Religion & Doublethink

November 18, 2021

From time to time, I get asked about my religion. Sometimes, “asked” is putting it lightly, like when my SO’s father asked if I believe in a God, but made it very clear there was only one right answer if I wanted to date my SO. Sometimes I’m asked with honest curiosity, as when people find out I grew up in a mixture of Wicca and Christianity, people wonder how that works, and what I came out believing in. Sometimes I’ll mention my less-than-ideal experiences with Christians, such as the career campus preachers, my interactions with those extremely anti-LGBT, and my honestly extremist grandparents (that’s a whole different story) - but I can think for myself, and I’d like to think none of those things have really influenced my own view of religion.

So here’s the truth: when it comes to religion, I believe whatever I find convenient. I see it as a hack, a shortcut exploiting a bug in the code of human psyche, but it’s a hack that requires the hacker be willfully ignorant of the hacking itself - exactly as Orwell describes Doublethink in 1984. Now, obviously, 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale of exactly why this kind of thought is dangerous; however, I think religion is the one exception.

So, what do I believe?

• Nothing. There is no god, no afterlife, we’re a collection of energy and matter that are a spec, an accident, a random chance.
• Everything, every god is real. Human made the gods, and we gave them life, but the are sentient in their own right and do have power
• All gods are one god, just appearing to different people in different ways
• We’re all God, or at least The Egg of one

And I believe each of these, either one at a time or together, as I find convenient for coping with my own mortality as I see fit. I never see one as totally true. It’s not that I’m indecisive, or that I’m not confident in my faith, it’s that I don’t see a reason to believe just one thing.

Now, that has two obvious rebuttals from the two camps with a stake in this game:

• Aren’t you worried you’ll go to hell for not being a true believer?
• If you’re skeptical, then just trust Science!

To which my response is

• If you must believe in your god (and, if Abrahamic, then your prophet of the week) then at least \(2/3\) of the world is going to Hell anyway, and if your religion really thinks that then I’m not interested in joining you on the ‘good’ side
• I do! I just also know that life can be complicated and it’s nice to trick our brains sometimes.

So if someone asks if I believe in God, my answer is literally non binary.

There is a second half to this post that is much harder to write and be PC and that’s the “But what do you think about X religion” question.

Here’s the short version: I dislike it. I dislike religion of any scale above one person. I don’t think you should need a book to tell you what’s right or wrong, or that you should let others use their interpretations of a book to change your views. Tax churches. Start community centers and fund libraries, fill the community role provided by them with something that welcomes diversity instead of historically shunning it.

Also, can we please stop indoctrinating kids into our religions? It’s just creepy.

I’ll probably write the Religion chapter soonish, but I want that to be less about me, and more about how world religions interact, influence politics, and go a bit into metaphysics. If you’ve got experience talking about that sort of thing, please feel free to submit a PR on GitHub for that page!