Religion, How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.

 

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.