Who is better off?

Who is better off, the atheist or the theist?

I am an atheist, but I believe that faith in the supernatural is more productive, healthy, and consistent with our overall nature, and that our psyches almost require the incorporation of a religion in order to function properly.

We are a race of weeds that have sprung forth from the earth and arrived at our current situation by feeding on water, air, sunlight, nutrients, and faith. All of these elements have been present since the first conscious thought. Somehow, faith is a required component in the blueprint of evolving conscious minds. Whether it was necessary to allow early man to think about some things (How can I get more food? Where will I sleep? How can I keep warm?) and not worry about other things (What is thunder? will I die? Who put the moon up there? Why am I attracted to girls? Why do men have nipples? What are dreams? ). I might bet that 30,000 years ago there were some cro magnon men who dwelled on great and lofty wonders of the universe and I might bet that they all starved to death. The men who were more predisposed to attributing unanswerable questions to the supernatural probably had more time to go about their business, and therefore may have been the fittest to survive.

Religion seems highly necessary. Man himself appears to have very little instinctive morality. Certainly, most of mankind is filled with small amounts of compassion, sympathy, empathy, and other features that help with general social interaction, but there are two great forces of religion that can carry the mind of man to the both the height of sainthood and the pit of darkest evil. These forces work to similarly guide mankind through an arbitrary yet effective moral code that we would otherwise be helpless to live up to individually, the other force steeps mankind with a kind of hatred and loathing of others, for a variety of reasons including racism, far more powerfully than any kind of hatred and loathing that man could come up with on his own.

This all gets back to something I’ve felt for a long time, that you really don't have free will.

Everything about you is controlled by external forces and you react to them. My Axiom is “You always do what you would have done.” Religion is one of those forces that can compel you. Love is another. Emotion is another. Fear. Need. Desire. Pleasure. All of these things make us who we are.

I go to church because my wife likes it and wants the children to be exposed to religeon. I'm okay with that. In fact, in the seven years that have passed since I first drafted this and Glenn Beck graciously posted it on his web site, I've actually come to the conclusion that All Human Beings Should Be Christians.

What?????

Yes, I am an atheist, I do not believe in God, and I think that people who believe in God are delusional, but I think that people SHOULD believe in God, and I also believe that people should believe in the Christian God and Jesus Christ.

Oh how my liberal (I'm sorry -- I mean Progressive) friends would probably howl at that.

I was raised by Christian fundamentalist parents. In fact, my father was a preacher. I was tormented with thoughts of sin and hell and prayer and devotion and faith for years and years until I finally broke the chains and realized that it was all phony balony. I then spent several years trying to convince everyone I knew that religeon was fake. Then, after a while, I started noticing the behavior of people and began to observe that there are some atheists who are very well balanced and relaxed. They are at complete peace with themselves and the world. They ponder every circumstance with quiet patience and understanding, and have nothing but love and acceptance for everyone in their hearts.

Yeah, right. No, seriously there are some atheists like that, and I consider them to be the only true pure souls on this earth.

But then there is everyone else. First, the rest of the atheists are not really atheists, they are crazy people. By crazy, I don't mean that they are abnormal, they are normal people who don't have religeon to stabilize them. When people reject the religeon of their parents, they usually don't dive headlong into atheism, rather they pick something equally rediculous but useful, like Gaya the Earth Mother and that kind of hog wash.

The most visibly crazy people are the agnostics. They aren't willing to face the hard truths (and wonderful possibilities) of atheism, but they aren't interested in living a lifestyle structured by a specific faith. These are the people who twist in the wind. Wife Beaters, Child Molsters, Drug Addicts, Alcoholics, Criminals, and all-around Dickheads head up the long list of human perversions that tumble the agnostic through his life as he helplessly wonders in vain why he can't be "normal".

But he IS normal. He is just like the 500 people who regularly attend my church. The difference between the twisted agnostic and the generally stable population of Cypress Meadows is that the generally stable population of Cypress Meadows follows a highly evolved way of life that includes a limitless supply of mechanisms and support structures for dealing with each and every one of our little human frailties, and the driving force behind all of them is their faith that somehow it is all signed off on by the Great Gazoo in the Sky.

I, however, had yanked out the religion circuit and held it before my eyes. "This isn't real." I said. "This is just a circuit in my brain that causes me to do certain things." I couldn't put it back in because one of the things that allows it work is that you don't know it's not real. You have to believe that it is, otherwise its power is useless.

I started to yank out other things and look at them. Fortunately none of the other circuits require faith in order to operate, so I could put them back in. "Here's Love", "Ambition", "This is the circuit that makes me want to look reasonably well groomed", "Here's the mechanism that causes me to eat what I do", "And here's the thingy that makes me want to look at all the thingies."

All of the parts, each one fairly minor by itself, all together make up human beings and civilization. Nothing is magical about them. Unfortunately, some parts can't be put back in once you take them out. I should have discovered that when I was 7 years old and heavily predisposed to disassembling things.

My conclusion is, religion is necessary in order for people and civilization to function. I've even decided that Christianity is the most effective one of the bunch, for all of the tools and mechnisms it contains, and that whole "Peace and Love" thing that you really don't find anywhere else. Buddhism is pretty cool, but unless you are prepared to really follow the path, you cannot be a Buddhist. I know people who say they are buddhists. You can't be a buddhist and also act like a normal person. You can't.

Religeon is the cause of great good and great evil. I no longer desire to convince people to remove their religion circuit, only that they find a way to use it for good and not evil. As long as they have that, they have more than I do, which is just mere machinery. Woody Allen is correct about the misery and despair of life. Mankind wasn't constructed to live that way, whether it is true or not. Man needs the morality and institutions that only religion, no matter how ridiculous, can provide.

But it is not a magical reason why this is so. Man is not some kind of special super amazing creature that has incredible powers and potential. Man is a bug. A slug. Something that crawled from the ooze. Man is an amazing thing, but Man is also a race of utterly insane, psychotic, irrational whack jobs that probably wouldn't survive another generation if left in charge of it's own devices. Some point along the line we discovered that Faith in the Great Gazoo actually helps us to get along, and live longer, healthier, happier lives.

Would I be better off if I trick myself into some sort of belief in a Great Gazoo, because it's what my brain was designed for? I have my head up, and I see everyone else asleep and dreaming. I see the dismal cave that contains us, and that pitiful bridge to nowhere. I don't feel bad about it. In fact, it excites me that the possibilities are indeed far more than what the Great Gazoo Book was telling me, but being realistic about it, there is no Great Gazoo and your memories and my memories are all dust in the wind. Whether we are cells of a larger creature that we cannot comprehend, or the forerunners of a future great race, other even perhaps pools of the same conscious entity experiencing life from many brief points in time and space, I don't know. Maybe the universe is the skin of God and we are his taste bumps.

We can't know.

My mother is absolutely convinced that God exists and that he talks to her. She went through a phase a while back when she was referring to God as "She" but she's a pretty hard core fundamentalist when it comes to her Christian Faith. She's also a liberal democrat, which is kind of odd to me, but no stranger than me I suppose, a Conservative Republican Atheist. I guess you just have to walk a mile in someone's shoes to really understand them. Almost everyone I know Cannot Not believe in God. A few people I know, myself included Cannot believe in God. I can't change that. Medical science has never, ever documented a person being resurrected from the dead, and has never, ever documented a limb growing back on an amputee, which begs the question, "Why does God Hate Amputees?" As much as we pray and believe that God has performed this or that little miracle, nothing exists in the known universe that could ever document any miracle, other than word of mouth. I don't want to have that kind of faith. I don't want to believe in something that I know ain't so.

But maybe I wish I did.

All I can do is put my head back down and live out the rest of my intended destiny with as much grace and poise as I can muster.