RELIGION
TIM URBAN
I’ve spent most of my life thinking “the more atheists, the better.” Looking back, this now feels like a “be careful what you wish for” hope. It’s easy for non-religious people to look down on religion, but we take for granted the extent to which a good society is good because of the moral structure it provides.
The world’s major religions, for all their faults, have been shaped by millennia of experience with human nature. I was one of tens of millions of 2008 Obama voters who had come to see religion as an organ of bigoted right-wing backwardness and the root of most of the world’s evil. That’s a pretty one-dimensional way to see systems of thought that have been around since antiquity.
Over the past few years, it’s been made starkly clear that a world without the major religions is not a world without religion—it’s a world with a bunch of new religions sprouting up and quickly capturing millions of “atheists.” These new religions—many political—have not been put through centuries of trial and error, and the moral structures they provide often stoke the worst parts of our nature.
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