A Transparent Shield

I found this little tidbit on Reddit that I thought was worth sharing. I corrected the spelling and punctuation.

I'm a 19 year old college student, atheist, at a private Baptist university.

Today in my (mandatory, but tolerable) Christian Heritage class, the professor posed the question "Do you believe that a baby is a sinner, without the knowledge of what "good," "bad," or "sin" is?"

A girl immediately raises her hand and says "Well if they don't know it's sin then it's not real sin. But we don't really know. We're not God; none of us are, so we can't really answer it. I know if it was my baby, I don't want to think of it being damned to hell just for ignorance."

I asked her, "So your entire belief rests on the theoretical? You would LIKE TO THINK of this certain way in an optimal scenario, so that's how your faith is based? What you think you believe to be true?"

She said "Exactly, thats how faith works."

I ask, "So why bother asking? Why try? Why even argue about it in a class right now, why teach it, if we're NOT God and we cannot possibly KNOW, if its only faith and best guesses?"

She paused for a moment, and said "Well why believe in anything if you look at it that way?"

"Exactly. That's how intellect works."

"Faith". It's the fail-safe word when a religious person is backed into a corner. Dan Barker was right concerning what he said about faith; it's nothing more than a cop-out. When you use the word 'faith', you're freely admitting that the beliefs you hold can't stand up on their own merits, and because these beliefs are a part of your faith, they deserve to be free of criticism.

Faith, on one hand, is something that is very comforting to people. We know this. Many people in our country regard faith as something sacred to them, something personal that pulls them through tough times, because they feel that a higher power is watching over them at all times.

We cannot deny, however insulting as it may sound, that faith is the result of a weak mind. It is nothing more than a clear plastic shield, wielded by its bearer to protect them from a little something called reality. As Mark Twain puts it, it's "believing what you know ain't so." It takes a lot of faith to believe that the earth was created in six days, that your loved ones are living on forever in eternal paradise, and even that Hitler is serving some cosmic justice in Hell, burning in agony for his deeds on Earth. It takes a lot of faith to think that you have seen and communicated with a millennia-old Jewish zombie and his deified father. We know this, because we're humans too, and none of these things happen or have happened in real life.

The belief that if a baby dies, since it is imbued with Original Sin, that it goes to Hell, is nothing short of completely barbaric. One is completely within their rights to hold such a belief, but unfortunately one is completely within their rights to rationalize it away such as the girl did in the above example.

This is why the Rhode Island Atheist Society, and other groups like it, exists. The views of atheists are views that, the majority of the time, correspond with the reality that can be observed and empirically tested. These archaic, Bronze-Age myths have given rise to beliefs that are destructive in nature; not just physically, but mentally as well. (Case in point? Listen to last week's episode about how a religiously-fueled woman killed a puppy.)

We need to stop treating faith as if it were something righteous, virtuous, and sacred, and instead exposing it for the fragile religious escutcheon that it is. Intellect, reason, and skepticism are valuable tools that we must put on a pedestal in its place.