Why religion matters ( to atheists)

Since I first heard about the scientology I secretly suspected that it was a big social joke. I hoped Tom Cruise at one point would hold a press conference explaining they did this to show how easily ordinary people can believe in absurd non-sense and explain all other religions probably started in a similar manner. It took me a decade to convince myself that these people are not joking. They are either irrationally obsessed with power or they are -well-just irrational.

But, how can you elevate a bad science fiction novel into a holy book? Well content wise its not that difficult. Other holy books does not exactly pass the rationality test either. But they come with millennium-full of rationalization, a tweak here, and an interpretation there. It is a process of immunization against trivial forms of inquiry and alignment with the society's values. I thought it was a long and difficult thing to do and that's why a "new" religion was very unlikely to appear.

Although religions require long periods to have a hold in the society, it is not the case on the level of individual. When a person decides to believe in a religion they just flip the faith switch- it is in our hardware. When faced with religious claims from one's own religion, people do not apply the same mental facilities they normally would apply for example to the claims of a car-dealer. It is a stochastic process that makes both failure and creation of new religions more likely, more dynamic and faster.

This ties back to a common illusion among atheists - that religion is just an infection. Among fellow atheists you can hear someone saying "If only we could wipe out these damned memes..." and hallelujah we will bring the kingdom of reason. Well - not quite - If religion indeed has a biological basis, as proposed by many recent psychological experiments, then it will spring up again in different, raw and dangerous forms.

But if it is biological why we atheists never think, mention or discuss what we would do if - despite our most militaristic parenting- our children embrace religion one day? How do you handle a scientologist child? Evangelicals refusing the fact that their children can be homosexual live in a state of denial. They believe this happens because of bad parenting and it will never happen in their family. They refuse that there is something intrinsic, something human, something that was set in the stone in their children that compels them to act the way that they act and there is nothing they can do about it other than making their lives miserable by forcing them to act differently. How is an atheist who ignores that their children may turn into religion is different? Are not they in the same state of denial ? Are not they making the world a colder, more difficult place by taking a hard anti-religion stance ?

Religion matters for atheists because it is not just those damned memes - it is the human nature, that switch we flip, that shepherd we follow. Some of us are more resistant to this nature - some of us are not. We need to figure out how to bend the tree without snapping it. It is a lot better to have a child that believes in a tolerant non-literalist pluralistic form of christianity than a scientologist. By dismissing all religions as a disease we are condemning those who believe to a position where they must defend their faith with ferocity, bigotry and fallacy - we are condemning them to fundamentalism.

This is not to say that we should all shut up - on the contrary - atheists must criticize the worst forms of fundamentalism and fight for the next generation's right of access to unbiased scientific education. Yet we should also support the more tolerant, pluralistic forms of religion, encourage religious to align their religion with the changing moral values of the society and welcome them as allies against absolutism and fundamentalism. All of us should act as if we have religious children that we love and care for- because it may as well happen.