Reply To: Is theism evil?

[Kuba Adamów]

@DrBob, @Unseen, @Davis, @Simon—Thank you, I’m genuinely grateful for your thoughtful words. It’s a never-ending journey for me, with quite a few arrogant and not-quite-informed claims (some really ill-informed ones, sadly, too) over the years. Your responses give me hope and encourage to tweak and verify my views. My use of words and the editorial choices I make are far from expressing the universal truth (English not being my first language makes it even further from it), which I will never be capable of, and are more thinking aloud with a hope that some wiser, more skilled and better-read than me (like you guys) will read and verify my mental paths. Just like you, I gather, by posting here I seek not the ‘pat-on-the-back, you’re-so-right’ confirmation from a hermetic mutual admiration society, but the genuine discussion and thought exchange. I’ve been now assured with the people like you this is the place.

As for the ‘unfortunate’ title for the post and a few claims in it—I absolutely agree it’s a massive over-generalisation that suffers from my very personal stance, experiences, arrogance and some deeply held grudge I’m trying to work through. I was born and raised in Poland, a beautiful country of mostly good but very often confused people, a country rooted deeply into Roman Catholicism, and that was one of the most important reasons to leave it (I live in Edinburgh now). I’ve experienced that confusion on many levels, and although I have to admit that, being from a buddhist background (which is not, as any other non-Cathlic system of beliefs, very common in Poland), these experiences have never been for me, personally, too harmful, the general mental climate I grew up and lived in for quite a long time has never been favorable for those trying to think for themselves, with a lot of instances of direct religion-based hostility and aggression. This is my grudge. There was one thing my late grandma, who I had a very close relationship with despite her being a devout Catholic, said that struck me, and that was along the lines of ‘If you don’t believe in God, heaven and all that—what stops you from doing as you please and hurting people along the way.’ I’ve seen that many times—God and the fear of eternal punishment being probably the only factors keeping some people from hurting others, and in some more radical cases God and the promise of eternal pleasure being the very reason for hurting others.

I’ve read and thought quite a lot on religion from the moral, social and behavioral perspective (surely, not as much as you have—that seems rather obvious to me), and my conclusion so far, a very general one, which I’m always willing to alter when confronted with some more compelling views, is that theism, while—that I absolutely agree with—not being, as a concept, inherently ‘evil’, is a mental device that is useful and serves its purpose only on a very basic level—when applied to more complex dilemmas, it loses its applicability as the dogmas which serve as the basis, are too often too inflexible and rooted in the archaic and out-dated visions of the reality which may have sufficed two thousand or even two hundred years ago, but can’t stand their ground nowadays. This is also, I agree, a simplification, but the majority of the theists I’ve ever met, who are mostly generally ‘good’ people, display this quality to a lesser or a greater degree, some of them being extremely radical. That radicalism, although—one might say—statistically marginal, and its consequences, outweigh, as I see it, the benefits, which do exist, that is hard to disagree with. The fact that atrocities may be, and have been, committed with the support of theism of some sort is, for me, a reason enough to denounce it. Any ideology that takes the burden of thought, compassion and responsibility from people and places it upon some vaguely and imprecisely described deity, is—in my view—harmful, even if not directly, even if not immediately. But I may be wrong, of course, and, in this respect, I’m always ‘happy’ to be proven as such—imperfectly as it goes, I do try to grow beyond my grudges, convictions and prejudices.

So thank you once again and I’m looking forward to more inspiration and thought-provoking exchanges, hoping I won’t be the only side benefiting from them.