Everybody Is Wrong About God (Kindle highlights)

Theism is mythology. It looks to a fantasy as a method of characterizing reality. God is a psychologically satisfying idea believed in via mytholog. (p. 10)
In too-short summary, “God” means “my values,” and so “atheism” is heard as “I reject your values.” This is why “atheism” needs to die. (p. 14)
Myths are culturally relevant narratives that simplify complex or unclear phenomena and that speak to people at the level of their psychological needs. (p. 17)
Racism, to draw one notable example, is obviously still present in the United States, but few of us would deny that the idea of racism was defeated decades ago. (p. 18)
The idea that there is no God and no supernatural takes care of itself once we reject faith-based thinking and replace it with informed skepticism. (p. 28)
The seemingly timeless and absolute grains of truth hiding within religious beliefs speak only to the fact that all of our cultures and religions have something in common: human beings. (p. 36)
Every time someone says that he believes in God, he’s saying that he has psychological or social needs that he doesn’t know how to meet. (p. 41)
If everyone on earth rejected theism, we wouldn’t call anyone atheists because we wouldn’t need to. We’d just call them people. “Atheism,” then, is a word that shouldn’t exist. (p. 47)
Maybe it’s better to say, then, that “atheism” is the most important word that shouldn’t exist. (p. 47)
Atheism is a nonposition, or more accurately a pseudo-position, a position that pretends to exist, a word that pretends to mean something, only because so many people insist on embracing a belief in a God that isn’t there. (p. 49)
There are also agnostics, those who claim that they don’t know whether God exists, and thus, though not all realize it, tacitly admit that they do not actually believe in God. (p. 50)
The philosophical defenses of theism exist to satisfy the inner lawyers of believers so that they can feel rational about maintaining beliefs held for other reasons. (p. 52)
The philosophy of religion is a type of academic puffery centrally concerned with pretending theism is worth taking seriously on its own terms. (p. 55)
One thing strong atheists may fail to realize is that the philosophical fight itself is the only thing that lends religious belief the slightest shred of academic respectability. (p. 56)
Formally speaking, being ignostic means that every theological position assumes too much about God, and thus it is one of the most intellectually honest positions one can hold about theism. For the ignostic, it is impossible to properly answer any question about belief in God because it isn’t clear what the term “God” means. (p. 68)
Gods have always been one such example of a fraudulent product sold on the pretense of offering control. (p. 79)
My point here, of course, is not to argue that theism is something we should take seriously because of its potential for benefit as a coping mechanism. Theism is bogus, and there are efficacious nonbogus coping mechanisms available, so of course we shouldn’t. (p. 80)
This phenomenon can be summarized both most clearly and in the most important way by remembering that religions are moral communities. (p. 81)
Religions constitute moral communities with “God” as a symbolic figurehead. (p. 83)
Haidt and Joesph identify (at least) six fundamental axes that characterize how people’s moral values manifest. These dimensions are care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. (p. 86)
Religion, maybe more than any other effort humanity has engaged in, has sought to provide moral understanding, and the world’s religions are often very sophisticated proto-psychological systems. Their weaknesses are in lacking a reliable method to sort the good from the bad, a certain reluctance to reject attitudes that are clear moral failures (slavery, among others, stands out), and believing a bit too righteously in themselves. (p. 90)
In a sentence, “God” is an abstract idea that is used to meet, fill, or ignore a variety of core psychosocial needs experienced by almost all human beings. The primary needs “God” exists to address relate to meaning making, control, and esteem, which manifest in terms of attribution, control, and sociality in various complicated and overlapping ways. (p. 98)
When nonbelievers say, “there is no God,” which we have every reason to believe is true as they mean it, they are saying something utterly unintelligible to believers. Believers believe there is a God because they know there is a “God”—a set of ideas that speak to and help them make sense of their core needs and values. What they don’t realize is that they are making a mistake by accepting theism. By accepting theism, they mistake a myth for reality. (p. 99)
These days, Poseidon is easy to understand as a mythological construction used to account for the various and sometimes unpredictable behaviors of the sea, and thus the fates of sailors and those living upon the coasts. To the persistent question of why the sea behaves in the way it does, Poseidon, or his will, became an answer. (p. 99)
Like that which happened with Poseidon, by centering our attention on the operative psychosocial needs, together with ways we can fulfill those needs, the need for God evaporates. (p. 100)
We are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. (p. 103)
Being post-theistic does not automatically imply being postreligious or postideological, and those are the real problems that we need to deal with. (p. 105)
Religion simplifies morality by providing the heuristic of making it the desire of a deity. (p. 106)
“God” is better understood as an idealized concept of the morals that the believer would exhibit if only she were a better (or perfect) person. “God” becomes the universalized standard of the moral code that each believer believes she would have if only she were what she deems as morally perfect. (p. 108)
All that is required to release the grip of this wight is to realize that moral perfection is a scam. We make mistakes, and this does not imply that we break laws of divine importance. (p. 110)
All that is required to release the grip of this wight is to realize that moral perfection is a scam. We make mistakes, and this does not imply that we break laws of divine importance. To fall short of an idealized take on the moral values held by an imaginary idealized self is not only normal, it is inevitable. (p. 110)
A belief that “God” is on one’s side is one of the most dangerous views a human being can have since it can literally be used to justify any atrocity on “moral” grounds. (p. 110)
When people make a case that there would be no morals without God, they’re really just uttering, from their own perspectives, a kind of tautology: morals exist because morals exist. (p. 112)
It can be very difficult even to conceive that there are other ways to conceptualize “good” and “bad” than in the ways provided by the cultures we are born and grow into. (p. 113)
Religious believers frequently use the term “God” in large part to refer to attribution for their framework-moral values. They understand morality in terms of “God,” so for them, the word “God” means something like “that which makes morals make sense.” (p. 114)
All that we have that can matter seems never to be enough for us, and so we have to pretend there’s so much more, possibly because we know it will all fall away. We all will die. Humanity will go extinct. We’re powerless against it, and we yearn for control. Thus we invent “God,” an idea to hide ourselves from this rather pitiable need. (p. 116)
Believers use the term “God” to talk about their sense of grand purpose in life, attempting to meet a need to feel meaningful and moral, often in a way that carries a sense of universality and permanence. (p. 119)
The goal in this book is nothing like attempting to give a countervailing explanation for the origins of the universe, life, consciousness, or mind, but instead to illustrate that people, lacking such an explanation, often use the word “God” specifically to refer to a sense that these phenomena are explained. (p. 127)
A particularly ugly problem regarding attributional frameworks including “God” is that it isn’t only when we lack natural explanations that we resort to religious ones; it also occurs when the natural explanations before us are too threatening to our deeper psychosocial needs. (p. 128)
Creationists, then, aren’t necessarily stupid, as unlikely as their beliefs about the origins of the world might be. They’re most likely terrified. (p. 129)
When someone wails in desperation to “God” for help, soliciting the prayers of anyone willing, he does two things. He reveals his need for control in a situation that he has no control over, and he needs reassurance that he is not alone in hoping beyond hope for help that cannot come. (p. 137)
The national motto of the United States since 1956 means, “In pretending to know that things will work out, we trust.” (p. 139)
It is outstandingly unlikely that secure, functioning, healthy governments, like the ones in nations such as Sweden, preside over mostly nonbelieving societies by mere coincidence. Many, though surely not all, of people’s needs for control can be satisfied sufficiently by society when states work to make that happen. (p. 139)
Part of what “God” means for believers, then, is the sense of community that arises from a shared sense of moral and cultural values, typically understood via sect-specific framework-moral systems. (p. 143)
We have good reasons to believe that part of what many believers mean by the term “God” has a great deal to do with being an attachment substitute for the parental figures in their early lives. (p. 148)
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted very articulately, many people’s religious beliefs seem to be maintained on a belief in belief, by which he means a belief that it is virtuous to believe. (p. 149)
Religion is often centrally occupied with denying death, in fact finding itself so occupied with it that it even denies that it denies death. (p. 150)
When many people use the word “God,” some of what they mean by it is their sense of assurance that their own death and the deaths of their loved ones are either not real or not final. (p. 152)
People use “God” to make sense of the phenomena of the world, and where reality contradicts those beliefs, Satan provides an attributional object that explains away the discrepancy. (p. 155)
For religious belief, we need to appreciate that belief is secondary to the application of the beliefs. Religious believers believe in order to meet certain needs, and the beliefs follow the needs. What they end up believing is a mythological rendering of a collection of abstract ideas that help them meet or ignore some of their needs. (p. 157)
Theism isn’t quite a delusion; it’s an attempt to make sense of the world mythologically. (p. 158)
The best that can be achieved when two faith-based moral attitudes clash is conversation and compromise, which we increasingly see works best when religious beliefs are relegated to the private sphere without state endorsement, that is, under secularism. (p. 161)
While many Christians do firmly believe without the slightest traces of doubt, I think it is likely for some untold many that there is a real sense that somehow this all may be silly. (p. 169)
Thomson insists that building a system of fictive kin is one of the primary functions of religion. (p. 169)
Faith, though, is its own kind of poison, the sort that allows human beings to pretend that they are absolutely right about something they absolutely do not or cannot know, and it has its tendrils extending into all ideological commitment. (p. 175)
We need to help people abandon faith, mythology, and superstition and to do everything we can to help them come to terms with the psychological and social needs that keep them clinging to ancient stories—as lone sources of ethical guidance, as coping mechanisms, as personal or cultural contextual narratives, and as a means of making sense of a confusing and difficult world. (p. 176)
We have to recognize that religion and belief in God meet needs for people, and thus we absolutely must start diligent and serious work into figuring out how to help people meet those needs in a better way. (p. 176)
If people can have their needs met without religion, they often will. (p. 176)
Religion and its attendant superstitions belong to the infancy of our species. (p. 177)
Uprooting faith means helping people learn to develop and rely upon more effective ways of coming to knowledge. (p. 182)
Honesty about what we can claim to know automatically introduces doubt, and doubt is the antithesis of faith. (p. 184)
The difference with SE is that Boghossian’s method doesn’t suggest answers but is instead centered upon embracing doubt when we don’t actually know something. (p. 185)
The prevailing religion of one’s parents and culture is by far the best predictor of one’s own religious faith. (p. 186)
Particularly, one tends to be automatically highly skeptical of faith-based positions that compete with those of the culture or subculture one is raised in and yet the prevailing religion of one’s parents and culture is by far the best predictor of one’s own religious faith. Facing these facts should lead an honest inquirer to wonder what her faith looks like from the outside as a test to see if it is worth believing or not. (p. 186)
Most Christians are able to see plainly that Islam and Hinduism are desperately unlikely to be true, and most Muslims and Hindus feel the same way about Christianity. (p. 187)
Evaluating one’s faith as if one didn’t already believe it seems corrosive to belief in a way that, perhaps, few other things can be. (p. 187)
A third fantastic way to uproot faith is via satire, which is a form of mockery that is easily ethically justified in that it is not intended to belittle or intentionally harm the majority of its targets. (p. 188)
Humor cuts through the vain pomposity of faith deftly and, if the joke is good enough, permanently. (p. 189)
Not only are the beliefs themselves often funny, but so too is the pretense with which they are regarded. (p. 190)
All faith possesses the power for great and needless harm, and all faith is unjustifiable because it mishandles information we pretend constitutes knowledge when it doesn’t. It simply has no room in the process of determining what is true and, thus, what is most likely to produce good results for people impacted by human beliefs, which is all of us. All faith has to go. (p. 191)
Revelation remains utterly indistinguishable from making things up. (p. 191)
Trying to pry away the faith of someone who is rapidly approaching death is almost as pointless and reprehensible as attempting to squeeze a deathbed conversion out of them. (p. 192)
It is a bad idea that some claims to truth or knowledge regarding our societies are privileged to a weaker standard of justification than others. Secularism is the rejection of that bad idea. (p. 196)
We need secularism specifically because we lack sufficient reasons to accept that any particular moral community is correct in its guesses about how to maximize the Good. (p. 197)
Secularism means conversation. (p. 197)
Secularism is the only known shield from this utterly predictable consequence of giving lots of power to people who pretend that they’re right for reasons no better than “just because.” (p. 197)
Religious people who embrace secular ideals should be encouraged in doing so. (p. 199)
It is fair to consider secularism as a virtue because it is inherently the combination of epistemic humility, the willingness to admit that one might be wrong, and personal confidence. (p. 199)
The goal is to have open, honest conversations that move people away from myth and toward more fruitful and solidly grounded topics, and achieving that is an art that often requires swallowing a lot of pride and frustration. (p. 205)
There’s a category mistake involved in turning atheism into an identifiable kind of thing, say a philosophy or a worldview. (p. 207)
We shouldn’t even keep doing atheism. We should ditch it. We should move on from it at the conceptual level, be settled in not believing what doesn’t have justification, and do what we can to help free other people from the confusion of faith. (p. 207)
The data are almost unequivocal, for example, in showing that as economic and security concerns diminish in a society, so too does its religiosity. (p. 210)
Death is perhaps the best lens we have by which we can learn to focus on what matters in our lives and our relationships, and denying it with fantasies of heaven is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. (p. 213)
It’s stupid to pretend that a need for the spiritual isn’t important for a lot of people simply because it’s so frequently tied to unjustified, mythological, and nonsensical beliefs. (p. 215)
Religion has succeeded in finding a number of ways to help people meet many of their psychosocial needs, and there are few reasons to think that we cannot borrow from those as we seek better ones. (p. 215)
This goal must be accomplished not only by fostering humility but also by helping people to ground moral reasoning in the here and now, in something to do with the experiences of sentient beings. (p. 216)
Encouraging public trust and understanding of science is more than sufficient to help most people leave mythology as a tool for understanding phenomena in our world. (p. 217)
Knowing we’re organized to deal with calamities when they arise provides a powerful sense of security without having to rely upon beliefs in mythological powers. (p. 220)
We should have therapists and counselors trained to specialize in the challenges associated with leaving behind one’s religious beliefs, and we should have lots of them. (p. 229)
The more people know about how the world works, including their own minds, the more likely they are to accept natural attributions over religious ones. (p. 230)
It will be a costly and unacceptable state of affairs for future citizens of our societies to know next to nothing about many world religions. (p. 234)
Courses like civics, ethics, logic, critical thinking, and comparative religions might be identifiable as topics many “atheists” are interested in—along with biology, physics, psychology, and just about every other field of inquiry15—but that’s only a reflection of the underlying fact that the religions aren’t actually true. (p. 236)
“Atheism” is dead because theism makes no sense. (p. 236)
Theism is mythology. It is not philosophy. It is not really even a worldview because it looks to a fantasy as a method of attempting to characterize the world. (p. 242)