I don't hate religious people. I do hate religion, or if you prefer, religious belief. I really, truly, deeply hate
religion. I suspect that there are far more people who feel the same
way than believers realize.
I’ll add the obligatory disclaimer that I don’t
hate all religious people. I only hate those who are deserving of
hatred because of their actions and/or opinions, not simply because
they are religious. My hatred is aimed at religion: not just at
organized religion, every single one of them—a lot of people share
that hatred—but also at the concept of religious belief itself.
Indeed, it’s the concept of religious belief that is the evil
starting point, the fountain from which the rest of the evil,
including organized religion, flows.
I think the distinction between organized religion
and non-organized religion is less important than is usually
supposed. Both start with the acceptance of baseless nonsense as
fact, privileged fact, accorded a higher status and significance than
demonstrable scientific fact. That baseless nonsense has an aura of
divinity, of higher meaning and purpose, that makes it particularly
emotionally subversive and socially dangerous. Organized and
non-organized religion alike are larded with authority figures,
self-appointed interpreters of the baseless nonsense, deemed to have
a special connection to the imagined higher realm and chosen to act
as an intermediary between it and common humanity. They are accorded
special status, and their utterances are given special weight.
History shows us how dangerous this is to social and intellectual
freedom and thus how deserving of hatred.
I’m quite comfortable with my hatred, by the
way. I see nothing wrong with it. At times, I suppose I revel in it.
Is it good, right, and proper to enjoy hating religion? It’s
certainly far better than the grovelling submission that religion
enjoys in America.
(I’ve lived in America since I was 13 and I’m
now almost 81, so naturally what I say about religion refers mostly
to religion in America.)
I hate religion in the abstract and the specific,
but I hate different religions in different ways, and that’s what I
wanted to write about. You can find well-written essays online about
why religion in general is harmful, dangerous, and deserving of
hatred. There’s no need for another essay on that subject,
especially one far less erudite than the competition. The manner in
which my hatred varies according to the religion in question,
however, is interesting to me, and I hope that reading about it might
be helpful to those who are pondering their own feelings..
Let’s start with the religion I grew up in and
the one that is consequently the most deeply and painfully embedded
in my psyche: Judaism.
Judaism
In American popular entertainment, Judaism is
handled with kid gloves. I suppose part of that is to avoid any
suggestion of antisemitism, and part of it must be because so many of
the creative minds behind American popular entertainment are Jewish.
Whatever the reason, Judaism is always shown positively. Jewish
religious/philosophical beliefs are treated as elevated and
especially insightful, and Jewish family life is depicted with a
golden glow of sweetness, humor, and warmth. Given how many Jewish
families there are in America, there are bound to be a few Jewish
families like that, but I bet most are not.
Mine wasn’t.
I won’t
go into my family life here. I’ll say only that my father
was a rabbi and that my upbringing
left me seeing
Judaism as a stifling prison. I
escaped from the prison, but scars
remain.
Long ago, I came to see
myself not as a Jew but as an
ex-Jew. (For
more on that, see my short book Once
a Jew, Always a Jew?) But
even now, decades after my breaking away, just the thought of Jewish
religious practices, celebrations, etc. fills me with the panicky
feeling that the walls are closing in, and
the air starts to feel thick and heavy.
But what about
those elevated Jewish ideas about life, the universe, and everything?
I have three words to say regarding that: the dietary laws. Forget
the silly attempts to justify those laws
on health grounds. The dietary
laws are a collection of
utter nonsense formulated centuries ago by foolish old men who
developed a vast number of ridiculous rules about what to eat, what
not to eat, how to eat it, what combinations to avoid, how to treat
the implements used to eat food and prepare it, and on and on. Out
in the Diaspora, crammed into little rooms, they
pored over vague lines
of text in the Old Testament and went crazy. They
disputed the meaning of ancient nonsense and fantasized absurdities
to resolve the ambiguities,
inconsistencies, and contradictions
in their holy text.
It’s not just
the ridiculous dietary laws. Almost all of
the rules that govern Jewish life come from the same source: not from
the supposed word of a supposed god, but instead
from centuries of Jewish
theologians interpreting that supposed word. And
oh, what a lot of rules those silly old men came up with: rules about
food, rules about clothing, rules about praying, rules about rules.
(That last one is a joke. I think.) Just thinking about all of those
rules fills me with disgust.
Not that most
self-identified Jews in America do think about those rules, let alone
follow them. They call themselves Jews but are indistinguishable in
any meaningful way from their non-Jewish neighbors. (Again, see my
book referenced above.) That situation seems hypocritical to me, but
millions of American non-Jewish Jews seem at peace with it. Not so
for a rabbi’s son.
Preachers’ kids,
whether Jews or Christians, are notorious for going to one extreme or
the other. They either become hyper-religious, often following the
clerical path of the parent and becoming preachers in their turn, or
they reject the religion of their upbringing with vigor and passion.
I took the latter path. But the religion of the ancestors doesn’t
give up that easily. It lurks in the unconscious. It hides
everywhere, ready to pounce, to wrap its arms around the apostate and
smother him. Sickly-sweet onscreen depictions of Jewish home life
fill me with revulsion; references to Jewish religious days and rules
with anger and a feeling of being threatened.
Of course none of
that is logical. It’s
entirely emotional. And I’m
only exaggerating slightly. Nonetheless,
there it is, and the result is that what I feel for the religion of
my childhood is a deep and
powerful hatred, even
far greater than the detestation I feel for
Christianity
My hatred of Christianity is both personal and
general.
There were individual Christians whom my parents
liked or admired, but they hated Christianity itself and Christians
in the mass, seeing them as a lower form of life than Jews. When I
confronted them about this once, they were astonished that I had that
impression and stoutly denied thinking any such thing about
Christians, but the most charitable thing I can say is that they were
fooling themselves.
Inevitably, I absorbed some of their hatred and
contempt for Christians and Christianity. It’s mental poisoning,
and it bothers me that I can’t entirely shake it. That’s the
personal side of my hatred.
I do understand my parents’ feelings, though. It
has to do with the Holocaust, but it goes beyond that. To my parents,
the Holocaust was not an historical aberration or solely the product
of Germany and the Nazis. Rather, it was yet another pogrom, albeit
the worst pogrom in history. (So far, I am forced to add.)
Pogroms were common for generations in Eastern
Europe, where my mother was born and lived until she was fifteen.
Antisemitism short of pogroms—sometimes just barely short of—was
common in England, where my father was born and grew up. How can one
not feel hatred for the Christians responsible for all of that? What
attitude other than contempt is appropriate toward those who spew
hatred of Jews (and gays and Muslims and immigrants and…) and
believe in the most absurd stereotypes about those they hate? They
really are a lower form of life.
I’m no longer a Jew. I’m an atheist and
politically liberal. That doesn’t lessen, and possibly even
increases, the danger to me and mine from the extreme outgrowth of
Christianity known as Christian Nationalism.
I imagine that people reading this know about
Christian nationalism. That’s not true of the nation as a whole.
More
than half of Americans are unfamiliar with Christian nationalism.
Many of those who are aware of Christian nationalism seem to dismiss
it as a minor, unimportant movement that poses no real threat to
American democracy. The reality is very different. Almost
one-third of Americans are either Christian nationalists or
sympathizers. The problem is even bigger than that. Almost
half (45%) of Americans think that America should be a Christian
nation. Part of the threat to democracy posed by that vile
movement stems from the success Christianity has had in brainwashing
the nation. Almost
two-thirds (60%) of Americans think the Founders intended this to be
a Christian nation. No wonder state and local governments all
over the country constantly work to destroy the separation of church
and state. They know that even many citizens who don’t like the
idea of living in a theocracy won’t stand in their way because 60%
of those citizens think we are supposed to be a theocracy, and 45% of
them are eager for us to be one.
Non-Christians understand how dangerous this is.
So do gays, trans people, and anyone else targeted by hate-filled
Christians. The Holocaust killed more than Jews, and the worst
elements in our society are eager to repeat the massacres here.
They’re not even silent about it. Moderate and lackadaisical
Christians need to wake up to the threat Christian nationalism poses
to them, too.
Putting aside the danger of the United States
being converted to a Christian theocracy, Christians’ bumptious
insistence on being given a privileged position makes them obnoxious
as a group. Their mythical savior might have adjured them not to be
proud, but pride and smugness are hallmarks of Christianity. But this
essay is about hatred and the unpleasantness of obnoxious people, so
let’s pass on to
Islam
Here my hatred is impersonal.
(Well, not entirely, and that’s because of
Israel, especially because I’m writing this during the war in Gaza
that resulted from the horrendous Hamas atrocities of October 7,
2023. Israel is not an easy subject for any Jew, and it’s not even
easy for an ex-Jew—not this one, anyway. So I will avoid that
subject.)
The Muslim world experienced its renaissance, its
golden age, roughly 1,500 years ago, and to it we owe a good part of
Western civilization. But that golden age was a very long time ago,
and in today’s Muslim world, enlightenment is achieved with great
difficulty and is usually undermined by religious fanaticism. Those
fanatics control some Muslim countries. Iran and Afghanistan are
obvious examples. But they are dangerously powerful in many others.
Moreover, Muslim religious fanatics aren’t content to destroy their
own countries and imprison their own people in theocratic hells. They
are determined to extend their power everywhere. The West has a
growing number of wackadoodle Muslim preachers preaching
wackadoodleism.
Of course, the very same is true of the Christian
fanatics of the West. I hate both groups for the same reason: They
threaten the civilization I hold dear. They want to replace
civilization with religious barbarism.
There are two obvious differences between the two
groups of religious fanatics. First, in the West, liberty is far more
ingrained in the culture, and thus the theocrats have a much more
difficult task before them than do the theocrats of the Muslim world.
The second is that the Muslim crazies are far away, whereas the
Christian nutsos are in my own neighborhood.
Except that they’re not really that far away.
It’s the modern world! We have the internet, the World Wide Web,
and telephones. Muslim theocratic craziness may be centered far away,
but it reaches everywhere. It will try to silence those it sees as
the enemy wherever they live, and it will use fair means or most foul
ones to do so. It’s not just those deemed apostates, such
as Salman Rushdie, who are in danger. So is anyone else who says
or does something that is deemed “offensive to Muslims.” Crazy
people are everywhere, and religions have the lion’s share of them,
but Islam seems to have the lion’s share of the lion’s share.
Are Muslim crazies really a threat to the world in
general and the West in particular? I don’t know. I will say that
they would be easier ignore if they were small in number, but I don’t
think they are. If there were only two million Muslims in the world,
it would probably be safe to ignore the wild-eyed theocrats among
them. But there are two billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is
the world’s faster-growing religion. Rightly or wrongly, I see that
religion as a threat to democracy and freedom, even more so globally
than Christianity, and therefore I hate Islam itself.
And so on to
All the Others
It’s common in the West to think that religious
violence is primarily the province of the Abrahamic
religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Muslims in India,
subjected to vicious discrimination
driven by Hindu nationalism, might beg to differ, as would
Muslims and Rohingya in Myanmar, brutally repressed
by Buddhist nationalism.
We are pack animals, and we tend to view
nonmembers of the pack as threats. Canny, amoral politicians all over
the world play upon those innate feelings, converting fear to
violence. Of course religion isn’t essential to that process, but
it’s a very effective tool. “Those people threaten the purity of
our culture and our blood.” That will stir up the bloodlust. The
incitement to violence is even more powerful if the politician can
add, “They worship strange gods and want to replace our gods with
theirs.” Surely such rabble-rousers and the rabble they rouse are
deserving of hatred.
But why does this mean that those religions are
hateful, as opposed to a subset of their practitioners being hateful?
It’s because of the elements common to all varieties of religious
belief.
Common Elements
Division
This alone would justify hating religion.
Our tendency to divide humanity into our
tribe/clan versus their tribe/clan, us versus them, in-group versus
out-group, is ancient and doesn’t require religion. Non-religious
divisions can cause anything from bloody wars between clans to social
discrimination based on income to something so trivial as some member
of the science fiction community sneering at the barbarians who call
that branch of literature by the convenient and popular shorthand
term sci-fi.
However, most of the bloodiest, most violent
strife in today’s world is religion-based. If religion vanished
overnight, with everyone waking up tomorrow morning and wondering why
they had ever believed such nonsense, surely the division and strife
would not increase. Surely both would decrease significantly.
Every religion divides humanity into the
enlightened or saved versus everyone else. Evil results are
inevitable.
Wasted Brainpower
Theology. Ugh. Think of all that wasted brain
juice thrown upon the sterile ground like the seed of Onan! (Which is
actually a good comparison, because theology is mere mental
masturbation.) Throughout history, so many minds have been wasted,
minds that could have contributed to human welfare and progress.
Instead, they spent their their mentally productive years jumping
through imaginary hoops, debating the fine points and implications of
nonsense contained in “sacred” writings.
Not all of the minds were or are fine ones, of
course. No doubt most of those who spend their days immersed in the
study of “holy” books are not thereby robbing the world of great
intellectual advances. But just as surely there must be a small
number among those people who, if they could only free their minds
and focus on reality, would achieve things of real value instead of
merely adding to the store of nonsense.
Throughout history, priesthoods have tried to
silence scientific research that contradicts their teachings and thus
potentially undermines their power. Nowadays, some of this is glossed
over to a degree in the West. For example, the Vatican now conducts
serious astronomical research. But it wasn’t that long ago that the
same church persecuted Galileo and tortured and murdered Giordano
Bruno. There’s a direct line from those actions back to the murder
of Hypatia by a Christian mob. Perhaps next week or next month, there
will be a new Pope who will turn the clock back centuries. Millions
of disgruntled traditionalist Catholics, unhappy at the (inadequate)
modernization of their church, would cheer such a reversal.
In America in particular,
evangelicals—fundamentalists, call them what you will, the whole
nasty crew—are fighting hard to destroy science education in public
schools, and they’re succeeding. Islamic fundamentalism has had a
similar destructive influence in the Muslim world. In America and
Israel, Haredim, a very weird branch of Orthodox Jewry, run their own
schools in which students are taught religious subjects and little
else, most especially not science and mathematics.
Those are examples of organized priesthoods seeing
science as a danger to their authority. But scientific advancement is
endangered even without organization and priesthoods. Opposition to
scientific fact is fundamental to the belief that the earth is flat,
that astrology works, that ghosts are real, that the moon landings
never happened, or simply that there is a “spiritual” dimension
to reality.
Belief in silly stories and supernatural beings
constricts the mind. Inevitably, such minds cannot contribute to the
advance of real knowledge. Instead, some of those minds try to
resolve the conflict between science and religion, twisting
themselves into mental knots. After all, there is no real conflict
between science and religion. The former investigates reality,
whereas the second pursues fantastical nonsense. One produces results
beneficial to humanity while deepening our understanding of the
universe. The other perverts psyches, inflicts emotional scars and
guilt, and produces innumerable books and sermons full of twaddle.
Presumably, most of the people trying to reconcile
science and religion do so from a sincere desire to accept both
science and religion rather than being forced by their own intellects
to reject one of those. But just in case their personal motivation
isn’t sufficient, there is also a significant financial incentive.
The $1.4 million Templeton Prize is awarded for work that
demonstrates “that
there is a deeper level of reality that can be accessed through
rigorous research, especially in the sciences.” This is vile.
That much money has surely seduced some good minds to switch away
from real work and into nonsensical investigations. Superstition that
hampers scientific progress is worthy of hatred, and that makes the
Templeton Prize particularly hateful.
Deference
People everywhere have been brainwashed into
believing that religious beliefs and religious leaders are entitled
to deference, to a special status and special rights. Fancy that!
Priesthoods have successfully brainwashed people into thinking that
priests are superior beings entitled to superior standards of living
and immunity from the rules that govern the rest of us.
In America, this brainwashing afflicts even many
non-believers. A Pew Research survey found that “41%
of atheists say religion helps society by giving people
meaning and purpose in their lives, and 33% say it encourages people
to treat others well.”
(However, this result might not be quite as
shocking as it seems. Many who call themselves atheists don’t seem
to know what the word “atheism” means. According to the same
survey, “23% [of self-described atheists] say they do believe
in a higher power of some kind[.]”)
Especially in America, Christian religious figures
are widely viewed as higher beings, in contact with the Divine and
ennobled by that contact. Here’s a physical manifestation of that
delusion: A statue of the late evangelist Billy Graham, Jr. stands in
the US Capitol building. A religious huckster is thus accorded the
same honor after death as George Washington.
Graham is not the only religious figure honored in
this way. Also in the Capitol are statues of Mother Joseph, Father
Junipero Serra, Father Damien, and Brigham Young. Now, it can be
argued that Mother Joseph, Father Damien, and Father Junipero Serra
did real good and are deserving of being honored. Perhaps so, but
honoring religious figures with statues in the capitol building of a
secular country built upon the principle of separation of church and
state is still wildly inappropriate. I strongly suspect that if those
three honorees had been atheists doing the same good deeds instead of
religious figures revered by Catholics, they would not have statues
in the Capitol. And imagine the shrieks of outrage from Christians if
an attempt were made to place in the Capitol a statue of a Hindu, a
Buddhist, or—especially loud shrieks, accompanied by threats of
violence—a Muslim.
(I said that Christian religious figures are seen
as holy, but a few non-Christians are also accorded that status. Or
at least one is—the Dalai Lama, who is always referred to as His
Holiness the Dalai Lama. I’m sure fundamentalist Protestants,
devout, traditional Catholics, and Orthodox Jews don’t consider him
holy, but wishy-washy Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and those who
consider themselves “spiritual”--nonsensical term--seem to.)
Religious leaders, at least the Christian ones,
expect and generally receive virtual immunity from the law. Priests
who molest children need fear nothing; when they’re caught, the
Catholic Church quietly moves them to a different parish, thus a
different police jurisdiction, where they can continue in their evil.
The Internal Revenue Service turns a blind eye to preachers who
campaign for political candidates in violation of tax law. When it
was revealed that the Mormon church had violated regulations by
hiding its $100 billion investment portfolio from the public and the
government, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined
the church $5 million—a slap on the wrist for an organization
that “earns”
$7 billion a year.
Religious leaders expect deference from members of
their own religion, and they receive it. To a degree, they may even
receive it from people outside their own religion. To give deference
is to defer, and indeed, religious leaders expect the rest of us to
defer to them—to privilege their opinions on matters ranging from
education and the upbringing of children to foreign affairs. They are
quick to give those opinions, and the news media are quick to report
them. No one in public life has the courage to tell them to be
silent, and with good reason, for to do so would be political
suicide..
The greatest and most degrading deference is to
the mythical Divine itself—the god who doesn’t exist. For
Christians, the degradation takes the form of deference to the
mythical man-god who is supposed to have been the god’s son. Jews,
Christians, and Muslims degrade themselves by proclaiming their
subjugation to an imagined king, lord, or master, all terms used by
those religions for their god. Their groveling is contemptible. The
religious impulse that requires that subjugation is despicable.
Stand up! You are human beings. You are the
highest form of life on this planet. Yes, humans have their many
faults, but they are nonetheless the closest thing to gods this world
has ever seen. We have accomplished astonishing things, the greatest
of which are science and its offshoot, technology. Slowly and
steadily, for thousands of years, we have been increasing our
understanding of nature and our control over our circumstances,
improving human welfare in the process. How much better that is than
groveling before an imaginary being and telling ourselves that the
universe is a mystery that only he can understand and control. We—or
more likely our machines—are on the way to the stars, where wonders
and intellectual delights await us, but no gods.
Privilege
Almost four years ago, I wrote a blog post titled
Gimme
That Old-Time Religious Privilege. I’d repeat that whole thing
here, but that would be silly. You can click on the link and read
that post, if you’re sufficiently interested. (And I hope you are,
since you’ve read this far in this post.) I will only add, to keep
things in line with the theme of this post, that the privileged
position demanded by religion/religious leaders/religious believers
is hateful.
The Religion of America is Religiosity
The majority
religion in America is Christianity, but the real religion of
America is religiosity. From the National Cathedral to the National
Prayer Breakfast to the national Christmas tree to the prayers that
open public meetings to politicians ritualistically ending every
speech with “God bless America, and may god bless our troops,”
this country, designed by its Founders to have no state religion, is
in thrall to the idea of religious belief and to public
demonstrations of religiosity. (Monotheistic religiosity, of course.
No political speech in America will ever end with, say, “May the
Olympian gods bless our troops.”)
No politician running for statewide or national
office will admit to being an atheist or even an agnostic. To do so
would be to sign their political death warrant. Even in the early
days of the Republic, when the Founders themselves were still
politically active, campaigning politicians accused their opponents
of being atheists, as though disbelief was a disqualification for
holding office. Thomas Jefferson was one of those so accused. From
the very beginning, the Constitutional prohibition of a religious
test for office was viewed by many—perhaps most—Americans as
nothing but pretty words. Religious faith of some type was considered
necessary. Realistically, in those days, that meant some type of
Christianity, and more specifically Protestantism.
The theocrats were aggressive in colonial America,
and they never did accept the Founders plan for a secular government
after independence. They have never stopped trying to undermine
secularism. They work ceaselessly to dismantle the Wall of Separation
between Church and State, oozing through every chink and loosening
and then removing every brick they can. Their intentions are not
benevolent. If they were to gain political power in America, they
would not live and let live. They would impose their will on
everyone. Anyone who refused to “bend the knee” would be
eliminated. This is what theocrats have done throughout history.
Theocrats rely on the dumb acquiescence of the
majority of Americans while the theocrats and their allies and
stooges slither their way into power. The acceptance of the idea that
religiosity is America’s true and proper belief system opens the
door to theocracy.
Switching
I know that I’ve been moving back and forth
between organized and unorganized religion and between general
religious belief on the one hand and religions and religious leaders
on the other. I don’t think there’s much point in trying to keep
those things distinct from one another. There’s too much overlap
and mutual influence between them.
Religious feelings, even the vague, poorly defined
“spiritual” feeling, almost inevitably leads to the rise of
religious figures, or religious leaders. Some of them are cynical con
artists taking advantage of the superstitious silliness of their
followers to grow rich. Fuzzy thinkers are easy prey for sharp
dealers. Some of those leaders are power hungry and see the
delusional masses as a springboard to higher position, or at least to
a postmortem statue in the U.S. Capitol. Some of them probably
believe their own nonsense. The end result is the same: a priestly
elite ruling over a repeatedly fleeced flock of sheep. Or in other
words, theocracy.
Hatred
This is departure from the topic of this post, but
I think it’s a necessary one.
Perhaps you are disturbed by my use of the word
“hatred.” Perhaps you feel that my real problem isn’t religion
but the hatred inside me—a poison, an acid, something dark,
dangerous, and damaging.
I disagree.
We are often told that harboring hatred is bad for
us, that it does nothing to those we hate (unfortunately true) but
instead harms us (not necessarily true). No doubt hatred that
consumes you and dominates your life is harmful, but I contend that
suppressing natural and justified hatred can also be harmful.
Perhaps particularly harmful is the spineless
Christian emphasis on forgiveness. My mother never forgave the Nazis
who murdered her family in Lithuania in the Holocaust, and why should
she have? (The problem—the flaw in her hatred, you could say—was
that it was too general: She hated Germany and all Germans decades
after that country had changed radically and was a very different
place from the land that had created the Holocaust.) Forgiveness says
that your wrong was minor and your injury forgettable. Forgiveness
takes power from the one who was injured and gives it to the one who
inflicted the injury.
By contrast, hatred, properly focused, is
empowering and healing. You are greater than those who injured you;
look down on them with anger, contempt, and, yes, hatred.
