Christianity Needs Fixing, And Atheists Will Do the Job
It has been my long-held observation that people are never what they seem to be, and what they are trying to show off themselves. Long before such a “brilliant thinker” like myself, there was an even much greater person, Shakespeare. He said that all people are actors. That’s what people do indeed: they are showing you the face that they want you to see.
We live in an absolutely unprecedented time when masks are ripped off from people’s faces, and all their ugliness is uncovered more often than ever before. It becomes more and more difficult to hide your true nature and continue to do the show. When the great wisdom of the sublime ancient sages is evaluated by modern standards, it turns out that they were not such wise after all.
It reminds me of the case when children grow up and start to realize that their parents whom they once adored are not as smart as it turns out. The children are faced with a choice whether to judge their parents or to show compassion and be grateful for what they were given.
Atheists are not always compassionable children of humans' religious past and are often cruel in their critique of the “old man”. A lot of atheists are not only trying to put grandpa in his place and get rid of his toxic control but also wish him dead. Sorry to lower your spirit if you are that angry atheist, but this allegory is not absolute.
In reality, religion doesn't look only like a dying old man. It’s also can be compared to evolving organisms. When the severe environment kills 99% of a species population, it leaves only those “freaks” who were on a fringe of the population and happened to fit the new environment variation.
So, what is about to happen now, when this mass “slaughter” of religious ideas occurs? Only those that are marginal, and abnormal will survive. Not all of them of course.
Not all mutants and freaks receive any advantage in wild nature. In fact, it happens very rarely that an organism, deviated from the norm, turns out to be more successful and prone to survival than its “normal” relatives. But, when it does happen, this genetic line of a new form of life overtaking in the race of success all unfortunate normal fellas.
That’s why it doesn’t look realistic how sci-fi TV shows and movies picture the future where believers and non-believers still exist and fight with each other. For instance, “Raised by Wolves”, American TV series caricaturally portrays believers as having the worse features that modern believers have.
But, that’s unlikely to be the case in the future. I can’t even imagine that in 100 years religion will look anything like what we have now. It has to evolve into something more sophisticated and benevolent in order to survive that long. Sorry, Nietzsche, but you can’t kill this son of a gun that easy.
Now let’s get back to the starting point of my piece. Do you remember the old cartoons where a showman fails to show a trick and out of despair starts awkwardly dancing to please the public? Then they start to boo him and he shamefully leaves the scene. Don’t worry about him. This crook will recover. After a few bottles of whisky, he’ll pull himself together and come up with a new idea for an act.
Do you dislike the idea of hell, intimidation by demons that enter your life when you sin, young Earth, and flat earth beliefs? Fine, the showman won’t play this part of the act to you anymore. What else is it that you can’t come to terms with?
We could get rid of the image of the true man of God who is so holy that almost never sin, and when he does sin, it’s a kind of noble error. After all, the availability of porn on the internet breaks this unrealistic image.
Well, fine, we won’t present this idea to you. Instead, we will show you a man of God who can publicly confess that they watched porn recently, but repented. Can you imagine Paul of Tarsus writing something like that about himself in his letters? No, he could only “confess” what a cool gangster he was before he became an even tougher warrior of Christ.
But since that image is not effective these days, new spiritual Fathers will tell you a different story. As an example, David Wood, an online Christian apologist, commenting on Ravi Zacharias’s sin and fall, confessed that he himself watches porn occasionally, but that’s because believers are just humans and we should lower our expectations about them. No one is perfect, aren't they?
What else do you dislike? We could come to terms with evolution, become gay-friendly, start to adore science. Whatever you want.
Besides, there are things that are unique for religion and atheism can’t replace it for you. In my view, the most significant among them is the solace of the afterlife, sense of life given from above, and divine self-identification. It is a toll order for atheists to compete with believers on such a high level of service.
But, these circumstances compel atheists to come up with something new like “we could create our own Universe someday”, or “we could genetically modify our bodyes or upload our consciousness into a simulation”. Thus, not only atheists do make believers evolve but the opposite is also true. I wish I could live longer to see who will win in thousands of years.
