Why do many people find religion unappealing? Why do so many – even many who call themselves Christians – believe in evolution, preferring science over religion?
Did you happen to catch CBS Sunday Morning earlier today? As part of the lead-in to Halloween (presumably), there was a feature about hellfire. (You can watch the segment below.) In it, a Baptist preacher from Tennessee was interviewed, and segments from several of his sermons on the topic of hellfire were played. The man practically inhaled his tongue in his foaming enthusiasm to describe the horrors and agonies of hell. As the Church of the Infinite Chasm has previously noted here, this teaching requires Satan and God to be in business together: Satan wants people to do bad, and when they do, God sends them down to Satan, who punishes them for God. That is quite a curious arrangement, to say the least. Especially when the Bible clearly teaches things like this: “from dust you are and to dust you will return” and “the wages sin pays is death.” Last time I checked, death is defined as the absence of life, not some alternate lifestyle. But millions of devout religionists want to see the wicked boiled in oil forever. How loving. And they believe God is on board with this too, the same God they say is the very personification of love.
Interestingly enough, CBS Sunday Morning quoted a Professor of Christianity who said, “In the Old Testament, hell is …a place of sleep.” The images we conjure up when we think of hell aren’t from the Bible; they’re from Greek mythology, says the professor. That makes sense: in general the Bible equates death with sleep. Unconsciousness. Lifelessness. See above: if to dust you are to return, can you imagine dust suffering? Hell didn’t become hellish until the Middle Ages, painted that way, not by the Bible, but “almost entirely” by literature and art.
One of the side effects of all of this is to make the cool simplicity of science seem a lot more appealing. Natural selection sounds pretty green, and non-vindictive. Nature operates under a “live and let die” philosophy that sounds completely benign compared to everlasting torment, a concept which we would find unfair and repulsive if practiced by any government or individual. By law, Christian nations prohibit cruel and unusual punishment from being inflicted even on the most vile prisoners condemned to death. Yet we are supposed to believe that a just God would burn people alive – and miraculously keep them alive forever to prolong the torture.
No wonder we contend that the #1 cause of atheism is religion. Notice we didn’t say the Bible is the cause; we said religion.