The Importance of Religious Literalism

Although I discarded all my religious beliefs several years ago when I deconverted, I have retained one metabelief throughout my life: it really matters whether the claims of religion are true. If there exists an omnimax deity who created the universe, who loves me, and who has instructed me how to be happy, then I want to listen to him and follow his plan. If heaven exists, then I want to live there forever. If hell exists, then I want, more than anything else, to avoid being condemned to suffer there for all eternity. Indeed, I simply can't imagine anything which would more justly merit my concern. If, on the other hand, there are no deities, there is no heaven and there is no hell, then I see no reason to maintain any religious tradition merely for the sake of tradition. And if religion is nothing more than a metaphor, then I don't care any more about biblical stories than I do about Aesop's fables. In fact, the message of the bible is essentially tyrannical and barbaric and, even though it contains some benevolence, I don't want to give the impression that I respect the more pervasive malevolence or give special credence to any of it as divine. If any religion is true, then I want to accept it as truth, but if it's false or just symbolic, then it's simply not of any interest to me.

The rejection of literalism and scriptural inerrancy is the mark of liberal religion. It seems in particular that one can't be a liberal believer without rejecting the doctrine of hell, or at least the belief that nonbelievers are condemned there simply for not believing. But without the threat of hell, there is no reason to take religion seriously except societal pressure, personal preference or the belief that religious devotion is rewarded in this life and there is certainly no reason to obsess about it. Over the past several centuries, even the Catholic Church has liberalized its teaching on the salvation of those outside the church. (Of course, church leaders refuse to acknowledge the change and refer to it doctrinal development.) The traditional teaching was that only baptized Catholics in good standing could hope to be saved. The possibility was later extended to those who lived before Jesus or who otherwise never heard the gospel. Next unbaptized infants or aborted fetuses were included. Then it was non-Catholic Christians who could be part of an “invisible” church. Now some theologians argue that all non-Christians and even atheists might achieve salvation. I know not all of this has become official dogma, but the overall trend toward universalism is unmistakeable. If the church officially renounced the doctrine of hell, however, and apologized for the enormous amount of suffering it has caused through the ages, I would be no closer to returning the fold as there would be even less incentive to return since I would be admitted to heaven no matter what. I attended mass every single Sunday for twenty-five years, with only a small number of exceptions which I later confessed, until the day I decided to apostasize. Not once since then have I ever even considered the idea of returning for the community or the nostalgia. Attending mass was at most a tolerable experience from which the only pleasure I ever really derived was my belief that I had fulfilled my obligation for yet another week. Attempting to follow all the moral rules was at best an annoyance and at worst pure torment. I want to leave all vestiges of my former faith in the past where they belong. Perhaps the only significant difference between liberal believers and nonbelievers is that the former like religion and want to preserve it, even if they have to mangle it in the process, and the latter generally don't like it and are content to live without it.

Ironically, I share this metabelief that religion matters with conservative believers, who are usually opponents on political and social issues, but not with liberal believers, who are usually allies on these same issues. Since individuals rightly have their own unique opinions, it's usually not possible (or necessary) to find others who share the exact same thought processes, only similar conclusions. We can use all the allies we can get for political battles.

Hell: The Evilest Doctrine

The single most influential idea on my religious outlook is undoubtedly the doctrine of hell. It was hell that sparked my initial interest in religion during my teenage years, it was hell that kindled the scrupulosity which tormented me for years, it was hell that ignited my investigation and subsequent deconversion and it is hell that continues to fuel my antipathy toward Christianity. It's difficult to envision how my life would have been if I had never believed in hell, but it certainly would have followed a markedly different course.

Every person values and seeks happiness. It's the ultimate motivation for all our thoughts and actions, whether we pursue it directly or indirectly (by making others and then thus ourselves happy) and even paradoxically when we find it in feelings of sadness. Hell is the antithesis of happiness and is by definition the worst possible concept imaginable. It's a place (or “state”) of eternal pain and suffering and has been symbolized as an unquenchable lake of fire. And it is, despite its simplicity, without a doubt the vilest concept ever conceived of by humanity.

No person could ever deserve to be consigned to hell, for the pain endured therein would be infinitely more than any pain inflicted by a finite being. Even the most brutal dictators caused only a limited amount of suffering and would be unjustly punished in hell, even by the most vindictive standards of justice. And I find it both laughable and depressing to hear believers argue that an omnimax deity cannot prevent people from being roasted for eternity. This claim can only result from complete ignorance or from a complete lack of imagination.

Whenever I hear Jesus referred to as loving or merciful, I wince. While the gospels do contain some benevolent teachings, these are completely overshadowed by Jesus' recurrent threat of unending torture for anyone who fails to accept his message. One cannot expect praise for preaching love while simultaneously executing divine blackmail. An objector might arguing that hell is only a metaphor and that Jesus' threats weren't meant literally. To this, I respond that this isn't the Jesus of Christianity but instead a sanitized caricature of Jesus that has been altered in response to moral progress of the past twenty centuries. To claim that the vast majority of Jesus' followers throughout history have totally misunderstood him and that the true message of Jesus perfectly corresponds with modern western humanistic values is to engage in completely unsupportable historical revisionism.

I simply cannot imagine that the billions of people who profess to believe in hell truly do so, or at least not that they believe they themselves might actually go there. If there is truly even the slightest possibility that one could be tortured forever and ever, then no response is too radical to prevent this possibility from being realized. For many, however, hell is just a place for murderers; everyone else will be admitted to heaven upon death. With this thoroughly unbiblical perspective and because most of us aren't emotionally close to any murderers, hell is relatively easy to ignore. I would like to stress that this is a very good thing; billions of people obsessing about it would result in worldwide chaos. It was, after all, belief in hell which fanned the flames of the crusades and inquisitions. We would all do well to toss the concept of eternal punishment into the trash bin of history.

I would like to comfort my readers by reminding them of a truly glorious truth which finally ended my personal religious struggles and which I hereby resolve to reflect upon each day: Smile! There is no hell!

No Sacred Cows

Atheism, unlike religion, has no sacred cows. There is nothing that someone can do which can cause especial offense to atheists beyond the mere desire to offend. There are no gods to blaspheme, no prophets to mock, no dogmas to ridicule, no scriptures to desecrate, no temples to profane, no sacred objects to defile and no rituals to parody. This is certainly not to say that you cannot offend atheists, only that we don't set ourselves up for offense by treating something or someone as inviolable. You never see an angry atheist mob form in response to a cartoon caricature, an obscene sculpture, an incisive documentary, or the publication of a controversial book. We might well feel upset over any of these but only because they misrepresent our position and not simply because someone had the audacity to portray it differently from ourselves. Even then, our response is far more measured than that of most believers.

Muslims in particular are known for the extreme amount of offense they claim and for their verbally and physically violent reactions thereto, but Christians aren't immune to emotional reactions to alleged blasphemy. Although they very thankfully almost never threaten real violence, we have all probably heard believers threaten and even wish others hellfire for even questioning their faith. It's difficult to appreciate just how violent this response is unless you realize that these people actually believe that hell exists and that they want you to suffer unspeakable torment there for all eternity! Perhaps even more remarkable is that the majority of Christians only condemn the desire to see others in hell and not the threat itself, which is an integral part of the gospel message. (Most people think the message is love and forgiveness when it's actually, “Believe or fry!”) Even if an atheist dismisses all believers as fools, that doesn't even begin to compare with what the average believer thinks about atheists. And atheists certainly don't express the same level of emotion when someone insults their beliefs.

It's not surprising there is no reaction when you believe that blasphemy is a victimless crime.

Thought Control

Although I have previously written about my past experiences with a condition known as scrupulosity when I was a devout Catholic, I would like to go into more detail regarding a particularly torturous element thereof which I endured for a few years, in order to illustrate the absurdity of certain religious prohibitions. As I have discussed in a separate earlier entry, the Catholic Church teaches an especially strict sexual morality which condemns every sexual act except that between a husband and wife without contraception and, per clear scriptural authority, condemns even willful indulgence of sexual thoughts. While the prohibition against actions is severe, it's not impossible to obey it if one is truly careful to avoid opportunities to succumb to temptation. The prohibition against thoughts, however, proves practically impossible to obey if one takes both it and the threat of eternal damnation seriously. I struggled mightily for years to control my thoughts and, despite my most strenuous efforts, I failed to achieve anything except an unhealthy suppression of my natural desires and the development of violent compulsions against myself.

The most relevant fact about the condemnation of consenting to impure thoughts is that it's simply impossible to control one's mental activity, most especially with respect to such a basic animal instinct as sex. It's almost always on our minds, subconsciously if not consciously. Most people realize this, especially psychologists and advertisers. Healthy adults automatically respond to the sight, sound or smell of attractive individuals by becoming sexually aroused. Now while the church teaches that mere instinctive thoughts aren't willful and thus aren't at all sinful, it does teach that to consciously entertain and indulge these thoughts constitutes such a serious offense that you could burn in hell forever if you commit it and die without repenting and confessing it to a priest. That idea in itself is absurdly evil, but notice that there's nothing even resembling a clear boundary between an event that happens automatically and an action that can condemn one to eternal damnation. That's just an open invitation for obsession.

Let's say that a sexual thought enters one's mind as it does innumerable times each day. If one dwells on it for even a moment, then one risks sinning by “entertaining” or “consenting” to it. If one attempts to banish it from one's mind, the thought only becomes stronger and more persistent. I found it impossible to simply “let it pass” as I was repeatedly advised by confessors because I was afraid that I had not done enough to avoid sin and had thereby sinned already. My response to this fear was to work harder and harder to banish any sexual thought as soon as it entered my mind. I shouldn't reveal much detail, but I will say that my attempts to immediately distract my mind from unwanted images became more and more manic over time and that it was simply impossible for me to function properly until my deconversion.

If I saw an attractive woman who aroused any sexual feelings in me, I forced myself to avert my eyes and drive out with a physical response against myself any sexual thoughts that the sight of her generated in my mind. I then thought about whether I was thinking about it and then about whether I had sinned by thinking something lustful about her, often subtly appearing like I suffered from a mental condition, which in retrospect was not entirely inaccurate. This rumination could last from a few seconds to several minutes to the rest of the day and all I had actually done was happen to a see a woman in completely normal and acceptable attire. My mind even seemed to revolt at the suppression of its thoughts. The more I struggled not to think something, the stronger the urge I felt to think it out of frustration and anger. This tendency, by the way, extended to violent and blasphemous thoughts as well, though these caused much less trouble due to far weaker instincts to think them. It's notable that I came to believe that the vast majority of women dressed immodestly and that I noticed every single inch of cleavage on every woman, perhaps similar to how a Saudi man might feel in a western society.

Contrast that to how simple life has become with respect to sexual thoughts since my belief in God and hell disintegrated. Now when I see an attractive woman, the exact same sexual thoughts arise, but they present no trouble whatsoever. If I want to and have the time, I can indulge in a sexual fantasy for a short time and move on. If I'm busy or focused on something else, I can let it pass because there's absolutely no fear that I have done anything which might result in neverending torment. Either way it lasts for a few moments at most and I can concentrate on actually living my life, all without any guilt or fear. There's no obsession; it's natural and normal. And I'm sure there's just as much cleavage and as many pairs of tight pants as there were a few years ago, but I hardly notice except in the most exceptional cases, when such a sight most likely presents far more potential pleasure than anguish. It feels so good to be normal again.

Not Following Jesus

If Christians fully embraced and lived their lives according to all of the teachings of Jesus rather just those which still allow complete integration into society, the history of the western world would remarkably different. Jesus preached voluntary poverty, radical pacifism and irresponsible spontaneity; he told his followers to sell all of their possessions, to actively do good to their enemies and even to avoid thinking about tomorrow! How many Christians do you know who practice all of these teachings? Even the vast majority of monks, friars and nuns live in communities where they share possessions and which require a certain amount of administration. There are some truly nomadic and mendicant groups, but they are extremely rare. Perhaps less than one Christian in a million actually lives their life completely according to the Gospels. The rest generally enjoy a more conventional and comfortable lifestyle, excluding the significant number in the third-world who are involuntarily poor. Why is there such a disparity between what Christians teach and what they practice?

The key to understanding this divergence is to realize that Jesus' ministry as portrayed in the Gospels was essentially an apocalyptic cult. The major theme of Jesus' preaching was that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was coming very soon and that his followers were to repent of their sins, ask for forgiveness and amend their lives. His followers expected that the end of the world would happen at any moment and only with that in mind can we make any sense of his directives to live so irresponsibly. If he had intended to found a religion that was supposed to last for millennia, then he surely would have given some more practical instructions. When Jesus' didn't return very soon, his followers did what they had to do in order to survive: they compromised with the world. All of the difficult guidelines, which technically appear optional in the Gospels themselves, have been de-emphasized, especially in Protestantism. The majority of believers don't seem to worry about their possessions making them larger than a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle. Christians today are no more likely to give money to charity than any other group and, here in the United States, they seem more likely to start a war than many other groups.

When I first started reading the Gospels on my own as teenager, I was very disturbed by what I read because I lived a normal lifestyle, not a radical Gospel lifestyle. I owned some possessions. I didn't start fights, but I would defend myself if attacked. I planned for tomorrow by studying. I wanted to get married. I loved my family and I didn't want to leave them to serve God. I didn't really spend any time volunteering. All of this made me feel very guilty and very afraid that God would damn me to hell for not obeying his commandments well enough, but I didn't want to live the insane life preached by Jesus. I didn't see anyone else worrying about this, but it was impossible for me to see Jesus' ministry for what it was, for that would mean that Jesus was mistaken and therefore not God. Eventually I learned the Catholic Church's teachings that one only has to die in a state of grace, not give away everything you own, to go to heaven. Similar yet distinct problems arose because of this, but that's another story. I knew I wasn't really following Jesus and it bothered me. I don't know why it doesn't bother more people.

I was prompted to write on this topic by the now annual coverage of Christians' war on “The War on Christmas.” I find it ironic for Christians to demand that minimum-wage employees explicitly say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays” while they spend hundreds of dollars on frivolous gifts, often manufactured in dirty and dangerous factories by malnourished children in third-world countries. What an odd way to celebrate the birth of their lord who instructed them not to own even a second pair of sandals!

Telling Others about Hell

Believers and nonbelievers tend to disagree about whether telling someone that they will be sent to hell constitutes a warning or a threat. Believers, convinced of the truth of their religion, feel that they must share this truth and attempt to save others from an eternity of suffering by warning them of the danger. Nonbelievers, unconvinced of the truth of the believer's claims, sometimes feel threatened, viewing the believers as the ones making the threats, using God as a proxy to express their anger and hatred toward nonbelievers.

Having been on both sides of this issue, I can sympathize with both groups. I know what it's like to be told that I'm going to hell, but I also remember what it's like to honestly believe that others would be damned and that I should at least make some effort to help them avoid that fate. I feel uncomfortable both with simply letting religious fanatics attack all of those who disagree with them while hiding under the veil of piety and with restricting the ability of people to express what they sincerely believe to be true. In the end, I prefer to support full freedom of speech as the law should never enshrine a particular viewpoint by prohibiting others from being expressed and discussed. Cultural conventions generally address issues such as this more effectively than the law, though I must admit that I'm concerned about the sustainability of informal norms in a socially fragmented and ideologically diverse modern society. We cannot, however, let fights over something as absurd as mythical torture chambers erode one of our most treasured freedoms by limiting what those who disagree with us can say.

God's Choices

Today I read something rather remarkable in the church bulletin from my parents' parish about the gospel reading regarding who will and will not be saved from the fires of hell:

If it were up to God, everyone would be saved.

If?!? The Christian God is supposedly omnipotent. He created the universe. He created humanity. He issued the commandments. He founded the church. He instituted the sacraments. He created heaven and hell. He forgives us. He will judge us upon our death. Everything is part of his perfect plan. How can one possibly say that our salvation is not up to him? I suppose one could argue that he grants us free will, concentrating on free will and ignoring he grants us, but even then there is absolutely no reason to imagine that we must forever suffer untold agony if we reject him. People who reject God don't suffer hellish pain while living. Why must they suffer after their death unless God specifically ordains it? It most certainly is up to him.

This attitude of resignation to whatever God has arbitrarily chosen to do as logically necessary can be seen in other areas of Christian theology. Christians say that Jesus' death on the cross was necessary for God to forgive humanity. Why? An omnipotent deity can forgive anyone of anything for any reason without any blood being spilled. If God chooses to do so, then it's because he wants to, not because he has to. Everything truly is up to God. You simply cannot justify the supremely hideous doctrine of hell by saying that God has no choice but to send some of his beloved creatures there to fry for eternity.

Scrupulosity, OCD and the Doctrine of Hell

For approximately five years, from 1999 until my deconversion in 2004, I suffered greatly from an obsession with sin, death and hell known as scrupulosity. The condition is usually considered a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder and is normally treated with counseling and medication. While I respect the general opinion of mental health professionals in this matter, I always insisted that my own problem was not the result of abnormal brain chemistry but simply of sincere belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding the afterlife and I think that the almost three years of my life since then, without any belief in the supernatural and without the slightest hint of obsession, have vindicated that opinion. My belief that God might damn me to hell forever almost drove me literally insane and the terrible anguish which it caused contributed to my sustained antipathy toward the idea of the Christian God.

The Catholic Church preaches two entirely incompatible doctrines which led to my scrupulosity:

1. God loves each person perfectly and unconditionally.
2. God will damn a person to hell forever if they commit a mortal sin and then die without having confessed or at least having made an act of perfect contrition with the intention to confess as soon as possible.

It also seems that one must engage in doublethink to fully accept both of these conflicting dogmas and that my eventual inability to reconcile them in my mind was indeed the source of my problem.

Let's say that I'm not certain whether I have committed a mortal sin despite knowing that it must be a gravely immoral act committed with full knowledge of the intellect and full consent of the will. A confessor would most likely instruct me that if I'm not certain, then it cannot be a mortal sin and I don't need to confess it. The problem is that there is no absolute distinction between certain and uncertain in any of the three elements and I was frequently uncertain about whether I was certain! The prospect of literally never-ending torture meant that I couldn't risk even the very slightest chance that I culpably judged wrongly and that obsession was the only rational response to infinite danger. I was often told that I had to trust my current confessor absolutely, but my confessors had directly contradicted each other, directly contradicted official church documents, and even told me that I was right in leaving other confessors who had instructed me wrongly. I was told even more often that I had to trust God because he loves us, but it was simply impossible for me to really believe this. If he really and truly loved us, then he would never assign us infinite punishment for finite sins or make our salvation so heavily dependent on the hour of our death. I was told that I was wrong to view God as a policeman who is constantly waiting for us to do something wrong so that he can punish us, but the image seemed to fit rather well except that, unlike a policeman, God had unlimited control over me, my world, the rules and the punishment! I simply couldn't love a being who threatened me with eternal fire if I didn't follow his rules exactly and who would just completely give up on me once I died. The Christian God was a monster in my eyes whom I grew to fear and despise more and more over the years.

My scrupulosity was treated by confessors, counselors, and even with medication from a psychiatrist. Their assistance granted me a certain limited amount of relief, but it was always only temporary and my condition never really improved beyond being simply bearable. My deconversion, which included the rejection of the concepts of God and hell as absurd, on the other hand, resulted in complete, instantaneous and permanent relief without any counseling or medication because my obsession was rational and had nothing to do with brain chemistry or my “failure” to trust and love God. Here is an example. Like sufferers of actual OCD, I had an obsession with washing and cleanliness. The typical OCD obsession is based on the small possibility of becoming sick and the minuscule possibility of becoming fatally sick from lack of washing and cleanliness. My obsession was based on the possibility of sinning by getting me or someone else sick from lack of washing and cleanliness. The worst that happens with an OCD obsession is that someone gets sick or dies. Everyone dies eventually, so while it makes sense to be careful, it doesn't make sense to be so careful that it ruins one's life. The worst that happened with my obsession, however, was that I burned in hell forever and ever. It really would be worth ruining one's life to avoid an eternity of pain, so my reaction was completely proportionate to the danger. Once I realized that there was no danger of hell, however, I returned to normal immediately. I started washing my hands only after using the restroom and sometimes before eating. I could touch anything without worrying about germs. I could drop a cookie on the ground and eat it without thinking about it except to laugh at how easy it had become. That is simply not possible for someone with abnormal brain chemistry and irrational obsessions. Of course, I would argue that my belief in hell was essentially irrational, but my scrupulosity itself was a perfectly rational response to that irrational belief. The infinite nature of hell had completely disrupted my normal pattern of ordinary risk management and created obsessive thinking, and the church's liturgy had forced me to participate in compulsive rituals such as mass and confession to eliminate these obsessive thoughts. My scrupulosity was thus generated by belief in the church and was thus resolved by disbelief in the church.

A fundamentalist Protestant might respond that one's salvation is assured upon accepting Jesus as one's lord and savior. (As an aside, I don't understand why they usually think Catholics haven't done this except that they don't use those exact words to describe their faith.) At first this seems to avoid the problem of always having one's salvation in doubt, but there other problems which only become apparent upon further reflection. If one's salvation were truly assured, then they could sin with impunity without any fear of hell. Fundamentalists respond that sinning greatly would be an indication that a person was never saved in the first place. This entails that one can be mistaken about whether they are truly saved because they also might sin greatly in the future and therefore they have no assurance of their salvation! One cannot argue that they know they would never do that because many people have been very devout in their faith and then sinned greatly. I have heard of fundamentalists who repeatedly tried to become saved after sinning because they didn't know whether it worked the other times. Since fundamentalist hell is just as terrible as Catholic hell, the same infinite danger merits the same obsessive response.

Fluctuating Religiosity in My Family

The world is always changing, but sometimes exactly how it changes surprises me.

Although my family has always been practicing Catholics who never miss a Sunday mass, growing up none of them was particularly devout or interested in religion outside of those Sunday mornings. As described in my deconversion story, I myself started to become religious around age thirteen and this devotion gradually increased for a dozen years until my deconversion at age twenty-five, but I never noticed any of them change at all during this time. Since then, however, I have observed that several of them have become more involved in their faith.

My father, who had always seemed the least interested in religion of anyone in my family, has been participating for a few years in perpetual adoration of the eucharist by spending one hour late at night each week praying in the chapel of their church and has more recently begun reading a book about church history. My older sister's change has been less marked and is not really unexpected because she and her husband have two young children. My younger sister's change, however, is the most radical. She prays often, reads devotional books, attends daily mass on occasion, consults a spiritual advisor and is currently discerning a vocation to be a nun! I find it notable, however, that she has never really sat down and read the bible. I recommended this to her because doing that is more likely to create doubts in the mind of a believer than any skeptical book, which she would flatly refuse even to consider anyway. If she decides to enter a convent, I will respect her decision, but I think it should be an informed decision.

Throughout all of these changes, I am pleased to say that certain things have remained the same. My family still respects my atheism, never treats me any differently and never raises the topic around me. I occasionally find myself voicing criticism of religion around them, to which they don't respond, but generally try to avoid doing this. They are remarkably tolerant of my opinions, but it really bothers me that the only people who really love me also probably believe that I will burn in hell forever after I die.

Catholicism and Guilt

The relationship between religion and guilt is rather complex. Religion both manufactures and eliminates guilt and the more dominant aspect varies according to an individual's disposition and personal experiences. I would like to examine these two elements in detail. Since I was a Catholic for many years, I will speak about Catholicism in particular, but some of what I will say is relevant to Christianity in general and, to a lesser extent, religion in general.

Catholicism manufactures guilt in several distinct ways. First, the Church teaches that, because of the actions of Adam and Eve, we are all born sinners with the stain of original sin on our souls. This includes exclusion from heaven unless we are baptized and an insurmountable tendency to sin ourselves regardless. Second, the Church's liturgy constantly reminds us of our worthlessness and our sinfulness, especially in contrast to a perfect God. Third, and most important, the Church almost uniformly condemns as sinful a completely natural and normal aspect of human existence: sexuality. The Church teaches that every single sexual act except intercourse between a married man and woman without contraception is a mortal sin, meaning that it can cause that person to be damned to hell. This includes not only homosexuality and fornication, but masturbation, viewing pornography, mentally indulging in sexual fantasies, and even sex between a husband and wife who simply want to avoid having more children. It thus excludes from sexual activity every person who isn't currently ready to have another child with their legal spouse, i.e., the vast majority of the planet, and tells them that if you do anything sexually, you are an enemy of God who should burn forever in a lake of fire. Sexuality is an absolutely integral aspect of life and to attach extreme guilt to a basic human need is terrible. Sex is a serious affair and requires responsibility, maturity and respect, but condemning with hellfire every single sexual act except one is absurd. It's similar to teaching that if you eat any food other than organic vegetables, you are evil. Perhaps that is why dietary regulations are also common among religions; they create guilt and give power to the leaders of religion who alone can magically absolve that guilt.

Catholicism also eliminates guilt, primarily through confession, or as it is known today, reconciliation. Psychologically, it's probably helpful to admit one's faults to another person and to hear someone say that the sins are forgiven. The requirement of confession, however, on the balance probably creates more guilt than it relieves. Most penitents feel anxiety before and during the confession and many often avoid confessing for that reason. Others feel anxiety because they are afraid that they forgot something or that something made their confession invalid. Since receiving communion in a state of mortal sin is another mortal sin, worries arise every week at Mass. Adding anxiety to guilt is a recipe for much anguish. For some people, however, confession frees them of their guilt and tells them everything is all right.

Atheism, by contrast, neither manufactures nor eliminates guilt. Atheists have no one to make them feel guilty except their own consciences. Actions can be judged from a human level without fear of offending a perfect deity, violating an arbitrary regulation, or incurring eternal punishment. In addition, atheists are not tied to a holy book which must either be reinterpreted or discarded in order for their moral values to progress. But atheists also have no one to make them feel less guilty. They may occasionally and informally confess their failings to friends and family, but they have no deity to instantly make everything better. They have to take responsibility for their actions and realize that if they hurt someone, no one but them will make it right again. All of this echoes the theme I propounded in a recent entry, that a major aspect of atheism is maturity.

Before I finish, there is one more related topic to address. Theists sometimes claim that atheists really do believe but just want to sin without guilt. While this may be true of a small number of self-identifying atheists, the vast majority of atheists with whom I interact are quite sincere in the disbelief in the supernatural and exhibit no greater tendency to sin than theists, excluding actions such as not attending church and not praying which could only be considered wrong within the context of religion. They don't lie, steal, cheat, or hurt other people more often than the average theist. On the contrary, atheists are statistically much less likely to commit crimes than theists. The evil atheist who does whatever he wants because there is no divine police officer watching is nothing more than a caricature.

Despair and Hope

When I was a Catholic, I viewed atheism as the pinnacle of despair. Atheists have no hope for an afterlife; consciousness ends with bodily death. Atheists have no hope for ultimate justice; good deeds often go unrewarded and evil deeds often go unpunished. Atheists have no hope for final vindication of their beliefs; if they are indeed correct, the vast majority of the world will never know that their religious beliefs were mistaken. Atheism, from the outside, thus appears to be desolate of hope. It was partially this bleak appearance which kept me from investigating my doubts about religion for seven years after they first arose in my mind.

Now that I am an atheist, I no longer view atheism as gloomy and dreary. While I willingly admit that each individual claim above about hope is completely valid, I feel no despair and no sadness. I simply realize that I can only accept that, with atheism, all things come to an end. I would like to examine the two sides of that coin.

First, all bad things come to an end. No one suffers eternally and everyone will eventually be released from even the most protracted and intense agony. Many theists, by contrast, grapple with the idea that their closest family and friends may be tormented or may already be tormented eternally in hell and of course also grapple with the possibility that they themselves may be tormented with absolutely zero chance of ever escaping even for the briefest moment. Fear of being endlessly tortured filled my own life with considerable sorrow for several years; simple annihilation of my personality upon death is quite pleasant and even poetic in comparison.

Second, all good things come to an end. This is the difficult aspect and there really is little I can say to make it any easier. We would all like to live in paradise, to see our loved ones again, to learn every mystery, to enjoy every delight, to celebrate love and friendship with every person without any anger, fear or jealousy. Unfortunately, wishing cannot make it so. Some atheists find it useful, however, to realize that they continue to live, in a sense, through the people they have affected, especially their children and grandchildren, and then through the people they affect and so on. Some also believe that they would grow bored in an eternal paradise, and that it is not so tragic that our lives end after only several decades. I cannot say that death is not tragic, only that the associated pain is not necessarily unbearable without religion.

Atheism to me now represents maturity and honesty in the face of reality. Atheists must accept the cold truth that there is no one to make everything all better in the end, no one to give our lives purpose and meaning, and no one to tell us what to do or what to think. We must take ultimate responsibility for our lives and for ourselves. While it's comforting to believe the promises of religion, without evidence to support them, we must discard them as childhood fantasies and embrace our future as mature adults.

The Source of Christian Tolerance

Today the discussion of a recent syndicated column continues with another letter to editor. This letter by Dottie Stalter was published under the heading, “God's message: ‘Peaceful compromise.’”

This is in response to the letter titled "Christians: Hypocrites are everywhere."

I agree that it is wrong and hypocritical to speak to anyone in a way that is unkind and derogatory. People can go to the extreme, hence not walking in the light of peace.

Always a freethinker, proud of my rational beliefs, but driven and enamored to critical inquiry of the Bible, I soon discovered that God did get it right the first time. Being "born again" is to appreciate and understand God's grace and love.

Knowing this as Christians, we should all be humble as we walk in his light. God's message is all about peaceful compromise. I don't agree that a Christian school should remove a Christian symbol - the cross - permanently from its chapel as Gene Nichol, president of William and Mary College, recently did.

Removing it temporarily to accommodate other religious events was an example of peaceful compromise. I agree with columnist Shaunti Feldhahn that removing it permanently is an insult to most Christians. This is what prompted Feldhahn's recent column.

There should be no shame in embracing and celebrating our Founding Fathers' principles, whom, I might add, were freethinkers and proud of their rational beliefs.

My response to this letter is mixed. There is nothing I find really objectionable about it, but the author rambles somewhat and relies on muddled logic to support her conclusions.

While I generally support peaceful compromise in civic discourse, I grow weary of hearing people claim to know the message of an ineffable deity, especially when it flatly contradicts the source documents and historical interpretation of the position it purports to represent.

First, there is almost no talk of compromise in the Old Testament. Joshua didn't compromise as he supposedly conquered Canaan, by God's own order, burning town after town, slaughtering man, woman, child and beast. The primary purpose of law of Moses was to maintain a strong distinction between the chosen people and the gentiles. Again and again the prophets railed against compromises and accommodations made by the Jews and consistently blamed Israel's defeats and the Babylonian captivity on lack of zealotry in maintaining their own identity. Where was there any compromise?

Second, there is little talk of compromise in the New Testament. There are indeed certain passages about rendering unto Caesar and such, but there are also passages about hating one's own family, selling all of one's possessions, and about shaking the dust off of one's feet when a town doesn't welcome you. And of course Jesus himself was the absolute antithesis of tolerant toward anyone who didn't accept him as absolute master. Rather he condemned all of those to the eternal fires of hell. Where was the message of compromise?

Third, Christendom wasn't especially tolerant until recent centuries, not coincidentally precisely when it ceased to be Christendom. There were persecutions of Jews and of Christian heretics, bloody wars between Christian sects, and multiple crusades against the infidel Muslims. There was slavery and the subjugation of women. Where was there any compromise? Eventually moral values became more tolerant, but it wasn't because of any message from God.

Let me make myself very clear: It's very good that most Christians are quite tolerant today of most people different from themselves. (If only Islam would undergo such an enlightenment!) I simply object to the claim that their religion makes them tolerant when the truth is the reverse: with their tolerant values, they have changed their religion to make it more tolerant. They are reluctant to acknowledge that their moral standards have changed for the better over time, in accordance to the moral Zeitgeist, because it invalidates their claim to have an immutable message from God and thus their hope for an afterlife.

Let us treat each other with compassion and respect. Let us do it not because an invisible being supposedly said so, but because it's the right thing to do.

Religious Opposition to Violence

Today we find the first letter to the editor of the year about religion, after a flurry of letters about freethought. This letter by John Gallo, was published today under the heading, “Religion: Oppose violence in any form.”

I get quite amused when I read about the struggle some Episcopal leaders are having in allowing their homosexual brothers and sisters full participation in the church.

Most American believers aren't really concerned about boys kissing boys. They worry much more about existential matters of faith. Examples are the immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq, the failure of our health care system, the absurd Medicare drug plan, the genocide of young black males, the oppression of the poor, and the total corruption of our political system by money and corporations.

Somehow these Anglican defenders of the faith suffer from amnesia in failing to remember Jesus' inclusive ministry to the excluded and marginalized, and his harsh condemnation of the religious and social structures that perpetuated injustice and violence against individuals and groups. Frankly, the biblical writers had no scientific concept of human sexuality and all its complexity. What Scripture does condemn is the misuse and abuse of all of God's good gifts.

All of us should heed the pope's words that urged religious leaders to oppose violence in any form. Whether it be the persecution of people because of their God-given sexual orientation or the slaughter of the innocents in Iraq, our calling is to be the peacemakers and agents of God's reconciling love.

Although Gallo's signature indicated that he is a pastor, it didn't indicate of which church. An online search returned several relevant pages, but I couldn't find his association listed anywhere, even in a newspaper article explicitly about him and another local pastor! It's not really important to the above discussion, but I wanted to provide my readers with as much information as possible before I begin my critique.

As a condemnation of violence, hatred and moral apathy, I agree with the major sentiments of this message and I am glad to see it published. There are a number of points, however, with which I disagree or upon which I would otherwise like comment.

First, although the issues listed as examples in the second paragraph are very important, none of them are matters of faith and none are existential. Perhaps the author meant to say that they should be of concern to people of faith, but they have nothing to do with religion itself and nothing to do with the philosophy of existentialism, so he should be more careful with his words.

Second, I object to some of the labels used to describe the issues. Violence among young black men is certainly a major problem in the United States, but characterizing it as a genocide is simply an abuse of the word. I wouldn't label it genocide because it's not large-scale, it's not organized, it's mostly perpetrated by members of the community itself, and it's mostly committed on an individual basis rather than according to the victim's race. It doesn't resemble a true genocide like the Rwandan genocide in which almost one million victims died in about three months during a well-organized extermination by militias of one ethnic group by another. I also object to the use of oppression of the poor because it sounds like an active conspiracy rather than culpable neglect and total corruption because corruption in the United States is actually rather low compared to most of the rest of the world.

Third, characterizing Jesus' ministry, as portrayed in the Gospels, as “inclusive” is at the best incomplete and at the worst inaccurate. Jesus repeatedly condemned to the eternal fires of hell everyone who failed to believe in him and his message. This could not be less tolerant and compassionate. And while Jesus reached out to everyone within Jewish society, he also repeatedly stated that he came to save only the children of Israel, not the Gentiles. This is hardly any more inclusive. It was only after his death, and thus after his own ministry had ended, that his message was adapted and brought to the rest of the world.

Fourth, Jesus did repeatedly condemn the religious leaders of his time, but he failed even to address two major unjust institutions of his time: slavery and the subjugation of women. In fact, by approving of the entire Old Testament and by failing to select any women as apostles, Jesus gave tacit approval to both of these social systems. A human revolutionary could be forgiven for moral shortsightedness, but a supposedly divine revolutionary has no excuse.

Fifth, I wholeheartedly agree that the authors of the Bible had no scientific concept of human sexuality and all its complexities, but their ignorance is more extensive than is suggested by this humble comment. They also had no scientific understanding about the origins of the universe, the origins of mankind, the connection between body and mind, the inefficacy of prayer, the impossibility of miracles and the very definition of God himself. One can't ignore the parts of scripture which one doesn't like on the grounds that they're unscientific unless one is willing to apply this principle consistently and examine the Bible thoroughly until all we have is a collection of occasionally interesting stories.

It's good to see someone in favor of social justice but disappointing to see them clinging to ancient superstitions as primary justification for purely human compassion.

Why I Am No Longer A Catholic

The following is a lengthy essay documenting my reasons for leaving the Catholic Church. It was written in December 2004, two months after my apostasy.

I. Introduction

Before I begin explaining my reasons for leaving the faith, it would be appropriate to briefly examine the reasons I was a Catholic in the first place. The story of how I entered the Church is a very common one: my Catholic parents had me baptized not long after my birth, brought me to church each Sunday, and sent me to formal religious education at the church until I made confirmation at the age of thirteen. As do many children, I simply accepted what I was told by adults in essentially all matters without questioning it, and this certainly extended to what I was told about God and religion.

While my enthusiasm for religion waxed and waned, I cannot recall any doubts of any significance until the summer after I graduated from high school, at the age of seventeen. For the next eight years I struggled from time to time with these doubts, and reassured myself with various reasons for believing the Catholic faith true. Since this is not a deconversion story, I will not detail the reasons I began my investigation into arguments against the faith, but only summarize my research, reasoning, and conclusions.

The intellectual challenge to my faith was two-pronged: questioning the reasons I had for believing and discovering distinct reasons for disbelieving. With regards to general chronology and relative strength, the order of these two elements was in fact reversed, but for stylistic reasons I am presenting them here in the listed order.

II. Reasons to Believe

A. Argument from Miracles

The history of the Catholic Church is filled with volumes upon volumes of accounts of miraculous events of all sorts: healings, apparitions, divine artifacts, extreme fasting, levitation, bilocation, mind-reading, visible Eucharistic transformations, survival of deadly force, resurrections, and even a dancing sun. St. Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican missionary of the 14th and 15th centuries from the Iberian peninsula, is reputed to have performed 40,000 miracles in his lifetime alone, which incidentally only lasted approximately 25,000 days. It's an impressive record, and very effective in quelling the doubts of a young Catholic. Its efficacy in convincing skeptics, however, is almost non-existent and for good reason. There are a number of problems with using miracles to establish the truth of a religion.

I would like to begin by saying that the sheer number of alleged miracles can seem overwhelming until one examines why mistakes, hallucinations, fraud, and forgeries could be so common. We need to understand that there is a long tradition of miracles in Christianity. Jesus Christ performed a number of miracles to establish himself as the messiah and the Son of God. The apostles performed miracles to establish their apostolic authority. Saints are only canonized by the Church after two separate confirmed miracles are attributed to them or their intercession. People in an unscientific age would be less likely to fully investigate an unusual natural occurrence and more likely to mistakenly consider it a miracle. Additionally, miracles brought respect, fame, and fortune that would entice many to try to create their own. There are even so-called pious frauds which are contrived to increase the declining faith of the people. The number of claimed cases itself proves nothing.

The most glaring difficulty with using miracles to establish the truth of a religion is determining whether these events occurred at all. A miracle qua miracle is always the least likely possible explanation of any event. While scientists and historians may be reliable enough to establish the probability of natural events, they are simply not trustworthy enough to establish the occurrence of a supernatural event which violates the basic laws we otherwise never see broken. It is always more likely that the reports are mistaken, fraudulent, or the result of later forgery than that a natural physical law was violated. Whatever the individual case, it's important to remember that there are always other possible explanations that cannot be definitively ruled out so that divine intervention can be firmly established.

Beyond the difficulties of confirming miracles at all, there is also a major problem in that each person in the world would himself need to become an expert in logic, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, history, and several other academic fields in order to be as certain as possible that no errors have occurred in the long line of research and reasoning. For while one may trust scientists and historians to establish the likelihood of natural events, one cannot confirm a supernatural occurrence and logically conclude that a certain institution is absolutely infallible on the fallible word of other persons.

The validity of using miracles to establish religious authority depends entirely on the truthfulness of whoever performed the miracle, in most cases assumed to be an omnimax (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) deity. This assumption, however, must be challenged. First, the very existence of such a being can be questioned; the problem of evil even suggests that such a being most certainly does not exist. Second, we cannot exclude the possibility of less honest supernatural or even advanced natural extraterrestrial beings performing these miracles. In fact, miracles in religions other than Christianity have sometimes been dismissed as the work of demons. Descartes argues that an omnimax deity would not allow supernatural beings to deceive us. This argument depends on the existence of an omnimax deity and certain knowledge of his will, and fails to consider that this deity does not prevent even other humans from deceiving us into false religions. One would need to exhaustively investigate the numerous miraculous claims in all other religions in case miracles confirm conflicting messages.

Finally, unless we blindly assume that whoever is most intimately connected to the miracle is henceforth absolutely infallible, we need a reliable method of determining when he speaks authoritatively. We cannot allow the authority to define it himself because we do not know whether this definition itself is infallible; the logic would be circular and thus invalid.

I personally consider fulfilled prophecy to be a special subtype of miracle. Everything I have said against miracles applies as well to prophecy, so there is no need to repeat my arguments. Mystical experiences are also of a similar nature to miracles and prophecy: they simply cannot establish an authority that we can trust without questioning. The argument from miracles fails.

B. Argument from Ecclesiastical Stability

The Catholic Church has experienced a certain amount of stability throughout her history. This point is certainly worth noting when studying the Church, but I argue that it cannot be used to establish her supernatural claims. First, the stability is only relative. In comparison to the doctrinal alterations experienced in the short history of Protestantism, yes, the Catholic Church has been quite solid. But in the earliest years of the religion, it was anything but stable. There were a good number of competing factions, teaching and believing very different things. These were not just heretical fringe groups. Often those who held the currently unorthodox positions greatly outnumbered those who eventually established their own beliefs as universal orthodoxy. Real and lasting stability didn't arise until Emperor Constantine converted and instated Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and at the same time also outlawing all other religions. Now with worldly power, the Church became more and more disinclined to alter doctrines unnecessarily and thereby jeopardize the status and revenue it was accruing. It should be noted that there have always been heretical groups, but that they were unable to establish and maintain themselves indefinitely until the invention of the printing press strengthened their cause against the extremely powerful bureaucracy of the Church. The various inquisitions stand out as rather ungodly methods of maintaining ecclesiastical stability, but we should not forget how effective the economic, social, and spiritual devastation attached to the silent threat of peaceful excommunication could be throughout the history of the Church. We should also note that the Church places extremely stringent limitations on what she considers unchanged in her history. The teachings and attitudes toward non-Christians, for example, have undergone revolutionary changes in recent centuries and expert theologians have had to bend over backward to find some core teaching which fits multiple teachings. Both Vatican Councils have resulted in the birth of many schismatic or semi-schismatic groups in the last two centuries. Why is there such an appearance of instability, both in doctrinal matters and church governance, if there is in fact none?

It is not necessary that I establish the instability of the Catholic Church. It is not even necessary that I demonstrate that her stability is debatable. It is only necessary that I provide natural reasons for the stability she has displayed, and I believe I have done that. The Church's stability is not nearly strong enough to establish the divine origins she claims. If never there had existed any heretics, schismatics, or doctrinal development, if there had never been violent and non-violent threats against heretics and apostates, both in this life and the next, and if there had been only minimal worldly motives for maintaining stability, there would be some plausibility to the idea. But it is simply not the case. The numerous failings of the Church, especially on a grand scale, strongly suggest it is something other than divine. The Church may perhaps be a unique institution in world history, but it has all the markings of a merely human institution nonetheless. The argument from Church stability fails.

III. Reasons to Disbelieve

A. Divine Injustice

1. Original Sin

The doctrine of original sin teaches that all of humanity has been punished for the sin of our earliest ancestors. Punishing an innocent party for the transgressions of another party is clearly unjust. The association we have with the other party was even made without our consent. And even if substitutionary punishment were just, it would at least require the assent of the party to be punished, which we have never granted. No Catholic can argue that original sin is a logical necessity, for the Church teaches that God allowed the Virgin Mary to be conceived without any taint of sin. There exists no reason he could not do the same for each human conceived, who are all as equally innocent as the Virgin Mary before they are born. Original sin is pure injustice.

2. Eternal Punishment

Assuming for the sake of argument that God has the right to punish his creations for their sins, justice demands that the penalty match the severity of the crime. Eternal punishment in hell for temporal sins violates this principle. A human who inflicts a limited amount of unjust suffering will himself experience unimaginable agony for all of eternity. St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes this principle but argues in his famous Summa Theologica that because God is an infinite being, all sins against him are infinite in magnitude. There are two major problems with this idea.

First, God as an infinite being cannot suffer: we cannot do anything to diminish his infinite beatitude in even the slightest degree. The first reason that we imagine that we can is that our natural experiences involve only finite, harmable creatures so we cannot truly conceive of an infinite being. The second reason is that we have been taught that Jesus suffered despite the logical impossibility of the concept.

Second, the Church distinguishes not only between mortal and venial sins, but between transgressions that are inherently more or less grave. If we follow the idea presented by Aquinas, this distinction is totally mistaken; all sins are infinitely grave. One cannot argue that some sins are more infinitely grave than others.

3. Doubt, Disbelief, and Apostasy

Prohibition of doubt in matters of religion and philosophy is nothing more than tyrannical intellectual dishonesty to the extent to which it limits rational inquiry. If one is never allowed to question his own thinking, he will remained trapped in a mental jail which he has constructed for himself with the help of the Church. It should be noted that Church actually encourages members of other faiths to doubt their religions and investigate Christianity. Logical consistency would demand that they discourage them, for many non-Christians are as convinced of the truthfulness of their own religion as are many Christians.

The extent to which our beliefs are willfully held is debatable. I think that most would agree, however, that it is wrong to assume that all non-Christians, at least those sufficiently exposed to Christianity, deliberately choose to disbelieve the faith. Culpability could only be assigned if the non-believer makes the decision with sufficient consciousness and is sufficiently convinced of the truth of the faith prior to the decision. We cannot presume to truly know the mind of even one other person, much less everyone who has encountered Christianity, so it seems absurd to uniformly condemn all of those who refuse their assent to the faith.

The condemnation of apostasy rests entirely on the condemnation of disbelief. There is no reason to prohibit the discontinuation of the practice of a religion which one no longer believes.

4. Biblical Atrocities

The Bible is full of stories of violent injustice of all types committed by God, commanded by God, rewarded by God, or looked favorably upon by God: wars of conquest, slaughter of innocent men, women, and children, divine plagues, looting, slavery, death penalty for minor infractions, and a worldwide flood. The Skeptic's Annotated Bible is an excellent reference to Biblical violent injustice.

B. Divine Imperfect Benevolence

1. Prayer and Blessing

Prayers of petition are completely incompatible with the idea of an omnimax deity. With perfect knowledge, power, and benevolence, we would expect God to provide us with all of the good things we need simply because he loves us. Petitionary prayer implies that God would refrain from granting you or someone else something if you failed to ask for it. Would even a human parent fail to prepare dinner for his child if the child did not specifically ask for it, or would he cook one because he knows that is what is best for the child? Would he not attempt to catch his child falling from a tree and prevent a broken bone unless the child yelled for help, or would he try his hardest to prevent injury to his beloved child? When someone prays, for instance, that God grant him a safe journey and protect him from harm, he is essentially asking his all-loving Creator to prevent any injury that he would have allowed to happen to him if he had not made this petition. If God knows what is best for us and is completely capable of and willing to giving it to us, why ask him for anything? If he desires that we humble ourselves before him, there are other ways of doing that without making his blessings conditional.

The absolute disparity of the blessings bestowed upon each individual is normally answered by saying that God will judge each individual according to what he did with what he had and that God always judges perfectly fairly. Why not grant everyone the same blessings in this life? Why allow it to appear as though he does not exist and that blessings are randomly distributed? These questions prove nothing, but they do force one to ponder the situation. Regardless, I am often made sick when a rich person in a rich nation attributes some minor blessing to God on account of his faith and prayers when the same God allows thousands of orphaned, exploited, abused, malnourished, homeless, innocent children to die in filthy gutters around the world every single day.

2. Arbitrary Salvation

Salvation is a very highly disputed issue among Christians, with many contradictory opinions held fiercely by different groups. The requirement for salvation in the Catholic Church, however, is that one must die in a state of grace. One enters a state of grace by baptism, and if he should fall into a state of sin by committing a mortal sin, he must make a sacramental confession to a Catholic priest and receive God's forgiveness. This remains the teaching about what is necessary for believing Catholics. Over the years, the Church seems to have gone from condemning every single non-Catholic to hell to throwing her hands up into the air and making extremely vague statements about hoping for the salvation of even non-Christians. This is evidence of doctrinal instability, but the recent equivocation is almost impossible to criticize because it cannot be clearly formulated. There are, however, a number of serious problems with the clear teaching.

First, the time of death becomes disproportionately significant. One may lead a life of exemplary piety and faith, commit a single mortal sin in his dying moments, and be condemned to eternal fire. Alternatively, one may lead a life of debauchery and violence, sincerely repent in his dying moments, and be welcomed to eternal paradise, though admittedly having to spend a long time in purgatory beforehand. One may walk out of a church, having made a good and honest confession and thus in a state of grace, consent to one impure thought on the way home, get struck by lightning immediately afterward, and be condemned to hell. If the lightning had struck one minute earlier, he would have enjoyed the delights of heaven. It is completely arbitrary. Though I do not accuse the Church of having crafted the doctrine deliberately, they could not have designed one more favorable to her power: the faithful must diligently be cautious to remain in a state of grace lest their lives be wasted, while infidels are offered the chance to have their eternal condemnation voided and receive eternal paradise if they return to the Church, enter a state of grace, and die in the same. To remain in a state of grace, a Catholic must, among many other things, attend Mass on all holy days of obligation and generally contribute money to the Church.

Second, since the Church distinguishes between more and less grave sins, as discussed earlier, absurd lines must be drawn within sins that are not inherently grave. Theft is more or less grave depending on the circumstance such that, all other things being equal, stealing a small amount is generally venial in nature whereas stealing a large amount is mortal in nature. The line is sometimes drawn at an amount equal to one day's wages for the victim, but the specifics of the line are unimportant to my point. What is significant is that there does exist some line that separates two amounts which differ in the smallest monetary unit used, which would be a penny here in the United States. Let's say in one particular case that the line is drawn at $100.00. If you are in a state of grace, steal $99.99, and die immediately afterward, you would commit only a venial sin and thus go to heaven. All other things being equal, if you steal $100.00, you will commit a mortal sin and thus go to hell. Must a line be drawn? We humans must draw lines somewhere in government and business, but certainly an omnimax God could devise a superior system for determining whether we are granted entrance to paradise or to a lake of fire.

Third, the teaching allows for practically absurd scenarios to arise. Let's say that Person A hates Person B. Person A not only wants to murder Person B, but he wants to try to have him condemned to hell. Person B is a faithful Catholic and we can assume, for the sake of the story, that he would achieve salvation if Person A does not interfere. Person A, however, deliberately and successfully attempts to corrupt the morals of Person B, by encouraging and tempting him to commit various mortal sins and lose his state of grace. So Person B cheats on his wife by sleeping with a prostitute, and Person A kills Person B immediately afterward. Person B is now in hell and will remain there forever. Person A, however, can theoretically repent of his sins, go to confession, enter a state of grace, die in the same, and be rewarded with heaven for all eternity.

Fourth, with one's eternal fate always hanging in the balance, the Catholic teaching on salvation can easily lead to obsession with death, sin, and hell, if taken completely seriously. The stakes are simply too high to relax. One can diligently study Catholic morality, examine his conscience, meet with his confessor and still have doubts about the condition of his soul, whether he should go to confession when available or whether he should refrain from receiving communion. Confessors can confidently instruct their penitents to consider doubt equivalent to being no sin, but the obsession with the infinite cannot be so easily reined in. One doubts whether he should trust his confessor. He doubts whether he doubts and then fears that he claims doubts where none exist in order to excuse himself. It always seems safer to go to confession whenever possible and always refrain from communion. Can one live with the eternal consequences if he really does culpably excuse himself? Everyone does this every day when dealing with their earthly lives: we aren't certain that our food isn't poisoned, but we would rather risk our lives than ruin them obsessing over the extremely small chance of being poisoned. When you throw infinity into the equation, however, everything becomes skewed. No behavior becomes too radical. One can derive absolutely no comfort in hell by reminding himself that it was extremely unlikely that he was in a state of mortal sin when he in fact was. His choice to attend a sporting event instead of confession on one afternoon resulted in his eternal damnation; he would have been better off for the rest of his existence if he had played it safe. What's more, petitionary prayer implies that a decision to go to bed early one evening rather than spending ten minutes asking God for the gift of final penitence could eventually result in one's damnation. The Catholic teaching on salvation, if taken seriously, can easily lead to a life of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Although one can rightly argue that canonized saints certainly took the teachings of the Church seriously, it does not mean that they followed all of the teachings to their logical conclusions. The phenomenon of scrupulosity is extremely rare among canonized saints even though it affects a number of fairly devout believers. Since I have found no response to this issue, I hypothesize that canonized saints generally do not have obsessive personalities, allowing them to avoid obsession, while people who do are prevented from achieving sainthood precisely because of their personalities. I welcome research on this topic.

3. Superior Alternative Plans

Devising superior alternatives to what the Church teaches is God's divine plan of salvation is surprisingly easy. If we believe that God desires that every person be saved and avoid eternal damnation, we simply seek ways to achieve this objective while attempting to avoid compromises with different divine desires.

First, we must understand that Christians place great importance on free will and consider it logically impossible without the ability to determine our eternal fate. Christians, however, also believe two very significant things about heaven: First, no saint ever sins. Second, every saint has free will. This means that free will and not sinning are entirely compatible, which itself means that God could have created us in a state similar to heaven in which we have all the benefits of free will without anyone being damned to hell. There is no reason to think that an omnimax deity would have some other motive that would have been worth letting many of his beloved creatures suffer eternally.

Second, God could have chosen to refrain from placing temporal limits on his mercy. Catholics believe one has his entire life to enter and remain in a state of grace, and once he dies, he has no more chances. There is no reason to imagine that souls in hell cannot repent. On the contrary, they have more reasons than ever to do so. If they can repent, why would God not accept their repentance and forgive their sins, as he would joyfully have done one second before they breathed their last breath? If they can't repent, why would he remove them from the earth where repentance is always possible? The only response I have encountered is that, given an infinite amount of time to repent, all souls would achieve salvation and no one could really choose eternal torture. It is presented as though that's a bad thing! I am not convinced that an infinite number of opportunities necessitates that something will occur, but infinity is a difficult concept to grasp and apply, so I will grant this point for the sake of argument. Regardless, the one choice to repent, whenever it happens, would still be absolutely free and free will in that sense would still be maintained. Does it really matter that everyone is fated to freely accept God's love and live with him in perfect happiness for all eternity? Why would God allow us to freely choose eternal torture when he could have achieved all known objectives without a single soul in hell forever?

Third, assuming the principle that infinite chances equals necessary occurrence, God could have chosen to extend the lives of humans until they enter a state of grace and then allow them to die immediately, assuring their salvation. This plan is actually superior to the second because no one would have to suffer in hell even temporarily!

Fourth, God could have chosen to deny humans free will. Many, if not all, souls in hell would have preferred to have no free will if they had known they would be condemned to eternal torment. Unless this desire is irrational, there is no reason to suppose God would act against their wishes. Would a human parent hand his suicidal child a loaded gun so that he can freely choose whether to live or die? Or would he act in the best interest of the child and not give him that free choice? Why would God act differently?

Fifth, God could have chosen to annihilate the souls that now go to hell. I do not accept the explanation that because God wills them to be eternal, he cannot destroy them. Even if that were so, God would still have known better than to make creatures who will find themselves better off not existing. Who would prefer to suffer unimaginable pain for eternity than to be annihilated? If God is the source of all happiness, what is the point in existing without him forever?

C. Implausibility as Divine Plan

1. Redemption

God becomes incarnate, suffers an execution to cancel a debt of justice to himself, incurred by his creatures by violating rules that he himself decreed. Paying someone else's monetary debts is certainly possible, but paying someone else's debts of justice is just not possible. Allowing someone to suffer in another's place for punishment is not possible for humans, and there is no reason why it would be logically possible for God either. Debts of justice are inherently non-transferrable.

2. Faith

Christians accept the importance of faith, ironically, as a matter of faith. Never have I encountered an explanation why one's salvation depends so heavily on believing a certain set of propositions true that made any semblance of sense. The best attempt casts it as a matter of personal trust in God, but there are two major defects of this explanation. First, it completely fails to address the fact that most believers do not believe God exists, so any discussion of trust is nonsensical. Second, trust is not something that is freely chosen. If one believes he can trust someone, then trust is not praiseworthy. If one believes he cannot trust someone, then mistrust is not blameworthy. The issue of belief is central and cannot be replaced with trust. Let us examine an example to illustrate. One day a man is sitting at home and he receives a telephone call. The voice at the other end is unfamiliar, but the speaker claims to be a billionaire second cousin that the man has never met or even heard of. He says that if the man sends him all the money from his savings account within twenty-four hours, he will give him ten million dollars, but if he does not, he will receive nothing. He gives the man some reasons to suggest he is legitimate, but there are problems with his story that the man cannot resolve. He asks the man just to trust him despite the difficulties. Let's say for the sake of the story that this offer is legitimate. Would the man be blameworthy for not believing this story without sufficient evidence simply because it turned out to be true? Then why do Christians consider non-Christians not just blameworthy but deserving of eternal torment for not believing the story of Jesus without sufficient evidence simply because it turned out to be true? If someone does not believe one's important message, is it better to enlighten him to best of one's ability or to torture him forever?

One story from the Gospels presents us with an interesting question. Why is the Apostle Thomas' doubt indulged by Jesus and he later considered a saint whereas later doubters were condemned, excommunicated, and occasionally tortured and executed? Why are we not justified in saying that we will not believe until we can examine Jesus' wounds ourselves?

3. Judaism

The Bible reports that the Jews are the chosen people of God. Christians view the Jews as being chosen primarily to prepare the way of Jesus to save the entire world. This presents some problems that are difficult to answer. Why did God institute the Mosaic Law if it was going to be rejected by the Christian Church? If it was salvific, then why replace it? If it was not salvific, then why institute it at all? Also, since most Jews, both in the time portrayed in the Gospel and ever since, have rejected Jesus as the messiah, why did God guard over them for three thousand years? Why would the chosen people be so unlikely to accept the message of their own messiah, who was the purpose of their entire existence? There is nothing definitive here, but it does cause one to question the plausibility of the story.

4. Biblical Problems

The Bible is full of material which suggests it is the work of humans and not of God: contradictions, failed prophecies, scientific errors, religious intolerance, misogyny, racism, sexual perversion, and blatant absurdities. I recommend The Skeptic's Annotated Bible as an excellent reference to Biblical imperfections.

5. Human or Divine?

The story of Christianity, and especially of Jesus, has all of the markings of a purely human phenomenon.

• similarities to god-men in other religions
  • divine father, human mother
  • gathered apostles
  • suffered for the sins of humans
  • resurrected from dead
  • ascended into heaven
• message not proclaimed universally
  • attested to by small, unoriginal, unverifiable miracles
  • recorded by men decades after death with many imperfections
  • Christians themselves deeply divided into many sects
  • still has not reached all persons
  • superior alternatives absurdly easily devised
• doubted by those who knew him best
  • Israelites
  • Nazarenes
  • family
  • apostles
  • St. John the Baptist
• return expected imminently for millennia still not accomplished

We can either conclude that God had some mysterious motivation for letting his perfect divine plan appear like a human-made religion, or that Christianity is a human-made religion. The choice is clear to me.

IV. Faith Paradigms

A. Definition

I have examined all of the major reasons I had for believing and have rejected all of them as insufficient for establishing the truth of the Catholic faith. At this point, some readers may be thinking that I have missed the entire point of religion: that it's about faith in that which you cannot prove, not about logic and science. Allow me to respond to this.

I had no definitive understanding of faith until high school when I acquired one, which I call the rationalistic faith paradigm, that differs from what appears to be the official position of the Catholic Church. The rationalistic claim is that one can firmly prove the truth of the Catholic faith using only reason and sense perception. That is, one can establish the authenticity of the Gospels, the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the divinity of Jesus as the Christ, the establishment of the Catholic Church, and the certain meaning of the promise of the Holy Spirit to guide the Church, all without any appeal to faith. One normally cites the reasons I have examined and rejected above, often called the motives of credibility, as the evidence. Having demonstrated the Catholic Church to be a divinely inspired, infallible authority, we can accept as definitively certain what the Church presents for our belief. Faith is merely a matter of trust and assent to the authority that one has discovered through rational inquiry, and thus in its foundations is completely rationalistic.

What I call the mystical faith paradigm approximates the teachings of the Catholic Church to the best of my knowledge, though I am certainly open to correction and clarification. It presents all of the same motives of credibility as the rationalistic faith paradigm, and with the same intention of arguing for the reasonableness of faith, but it makes more modest claims regarding the effectiveness of this sort of reasoning. It does not claim that these motives of credibility actually prove the faith, but that they are nonetheless strong arguments in its favor and help incline the individual to believe. The mystical faith paradigm differs from the rationalistic primarily in its insistence on faith being a supernatural grace granted at God's good pleasure. Thus our faith is based on supernatural grace, not on the motives of credibility.

B. Analysis

While imperfect and mistaken, neither paradigm is particularly troublesome until one considers the Church's condemnation of unbelief. St. Thomas Aquinas, widely considered the greatest philosopher and theologian in the history of the Church, in his famous Summa Theologica, boldly states that unbelief is the worst of all sins, thus saying that not believing in Christ is worse than murder, without providing any clear reasons why it's sinful in the first place.

Under the rationalistic paradigm, which I repeat is not accepted by the Church but under which I operated for many years, the condemnation would imply that the Catholic faith is so obviously true and divine that anyone who encounters the arguments in its favor will, without exception, believe it's the one true religion. Failing to profess the faith becomes a morally culpable choice to ignore the truth. This is so obviously absurd, and additionally irrelevant, that I will discuss it no further.

Under the mystical paradigm, the condemnation implies that God grants the mystical “light of divine faith” to people of good will who encounter the arguments in favor of the faith so that they can believe, even though the arguments themselves are not completely sufficient in themselves. In fact, it is even said that the arguments are totally insufficient without this grace! This is slightly more difficult to address because of its mystical nature, but not much more. The first objection is that people, in general at least, are not consciously aware of the offer of divine grace, thus it is impossible to make a willful decision to accept or reject it. An act must be willful in order to be sinful, but the supposed worst sin of all is not willful, nor even conscious. The second objection is equally damaging: the only reason we have to believe in the existence of the light of divine faith is the authority of the Church, and the only reason we have to believe in the authority of the Church is the existence of the light of divine faith!

C. Conclusion

Anyone can present insufficient arguments for any faith, claim there is an undetectable and mysterious light of divine faith, and then condemn all unbelievers for rejecting something they don't have sufficient reasons for believing even exists. Should we take seriously everyone who makes such a claim and tremble in fear of displeasing a deity that we're supposed to believe without sufficient evidence and of burning forever in that religion's hell? Then why should we take the Church's threats seriously? If the evidence does not firmly establish an infallible authority, and I argue that in principle and for more reasons than I present in this essay that one can never be established, then we can ignore anything that is not supported by evidence.

Whether intuition and feelings, however, constitute sufficient reason for believing something falls within the jurisdiction of the individual, but I personally do not trust my own intuition enough to decide that a particular comprehensive metaphysical belief system is absolutely, objectively, and universally true and live the only life that I know that I have according to its teachings. If anything, my intuition tells me that Christianity is a purely human and historical phenomenon, not a divine religion instituted by an omnimax deity.

V. Conclusion

Having demolished all of my former reasons for believing, discovered numerous significant, unresolved difficulties, alternate explanations which make much more sense, and established that believing on faith unacceptable, my belief had disappeared. My desire for intellectual honesty and my sufferings from scrupulosity had lead me on an extensive search for the truth. My deeply ingrained fear of hell resulted in prolonging it for several months after I could no longer profess the creed. The threat of infinite suffering as infinite, discussed earlier, had not lost all of its power. Eventually, however, I mustered the courage to say to myself, “If there exists a deity who will punish me forever for rejecting something as absurd, implausible, and disgusting as Christianity, then so be it.”

The Judgement of God

The following story is the first in a series of entries presenting writings which I have composed previously. It was written in October 2004. A film adapation, recorded in January 2006, is available at Secular Planet Cinema.

A Christian dies and ascends to the throne of God for judgment. As he has been a faithful follower of Jesus Christ throughout his entire life, he arrives in the heavenly room filled with much anticipation, knowing that God will reward him for his faith and extensive evangelization. He steps forward toward the bright light, and he hears a loud, deep voice bellow, “I am Allah and Mohammed is my prophet!”

The Christian's jaw drops to the floor, he begins sweating very nervously, and anxiously says, “But, but, what about my sweet Jesus? He said he would testify before the Father on my behalf! Where is he?!?”

Allah responds, “Jesus of Nazareth was just another prophet. I told you so in my holy book; the message was very clear. You chose to believe the lies made up by wicked men about someone who was simply preparing the way for the greatest prophet, Mohammed. I told you that you must have faith in Islam or you would be cast into everlasting fire, but you ignored my commands. I am just and I keep my word. Depart from me, ye cursed polytheistic heathen into neverending torment!”

The Christian shouts out, “Wait! Wait! I didn't know Islam was true! This isn't fair!”

Allah replies, “Why didn't you know? I made it very clear in my book! You knew exactly what I taught because I watched you every moment of your life, so I know you even researched Islam at the library! You cannot claim ignorance!”

The Christian continues, “Yes, that is true, but I didn't think it was actually true! It looked like a myth and there were other explanations that were more reasonable, so I didn't believe it. In the Qu'ran there are contradictions, inconsistencies, atrocities, absurdities, and other things that made me think it was the work of a man.”

Allah retorts, “You filthy liar! My book is absolutely perfect! Your sinfulness blinded you to the truth and made you see difficulties where a holy man would have seen nothing but pure wisdom! I gave you the grace to believe, but you chose not to accept it!”

The Christian pleads, “What?!? When did you give me that grace? I don't remember ever consciously being offered any grace to believe, so how can you condemn me for not accepting it if I wasn't even aware it was present?”

Allah says, “Who are you to question me and my ways!?! How dare you! I am mysterious, way beyond your puny human comprehension. You should have bowed down to the ground and trembled for mercy before the Almighty Allah. If you had just believed in me and trusted in me, then you would have rewarded with paradise. But in your insolence, you exalted your reason and logic above holy faith! And you shall be justly punished forever!”

The Christian desperately begs, “But I didn't know it was true! If I had known it was true, then I surely would have followed you, your prophet, and your holy religion. But I didn't know! That's just not fair!”

Allah continues, “You despicable hypocrite! You were ready to condemn all the followers of the true religion, people of all beliefs, and people of no beliefs to the exact same fate for not following your heathen cult! You even tried to lead my faithful people away from the path of righteousness with your wretched lies by telling them they must convert to your cult or they would be tortured in hell for all eternity! I will not tolerate any more demonic arguments from you, ye evildoer! Depart from my holy presence forever and ever!”

From Catholic to Atheist

In the interest of providing additional perspective to my thoughts, I will now share the tale of my journey from Catholicism to atheism.

The circumstances of my entrance into the Church are very commonplace. My Catholic parents had me baptized shortly after my birth, brought me to Mass each Sunday, and sent me to formal religious education until I received the sacrament of confirmation at the age of thirteen. Around that time, I developed a serious interest in religion and became relatively devout in my faith. I sought to understand the teachings of the Church more deeply. I read the Bible, the newly published universal catechism, and a few books on apologetics, though my forays into online apologetic debate were largely uneventful. Discussion of religion with two atheist friends at the end of high school, however, planted seeds of major doubt in my mind, which seemed to flower immediately before being quickly crushed by fear and anxiety.

At university I entrenched myself even more deeply into religion, leading to serious considerations of entering the seminary or the monastery, but the fear of an eternal hell which had forcefully preserved me in the faith soon created a terrestrial hell for me in form of scrupulosity. I will not discuss the details of the situation, but I will say that it truly was a nightmare. The condition persisted for years with only temporary, partial, and sporadic reprieves despite extensive assistance from the clergy and other persons. Eventually, however, the issue of doubt became a major focus of my obsession and the seeds planted years before germinated such that they were ready to blossom with the proper amount of cultivation.

A frank discussion with a friend who had earlier made a similar journey provided the catalyst to a thorough investigation of my doubts over the course of several months. During this time I read everything that I could find, online or in print, pro- and anti-religion. I spoke with family, friends and priests. I spent much time in prayer and in thought. In the end I found that I had lost my faith from a combination of the obliteration of my former justifications for belief, the establishment of numerous insurmountable objections and difficulties, and the realization that everything in life makes much more sense if Catholicism is indeed false. I left the Church almost four months after my initial decision to question my religion.

Though my sufferings certainly helped prompt the investigation, my loss of faith and subsequent apostasy were the result of logical, systematic inquiry rather than an emotionally motivated escape from the torment I experienced at the hands of religion. I am certain, however, that many believers will dismiss my reasons as less than noble. In response I would like to indicate that my decision to face my doubts and fears demanded a certain amount of courage. With my understanding that to entertain and indulge one's doubts was a sin grave enough to merit eternal damnation, I willfully endangered my soul in order to satisfy my sense of intellectual honesty and desire for truth. Additionally, I realized that it would perhaps be impossible to feel sorry and thus seek forgiveness for the sin of doubting if I found the Catholic faith to be true, meaning that I effectively had to surmount a point-of-no-return in order to even begin. Whatever the case, supposed emotional motivations do not discount rational argumentation and criticism.

My scrupulosity immediately and substantially diminished upon my apostasy, though the fear of hell lingered for approximately six months before fully dissipating. I initially considered myself an agnostic, but the more appropriate term would have been weak atheist. A further examination of the problem of evil a few months later prompted my transition to strong atheism. I have maintained that position since and that is where I stand today.