You should all go over to the Friendly Atheist site and have a read of this. It’s about a very good talk given by Julie Sweeney, whoever that is. It’s about her experiences and thoughts on religion and atheism in general.

There’s a full transcript of the talk (audio is available too, but I just stuck with the transcript), which is quite long, but worth reading. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it, so I’m not going to go over it in detail, but I’d like to highlight a few things which stood out to me.

We all know how good it feels to help your neighbor do something or contribute, or make some self-sacrifice to do something. Everybody wants that feeling. This is where religion can sneak right in and hand this feeling over to people. All this good will that we’ve evolved to have can be just sucked up by an organization that is really doing things that are probably not for the greater common good. Yet they can deliver that hit to people of feeling like they’re doing something good.

Wow. That’s a really interesting thought, which I have to admit hadn’t quite occured to me in this form. It’s interesting how religion uses (trades on, perhaps) these natural urges to ‘do good’ and subverts them for purposes that are not always (sometimes they are) beneficial to anyone, and sometimes might actually be harmful. The best word I can come up with to describe this, unkind as it might sound, is…. parasitic.

We like to feel affiliated. Obviously, there was an evolutionary advantage to us to have this feeling. I think religion, once again, in the absence of anything else, just swoops in.

Same idea again – parasitism on natural behaviours.

Anyway, if you really want to be in a club you can always join an Atheist Society (sorry, the website’s offline, my bad)……..

Uncertainty is highly stressful. It’s undesirable. And religion provides answers. Science provides some answers, and those are often deeply unsettling and deeply humbling in a way that is very unnerving.

It’s been mentioned many times, but religion provides comforting answers to difficult questions (some of which might even be completely meaningless – like “what’s the purpose of life?”). Science does not. I recently read an article (sorry, would give a link but I can’t remember where it was) in which some Buddhists rambled on about how “scientists are uncomfortable with uncertainty” – which is wrong at best, a lie at worst. Scientists have been embracing uncertainty for a long time. Buddhism is not so bad really (some forms, anyway), but I’d be inclined to take them more seriously if they actually knew what they were talking about.

For example, to realize the universe doesn’t care about you specifically is a very difficult thing.

This is a very powerful thought indeed, and one which I intend to post on at some point. In my mind it’s perhaps the worst aspect of religion; the idea that there is some kind of ‘cosmic justice’ at work in the universe is very hard to shake off – but trust me it is well worth it.

When I think back to how I loved being a Catholic and I loved the nuns and the whole humility thing, I was kind of, “Oh, that’s so fantastic! I’m so humble, I’m so humble!” What could be more arrogant than thinking that there’s a god out there wondering if you’re performing the five offices of the day? That is arrogance taken to the extreme.

I often think this – which makes it seem beautifully ironic (or deeply hypocritical, depending on my mood) when religious people start banging on about how arrogant atheists are. I mean, how dare we not believe in their magic invisible friend and how dare we have the gall to actually say that out loud?

Nine: We’ve evolved our consciousness, I think, to have a great capacity to live in denial about things that make us feel uncomfortable.

Yes, we all suffer from cognitive dissonance, and maybe we need this in order to survive. There’s an interesting book out, which I intend to read at some point (I’ll add it to the list, anyway). Greta Christina has a couple of good posts up discussing the book.

The biggest, the greatest harm that religion did for me is that it quelled my natural wonder about the world. I didn’t really wonder about science. When I took chemistry, first of all it was boring the way they presented it and all the guys just wanted to make stink bombs. I didn’t think of it as being like cooking–I mean, I love to cook. If they’d presented it that way I would have been in. But I felt that there was this answer to everything. God gave us the 92 elements, or however many there are! Everyone knows the real answer: It’s God!

I feel so cheated by that. That’s why I wish I could sue the Catholic church. It’s not for whatever those priests were doing, it’s because I didn’t let my natural wondering continue, the thing that makes me the most human, the thing that makes me the most different from other species–my natural desire to know the answer. It cut that off for me. And I just think that is the most heinous thing that religion does.

OK, so maybe that’s the worst thing religion does. Give me a break; there’s so much to choose from!

All in all, a very good little speech. I shall have to investigate this person.