Selling Humanity Short
Many times when I am in a discussion with religious and/or atheistic moderates, they tell me that, “some people need religion.” They also often tell me that, “you can’t reason with a fundamentalist.” These are interesting opinions and many of my readers may even agree with them. I however do not.
I think people are smarter than this. When someone claims that some people need religion, they are basically implying that while they are of a superior intellect and don’t need religion, other people are not on their intellectual level and still do “need” religious superstition and mythology in order to be moral or to function well in society. I don’t think people “need” religion. I think people have been taken advantage of by religious systems which prey on people when they are emotionally vulnerable. The fact is that any one of us could have been brainwashed by religion. Most of us have been taken advantage of when we were in an emotionally vulnerable position (often times when we were just babies with no understanding about the world).
While many atheists were once religious, we are no longer. Some how we were able to free ourselves from the “need” for religious belief. Was it our superior intellect? I don’t think it was. I think that most of us were confronted with questions we couldn’t answer and as result started to have doubts. Those doubts eventually lead to disbelief.
The funny thing is that many atheists were once fundamentalist believers. It is usually the string of questions and the fundamentalist’s need to justify their fundamentalist belief by finding answers which in time tends to leads doubt and later disbelief.
The fact is that we are all human and we all have the ability to reason and the think. Some people just have forgotten how to do those things well. But the more we poke holes in the religious mythology and show how ridiculous these beliefs really are, the more we can get believers (moderate and fundamentalist) to start to doubt their absolute certain beliefs.
Filed under: atheism, conversation, de-conversion, Religion
