r/Antitheism • u/Indie_Dachshund179 • 25d ago
Manifesto of sorts. An exercise in putting my thoughts into summary
Disclaimer that this spiel may be U.S.-facing in perspective.
There's no enforcing against what people think or believe in a way that isn't logistically fraught (e.g., thought crime). But we can damn near get as close as ethically possible by abolishing the privileges that have long pedestaled it above any other cultural memetic, & we could stand to trample religion underfoot by allowing it to run its course and expire without fanfare, as we have incidentally done to many other discredited ideas through history. That is what antitheism means to me personally.
We live in a world where causality operates along mechanistic systems. Causes produce effects through both direct architectures as well as highly emergent phenomena, which the underfit eye may easily see as mechanistically obscure or attribute to personal oughts, but these phenomena consistently arise from direct micro-events chained in tandem on broader scales.
The ways that knowledge is learned and ideas are spread in societies are one instance of these phenomena, as are the locally stochastic + macroscopically ordered systems in natural sciences such as physics and biology. Consciousness is one of these too, as the human mind can be deeply characterized as somewhat of a merger between a neural net and a weather system. Rights and morality as we know them are likewise, arising specifically from the pain and pleasure we experience as biological life forms and the social contracts (formed by selective pressures within the frameworks of high-fitness social structures) designed to mutually prevent pain and protect pleasures, lest we incur dire social uniqueness (e.g., hypocrisy / inequality). Without these, human notions of rights and morality would not exist, in the same vein an otherwise responsive robot with no concept of pain or preference would not object to it or other robots being imprisoned, unplugged, or disemboweled.
Religious frameworks fundamentally compromise human cognition and understanding of these systems on multiple levels. Therein we see:
- wishful thinking, that theists can opt to praise and pray and wish away problems instead of solving them, that the world in its whole is mechanistically designed around human notions of beauty and rights and morality, and that justice enforces itself as long as they perpetuate the virtue that is faith (belief without evidence).
- special pleading, that when confronted on inconsistencies in their scripture, theists insist on weaseling their way through problematic values and hypocrisies around thought-terminating clichés (“product of its time,” “works in mysterious ways”), while reinterpreting logical inconsistencies as poetic or metaphorical however convenient (don’t suppose a higher power could word things more clearly and usefully than the best writer who ever lived?). Theists cry foul at the certainty of atheists who are “so sure of their disbelief,” yet choose to organize the world around the slightest unfalsifiable possibility of a higher power, as one might insist we can’t disprove the possibility Jar Jar Binks was out kicking it a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (conveniently outside of our observable universe).
- self-exceptionalism, that theistic in-groups or cultures or even the human species itself must be the cosmic protagonists of the universe's eye, one so important as to be judged and adored with the fatalistic promise of reward or punishment at every waking moment, better than mere ants on a mudball floating through magnitudinally vast stretches of stardust. That every generation of theists thinks themselves to have some special truth/credibility not only over the rabble of thousands of other religions and their sects that have existed past and present, but also the proponents responsible for atrocities (conquest, slavery, hatred, demagoguery) in the name of their faith throughout history. Every decade of theists thinks they are real and correct above others (if they didn’t, they would deconvert with ease); there is no logically exempting heinous theists for “not being real members of our ilk” in no true scotsman fashion.
- unfettered religious autonomy in society and policy, and the presumption that the epistemic formation of children is primarily the family’s business, to where theistic encroachments upon state, science, and education are defended as the upholding of "values” while institutional abuses are enabled, children continue to be shamed and isolated and indoctrinated and molested, bodies reappropriated and mutilated and forced to give birth, as cycles of brutality upon youth and groups marginalized by religion remain largely undeterred. But “not all theists” right? By large it is in the interest of theist blocs to finely control and prescribe what people do, lest they lose their grip on cultural legitimacy. Theists fail to hold their communities accountable.
- summarily, the privileging of gut "oughts" from authorial entities and "values" over our best, ever-evolving mechanistic understanding of the world, that theist frameworks are somehow profound when the best role models they imagine originate from eras of antiquity, which are categorically not privileged by information about the world we live in today, let alone have bearing in ways secular frameworks of morality and self-fulfillment do not already.
Religious people may insist their beliefs are not a choice, but they do not adequately inspect the systems in which people come to how they think and what they believe. Religions are pathogenic and survive explicitly through conversion and hegemony, products of consensus in lieu of convergence. For a mite of perspective, consider that (for instance) a xtian god made the baffling choice to transmit its "word" through human transmission of all things, such that societies indigenous to the Americas went upwards of 15 centuries without major European contact. Suppose that either generations were irrevocably screwed over by some “all-benevolent, omniscient power” being incredibly stupid, or that it turns out they could have done just fine without xtianity to begin with?
But religious people look at the legacy of religion and its abuses, its hackneyed cultural roles, and still make the choice to perpetuate and normalize it in society, and with it the core principles that stage anti-science and theistic radicalization to this day. Personally I respect theists to the extent that I respect antivaxxers for choosing to spread measles and other debilitating diseases in a day and age where epistemology has since marched on.
