I joined an athiest group on MeWe (that’s where I hang out on the internet. Send me a friend request or whatever it is). I’ve never engaged with any kind of organized atheist thing or had any interaction with atheists outside of occasional, relatively shallow conversations on social media. To me, the topic is fun to think about, but not particularly important. It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment. I joined the group out of curiosity about how people think about it, why they think the way they do and how high the quality of discourse is.

I’d say it’s been mildly interesting. Nothing very profound and some things a little silly. One silly thing was posted recently that prompted me to write this post, which will, hopefully, be less silly. This is the post:

Of course, there was no definition of “evil”. I’ve argued that there are no evil people, only evil deeds, on which I’m open to high-quality criticism. Regardless, I think that the statement that religions are evil misunderstands religion in general. Religion, above all, is human. I don’t know all the reasons religions exist (there’s a non-zero chance that they exist because gods exist), but I am sure of this one; man is self-aware. That manifests in (at least) two ways:

1) We are curious and want to know things. Over the course of human evolution, we had very few resources by which to determine answers to our many questions, so it was convenient to create omniscient beings who could bridge the gap of knowledge. Religions naturally arise from that. Please excuse the simplicity. There’s plenty to be said of the details of the preceding sentences, but I’m only trying to make a basic point here.

2) We are aware of our own mortality. As far as I know, humans are the only animal of which each individual is aware that he will, some day, die. Survival instincts being what they are, no one wants to accept the eventuality of death. A way to get around that is to create the idea of an afterlife maintained by a benevolent protector. If dogs and giraffes suddenly became aware of their impending and unpredictable doom, they would, shortly thereafter, develop religions.

It’s true that, as with anything else, pathological personalities will attempt to gain control of religions and use them for their own benefit and it’s a constant struggle for the righteous to defend the integrity of their religion against abusers. Often, the abusers win, do bad things for their own benefit, and that puts religion in a bad light. Consequently, some people will say that religion is evil.

But religion isn’t evil. Some people use religion to do evil deeds, but religion itself is a natural coping mechanism of a self-aware species.