Religions at one time proved themselves to be a useful tool by providing rules that helped groups of people stay together and treat each other like people rather than animals (at least if you were male.) With modernity, the morality of any ancient religion has fallen far behind and lacks any means of updating itself. ‘Divine command theory--’ the moral theory of the Bible, is barely a moral system at all. It is the equivalent of ‘I’m stronger so whatever I say goes.’ Imagine a king that wakes up with a cold one day and decides that it is suddenly against the law for anyone around him to cough in the future. That is the equivalent of Biblical morality. The evidence of this arbitrary and flawed moral system can be clearly seen if you simply take time to read the Bible. God commands genocide, rape, and slavery in the Old Testament, and then—after going through some kind of mid-life crisis-for deities—says that everyone is worthy of love (except slaves, women and homosexuals) in the New Testament.

Human beings are social animals. It is likely that the most common communal activity for the past several centuries has been church attendance, as it has superseded any alternative non-belief-based alternative except for possibly sports. This is unfortunate because as much as church communities come together within their particular subset of beliefs (their denomination or brand), the very nature of a denomination implies the exclusion of all others that don’t share the same beliefs. Christianity alone is a model for the normalization of divisions in society that are having serious consequences in our political and social climate. The idea of a church community is nothing more than a group of likeminded people getting together to reinforce to one another ideas for which there is no evidence.

The idea that one can communicate with an invisible, inaudible, untouchable being that has promised to help them is a sad replacement for actual human support. Prayer is a projection of ones hopes and dreams onto an object of the imagination and a misattribution of gratitude if these hopes and dreams come true. The vast range of differences in reported experience of a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus, God, the Virgin Mary, one of numerous saints indicates that they are all objects of the imagination.

Like so many other concepts in religion, the afterlife is the overvaluation of wish. It is the brief distraction of a very real anxiety about mortality with a fictional version of one’s personal experience in life. My Heaven might involve the exclusion of someone that has done me wrong. But what if this person is also going to heaven and happens to be my neighbor—is this still paradise for me? The idea of Christian heaven is only real for someone if the idea of hell is as well. To believe in an afterlife goes against the single most observable phenomenon of life—that it ends in death. This has been true for all creatures that have ever lived and died until the moment you read this. Wishing something is true does not make it real.

It is a very common and proud claim of Christians that their belief system is the only path to meaning. This is utterly absurd. Non-believers everywhere live meaningful lives, and to the extent that believers do, it is for reasons entirely different than they imagine. Their sense of meaning being dependent on ‘bringing glory to God’ or some variation of this is illogical and sad. If slaves of Southern Americans found meaning in their lives, it was not because of their choiceless servitude at the threat of punishment by their immoral slaveowners—serving someone more powerful is not the basis for ‘meaning.’