequent reaffirmation of my belief, I was told, was the only way I could hope to keep my dark side at bay.
Now that I’m on the other side, this seems very strange to me. I have learned how science works, and more importantly, how evidence and “facts” work. (I use scare quotes when speaking of facts for the scientifically minded readers who will balk at its use in this context.) In this instance, the most important quality of knowledge is that it does not require reinforcement. Take algebra, for instance. When I learned how to do algebra, I saw that it worked, and that it was true. Since then, I have not had to go to algebra seminars to remind myself that it works. When I went to college, I learned that it was part of the foundation for calculus and physics and any number of advanced subjects which, when learned properly, help us to build bridges and buildings, and to send unmanned spacecraft to Saturn.
Since learning the truth of algebra, I have never once wavered in my conviction that it is a real, true part of the universe. Since learning that I must pay taxes each year, I have never once had to go to an IRS meeting to reaffirm my belief in taxes. When I was married, I didn’t have to attend weekly services to continually remind me that I loved my wife and she loved me. Since studying evolutionary psychology, I have not had to continually remind myself that human morality is innate and evolutionary.
Why, then, do Christians need to continually reaffirm their faith? The Christian answer to this is that man is inherently evil, and that the wisdom of the world is a lie. The true answer is that without continual reaffirmation, the faithful are likely to lose their blinders and see the world as it really is. Brainwashing is powerful, but it is not so powerful that it cannot be reversed. (Obviously, since there are atheists who used to be theists.)
We can look at this from another point of view to see the truth of it. If what the church says is true, shouldn’t we be able to look at the world around us and see the evidence? Shouldn’t everyone who is not a regular churchgoer be a degenerate? Shouldn’t primarily secular nations be addled with social dysfunction? Shouldn’t the prevalence of alcoholism, divorce, depression, STDs, abortions, and other social ills outside of the faithful make it patently obvious that it’s really important to go to church regularly?
Here, we can begin to see the whole thing start to crash down upon itself. The world is not as we would expect. Secular nations are remarkably dysfunction free. Atheist marriages are the ones most likely to last. Those who do not attend church show no particular predilection towards evil. In short, there seems to be no particular empirical evidence that church attendance does anything to alter our supposed evil nature. For that matter, there is ample evidence that human kindness runs rampant among the unfaithful. Some of the most generous philanthropists in the world are atheists. People are good to each other in Japan, where atheism is the norm.
Now, we can start to see what is really going on. Frequent church attendance is not necessary to keep our dark sides at bay. It isn’t necessary for moral strength. In fact, we really see only one significant difference between frequent church goers and those who have stopped going to church:
People who stop going to church frequently lose their faith.
So, the house of cards falls. All those ominous warnings when I was a kid weren’t about keeping me from becoming evil. They were about keeping me from losing faith. Where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us right where we started, only with a slightly different attitude. It’s true what they say — if you don’t keep going to church, you are likely to lose your faith, but not because you are inherently evil. Rather, leaving the church gives you a chance to see the world as it is and to learn the truths that don’t require reinforcement — the ones that stay with you precisely because they are true. To put it another way, one never needs to brainwash someone into believing the truth.
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Religious Indoctrination and the Atheist’s Moral Imperative
There are many truths about human nature that have ugly consequences for religion. We can certainly understand why religion so doggedly clings to us as a species by understanding human nature. However, this understanding should motivate us all the more to do anything and everything we can to end the power of religion.
Human nature and religion form a self-reinforcing circle of irrationality. Many studies indicate that the tendency towards religiosity is an evolutionary trait. There are several very well established reasons for this. First, we are biased towards finding patterns, even when there are no ‘real’ patterns to be found. False positives are much less detrimental to our health than false negatives. Consider an ancient human who thinks he sees a tiger in the grass. If he is an ordinary human, he will probably run as fast as he can away from where he thinks the tiger is hiding. If there is a tiger, perhaps he will have a chance to make it to safety before he is caught. If there is no tiger, then the whole exercise has been for naught, but he is essentially none the worse for his fright and flight. On the other hand, if there is a tiger, and the human doesn’t recognize the pattern of stripes in the grass, he will almost certainly die. So, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why humans are so prone to seeing patterns, even when they aren’t real.
Another part of human nature is the tendency to assume agency. That is, we are built to assume motive behind events. Again, the logic is perfectly clear. If a volley of small rocks comes hurtling above the treetops and lands near your encampment, it is to your advantage to believe there was an agent behind the event. If there are rival humans hiding in the trees tossing rocks, it would do very well for you to grab your spear and get ready for combat. If, on the other hand, it is a freak occurrence, say, from a boulder falling off of a cliff and breaking into stone shrapnel, nothing has been lost by being prepared, just in case.
These two human tendencies go a long way to explaining how religion might have formed. Our tendency to assume agency could easily lead us to believe that a drought was intentionally created to punish us for some transgression. If a meteor happened to cross the sky when the shaman told his story of what god was responsible for the drought, the human tendency to find patterns could easily kick in, and the rest, as they say, is history. For millennia, humans have been seeing coincidences, mistaking correlation for causation, and ascribing agency to made up entities.
The full realization of the scientific method has gone a long way towards correcting many of our errant interpretations of the universe, but religion has been the most resistant to science precisely because it taps into our deepest feelings of self. Religion tries (and fails miserably) to answer questions of happiness, meaning, sexuality, and morality. These are quite literally the things that make us human. Recent advances in the study of human nature have given us knowledge to back up the claim that religion’s failures simply cannot be idly condoned.
In our studies, we have discovered that far from being unique in the world, humans really are like the other animals in virtually every way. If giving a rat a certain chemical causes certain changes in its behavior, giving a human a comparable chemical will cause comparable changes in the human. This much has been common knowledge for a long time, but what we’ve recently discovered is that we are not really the masters of our environment any more than other animals. In other words, our consciousness is just as inexorably altered by our environment as any other creature’s. It’s not some removed “soul.” It’s a dynamic part of the natural environment. If you repeatedly beat a dog with a stick, but only while wearing a William Shatner mask, the dog will bear a lifelong hatred of William Shatner masks. If you repeatedly reward a puppy for sitting on command, it will sit on command for the rest of its life. If you take a child to church every Sunday for twenty years, and teach him that God is watching him and hates it when he masturbates, he will have guilty feelings about masturbation for his whole life.
4 Generations at Church
That last sentence probably wrinkled a few eyebrows. Clearly, some theists become atheists, so people aren’t just like dogs, right? Yes and no, as it turns out. Because humans have more brain power than dogs, and because we are much better at abstract thought, it is possible for humans to reach conclusions which convince them that their “training” was misguided and that they should no longer act the way they were trained. However, we’ve also learned that some things defy logic no matter how much we want them to conform. I’ve used the example before of women who experience sexual trauma as young girls. Ask any psychologist and you’ll learn that a group of a hundred sexually abused girls is just a few decades away from being a group of a hundred aging women who aren’t over being sexually abused girls. Some things really do scar us for life, and even though we may rationally realize that our scars are only doing us harm, the scars remain.
In our hypothetical group of a hundred sexually abused women, we would be absolutely shocked if nearly all of them didn’t want to have a normal sex life, or to be able to think of men as something other than dangerous, or to simply have an orgasm for the first time. If they have had psychological therapy, they are almost certainly aware thatlogically, there’s no reason for them to continue to have deep seated emotional problems since they are no longer in a position of vulnerability. Still, they will continue to have problems. Some things that are done cannot be undone.
Religious indoctrination is a lot like sexual abuse. In fact, I believe a case could be made that it is a form of sexual abuse in some cases. Many religious denominations teach young girls that their bodies are evil, and that they are literally responsible for all the evil in the world because of Eve’s temptation of Adam. (Even if children are not aware of the sexual imagery inherent in this story, it cannot help but have an effect.) Many girls are taught that masturbation is a sin. Young women are told that they are evil sluts if they have sex before marriage, but after marriage, they are expected to turn into willing and sexually healthy partners for their one and only life partner. If they happen to get divorced, many women believe that every sexual act they participate in for the rest of their lives will be a sin.
It’s not just young girls that suffer. How horrible must it be to have a healthy sexual appetite – for your own sex – and be taught that your thoughts and desires are abominations that make you one of the worst kinds of sexual deviants in the world? Can we reasonably expect homosexuals who were raised in fundamentalist religious households to ever have any hope of getting all of the cobwebs out of the attic? Will they ever be able to see themselves as normal and natural? The evidence I’ve seen is not encouraging.
Are these teachings the equivalent of physical sexual abuse? I don’t know. I do know that teaching girls that sex is evil can and does cause lifelong problems for women, even after they abandon religion. I do know that many gays who were raised Christian still feel that they are doing something wrong. Many women raised in these strict cultures experience sexual dysfunction as adults — often the same kinds of sexual dysfunction we see in cases of physical sexual abuse. If the effects are the same, does that make the causes equivalent? I suggest that it probably does. We can certainly cut religious parents some slack when it comes to motive. They certainly don’t feel like they’re sexually abusing their children, but does this make the abuse any less real?
The point of this article is not to rail against religious sexual abuse of girls or gays. Nor is it to say that sexual dysfunction is the only negative consequence of religious indoctrination. (I could have talked about the emotional consequences of believing that humans are inherently evil, for instance.) It is to illustrate that our scientific understanding of human nature, particularly our inability to emotionally overcome certain forms of abuse, ought to instill in us an overwhelming sense of moral initiative. Science has given us everything we need to know. The tendency towards religion is inherent, stubborn, and evolutionary. It will not go away. Religious indoctrination is real and has lifelong consequences. Conditioning works on humans just like it works on dogs and rats. If it is wrong to beat a dog with a stick while wearing a William Shatner mask, it is also wrong to teach a girl that God hates her when she enjoys sex. There simply is no conscionable excuse for anything other than outrage when we look at the billions of children who are being taught things that are not only unscientific, but demonstrably harmful.
It’s a tough hill to climb. So long as religion claims the rights to make pronouncements about morality, sex, and happiness, it will strike resonant chords in many people. Science has taught us this much. So long as our children are indoctrinated, they will bear scars for life, regardless of whether they escape religion. So long as we allow ignorance to flourish, people will have no real alternative to religion.
In my book, this sounds like the basis for a moral imperative.
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