Religion makes me extremely uncomfortable.

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But the social tribe always needs one, so religion will always exist. I thought Sam Harris's idea of stamping out everything religious, and anything illogical or dramatic as cute, as if the material natural human heart & mind can be maintained only a diet of concrete provable logical facts.

I prefer the Braveheart version of this quote:

The Lord says he can get me out of this mess, but he's pretty sure you're f****d. bwahahah

Of course you can't stamp stuff like this out. You can, however, make it highly unfashionable. Whatever our beliefs, whether evidence based or matters of faith, they are always removed from wharever it is that creates such impressions in us. Therefore, our beliefs can only represent prevailing fashions that inevitably shift over time.

Mind you, all beliefs are hostages to fortune in that new discoveries can overturn paradigms overnight. Religion is probably the least susceptible in ths respect but still tends to adapt as time passes. One fine day it should therefore paint itself into such a tight corner that it has no space for itself, in common with countless other hypothesis that had fallen before it and that have yet to fall.

Is there anyway to steer away from the Monotheistic religions towards NonTheism?

For the most part things like Taoism or Buddhism seem more like a way of life. I think some Eastern religions have missions but my impression is that they seek to help people more then evangelize.


One God Monotheism seems to have so many of the uncomfortable traits. The term God Fearing kind of sums it up for me. I can't go through life scared s**tless of God keeping a ledger of every single error I make in life to later hold it against me in some kind of Judgement.

Well, monotheism resulted from the rationalization of multiple deities, who were thought to create and control all the different aspects of the world, into a single agency - so at least an element of rationality is apparent in religion. The underlying belief that agency is necessary is being steadily eroded as well, and while some might see little progress in this direction the distance between a personal God and man inevitably becomes greater with every new insight into the workings of the natural world. The limiting case of this erosion is one of the various forms of Panentheism where God becomes a container for the natural world. Somewhere along this path people ought to come to appreciate that their notions of relationship with God must be entirely metaphorical at best.



The active promotion of the idea that God is the ultimate judge who's watching you even when no-one else is has had great utility for human society. While not as cynical as "your reward will come in heaven" (while mine will be the profit you generate for me in the meantime) it comes a pretty close second.

I think there's a pretty simple take on religion - once you see it as encoding all the innate feelings humans have. For example, if a prophet feels disgust, he interprets it as God telling him not to eat a particular food. As an acknowledged prophet he has been given license by his own culture to pass on such a "decree" as though it were God's own. This would explain why "God" evidently has different instructions for different cultures.

A more satisfactory interpretation of this muddle is that it's the inheritance of innate feelings through a process of natural selection that's being mistaken for the word of God himself. Think of any "gut feeling" and apply the two interpretations outlined above and it becomes abundantly clear that the voices of our conscience are passing on the wisdom of countless innate behaviors that successfully navigated our ancestors through the threats and opportunities of the world they inhabited - rather than God telling us to hate this and embrace that etc.