Some Reasons for God

After 20 years of (rabid) atheism, I've decided that opposition to religion is incorrect and that we must believe in God.

This post is a brief summary of the reasons for this shift.

Inescapability of Worship

Perhaps the most important reason for this shift is the realization that atheism and absence of worship simply does not exist. There is no such thing as an atheist. There are only those who don't know what they worship.

When you don't believe in God, you end up worshipping God substitutes – false idols, if you will. Money, love/sex, science and technology, or oneself – in our society all of these are false idols worshipped by millions.

Atheists believed that the absence of God/religion would bring about a rationalist utopia as opposed to a society of superstitions brought about by religion. But in reality the new god-substitutes create a society of far more harmful superstitions and cause self destruction both at a personal and social levels. Those who try the hardest to be rationalists are some of the most broken, disoriented, and morally confused people you'll meet.

These new man-made religions even come with their own narratives of apocalypse and bring people to irrational martyrdom, but they lack benefits of traditional religion, such as strengthening social bonds and cohesion. Worse still, many of them promote deadly and dangerous anti-human narratives.

The Rise of Evil

The worship of false idols is perhaps most palpable among our society's ruling elites. The anti-human narratives that many of them hold have had consequences that make me feel like evil is inescapable and ascendant in the world.

I grew up in Iran, a theocracy, and immigrated to Canada, a secular democracy. Over the ensuing three decades, instead of Iran "progressing" toward the Canadian model, I have watched the Canadian (and more broadly western) society move toward the Iranian model.

In Iran, the ruling class is actively hostile toward the society it rules due to its fundamentalist ideological foundation. Today the same is true in Canada and in many western societies, and I expect this trend to continue and accelerate. Canadian rulers are actively destroying it in service of their Cult of Climate Apocalypse, echoing the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic in saying that people need to be content with less. The climate cult also views humanity as a virus that needs to be controlled and reduced (of course, this only applies to the plebs).

Evil is on the rise on too many fronts to count. I used to think about each instance individually, but at one point I started feeling that more and more people were simply animated by an evil spirit. I can't find better language to capture the zeitgeist. Its sheer volume and pervasiveness has become unbearable for me over the last few years. All I can hope is that there is a beneficent spirit to balance it out and counter it.

Immorality & Moral Relativism

Religious people often pushed back against atheism by asking "if there's no God, where does our morality come from?". As an atheist, I would answer by saying that we're all born with an internal moral compass. We don't need religion to tell us not to kill people, for example. We instinctively know it's wrong.

We now have clear empirical evidence that this is not true. We need religious people to hold the line on morality.

For example, it has always been religious people who fought against abortion – another false idol that is worshipped in our society. Now I could be swayed either way on this particular issue, except that this false idol has turned Canada – a bastion of secular progressivism – into the most pro-death country on Earth. It is the only place in the world with no restrictions whatsoever on abortion. You can get one the day before your baby is due.

Canada has also legalized euthanasia (called Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD). They did so around the same time as California, which has about the same population. Since then, California has killed ~800 people through euthanasia. In Canada, about 5% of annual deaths are through MAiD. When its broken socialist healthcare system falls short, Canada offers to kill the patients.

I know what you're thinking: that this is a bureaucratic or political problem or that it has nothing to do with religion. I think this would be a non-issue in a religious and moral society where sanctity of life was taken for granted by all.

This brings me to another pushback that religious folk always had: "if God doesn't exist, how do we find meaning in life?"

My atheist answer was always that we can all find our individual meaning in life. And once again, empirical observation has proved this false.

For one thing, meaning is not meaningful unless it's shared and communal. Both meaning and morality orient us collectively and dictate each individual's commitment to the larger community and society. In the absence of a shared framework, we make the most rudimentary mistakes in moral judgement. You can test this easily: find a liberal progressive person who has grown up in the west (these are the people most allergic to God). Ask them if they believe in women's rights. Inevitably they will say yes. Then tell them that women's rights are not respected in many parts of the Muslim world, should western liberals organize missions to educate them on the importance of women's rights? Watch as their faces distort with cognitive dissonance. The absence of God means there is no ground on which to stand on any moral position, so we end up in the relativist position where we're unable to make any moral judgement.

Against Suicide and Nihilism

It turns out that God was the firm ground on which our moral frameworks could be built. The death of God leads to moral relativism, and moral relativism leads to the death of Truth, and that, in turn, leads to Nihilism. As Nietzsche said, "God is dead" means

That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no 'thing in itself.' This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.

This is where all of the aforementioned elements come together. Moral relativism, the rise of evil, and the worship of false idols all have nihilism at their root cause. They are all driven by the fundamental belief that pervades every aspect of our western culture that nothing ultimately matters, that there is no absolute truth, and that we can all do what we want.

To me, this is hell itself.

To take one of the most prevalent examples, since no truth exists other than what people want to exist, we now live in a society in which sex is considered a social construct. Canada is once again a trailblazer on paving the road to hell where its government will remove children from the custody of parents so that, having been brainwashed into degenerate sexual identities by their cruel teachers, they can be mutilated long before they're old enough to know what they're doing.

Not only does nihilism lead individuals to kill themselves, it leads society to collectively destroy its own offspring – a sort of collective suicide.

Prevalence of Hedonism

The absence of a firm ground for moral judgement and for meaning also means that people who don't immediately destroy themselves escape to hedonism. But as the old adage goes "Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in". The rise of hedonism is another manifestation of nihilism: continuity of humanity requires that we make sacrifices for the future, the first of which is having children. We don't want to do that anymore. In Spain, where I live, there are more dogs in households than there are children. I have a dog and I have no children. But even I can diagnose this circumstance as problematic. Hedonism is another way in which we are committing collective suicide.

Our society makes no demands on us and insofar as it does (through vestiges of religious responsibility that still linger in our culture), every generation tries harder than the last to escape it. I know because that's exactly what I've done.

It used to be expected of everyone to get married, have children, and commit to their family. Today, our primary obsession is to consume the world through various channels of hedonism – whether it's sexual gratification through consumption of countless partners or consuming exotic locations by being uprooted and nomadic. The only times in modern society that we feel a sense of responsibility is when we work soulless corporate jobs – not so that we can build a better future but so that we can consume more hedonism – or when we pay taxes. Our taxes, in turn, fill the coffers of corrupt politicians with their anti-human agendas referenced above. Do you see how this all fits together?

The death of God destroys morality and creates nihilism. Nihilism gives rise to the pursuit of pleasure or the pursuit of newly-invented, evil, and anti-human moral frameworks. It destroys our allegiances to our community, replacing it with allegiances to corrupt political structures (in a phenomena I've dubbed The Law of Conservation of Coercion), thus creating a positive feedback loop where we descend into suicidal darkness at an accelerating rate.

Social Fabric as the Solution

After the Canadian government declared war on its own citizens, and it became clear that evil ideologies were capturing even governments and societies that used to be sanctuaries from them, I was obsessed with identifying how their rise and their power can be countered.

An armed citizenry is a powerful deterrent against tyranny, to be sure, and it is great that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the US Constitution. But that's never enough. Ideas are far more powerful. The men who put their bodies at the service of tyrants do so because they believe what they do is legitimate. And where people can't resist tyranny it's because they don't have a strong moral framework to make them want to risk their own wellbeing for something greater. After all, how can this ultimate sacrifice be expected of a society for whom simply having children is a burden on their personal pleasure?

I think the solution to the rise of evil starts by rebuilding a social fabric that places importance first on the family and second on the community. A community must demand from its members that they act in accordance with a moral code and in service of that community. It must demand that community members take time away from their own lives and be directly connected to their neighbours and fellow citizens.

This cannot be done by groups organized around narrow interests. Your local dance community or CrossFit gym is not a hub for community organization. Those organizations are there to serve you (probably in some hedonistic pursuit). No, what we need is a community that demands service from us.

Such community participation serves a few important purposes:

1. Strong social fabric in a community provide organic, bottom-up social safety nets, reducing the need for central government intervention in people's lives. At scale, these delegitimize the state.
2. Strong social fabric in a community provide decentralized trust networks, again reducing the need for a central state, and creating possibilities for parallel economies that don't pay taxes and therefore weaken the state.
3. Strong social fabric communities create a barrier to entry and differentiate between members and outsiders. Such communities are not moral relativists - because if they were, they couldn't survive. No, such communities will not allow invasion by outsiders and they will have a strong telos for their own existence. As such they will avoid nihilism and propagate themselves.

It turns out participation in religious worship serves most of these aims. And here's the rub: nobody will put a gun to your head to participate in religious worship. But if you recognize that the absence of God leads to the worship of false idols and therefore to hell, and participation in religious practice can lead out of it, then perhaps that'll be good enough for a leap of faith. After all, as Jesus says in the Book of Matthew: you will know false prophets by the fruits of their teaching.

Evidence for God

The above is how I decided that belief in God is correct. I don't think you need to believe in miracles or the afterlife to arrive at this. You only need to pay attention to the world.

Absence of God is Hell.

Presence of God... well, I don't know if presence of God delivers Heaven, but I can tell it orients us away from Hell.

To me, this is an empirical and objective grounds for believing in God. And it's one that the New Atheist types ignore, for all their protestations of rationality and evidence-based thinking. The evidence is that much of the insanity that pervades the world today grew out of the fertile ground of New Atheism. I was there. I saw it first hand.

But if it's true that belief in God can move us away from the insanities of our times, then it cannot be a utilitarian belief. It must be a true faith. And that's what I'm working on now.