Why Faith Is Bad For Ya

"You gotta have faith" as the George Michaels song goes.

To me, not so damn much.

Here's the reason: Faith is bad for ya.

Actually, faith is bad for everyone, if one stipulates several extremely obvious facts.

Fact 1: People are stupid. Half of the population is below average in IQ. If this isn't self-evident to you, then please stop reading right now and get sterilized, then shoot any kids you have in the head because you are too fucking stupid to be allowed to breed.

Fact 2: MOST people think they're above average. Since this is statistically impossible, there are a large number of seriously deluded people who are out there fucking with the rest of us.

Fact 3: Faith requires the rejection of rationality in order to maintain. If you think being irrational is a great way to live, please re-read Fact 1 and follow the advice there.

Fact 4: People are unwilling to admit when they're wrong to the point of violence.

For the purposes of clarification, faith is the unfounded and unquestioning belief in something. That something can be anything from your spouse's faithfulness to the deity du jour you happen to believe in today. You have no proof. You have no direct knowledge. You just have faith.

And very often, you're wrong about these things.

I'm not requiring or demanding perfection here. People are wrong about a lot of things. People make mistakes. That's okay. It's part of living and life. But it's when you're always wrong, yet not only insist you're right, you demand others join you in your mistake that gets my panties in a bunch.

"I'm not wrong about my faith!" you scream at the top of your lungs.

Yes, in fact, you are and here's why.

Historically, mankind has had many different religious faiths. Today, there are basically three: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Atheism isn't a faith because they don't believe in anything. It's not a disbelief of your idea of whatever your faith happens to be. It not believing in it in the first place. If you equate disbelief with belief, then you see the first example of Fact 3 about those who have faith. Those who have faith believe in "something". That is what faith is all about. Those who don't believe in that something, but a different something, have a different faith. Those who don't believe in any "somethings" have no faith. A lack of faith in somethings means no faith in a something. Since only those who have faith in a something can have faith, those who don't do not have a faith.

One might argue that not believing in something is a faith. One would be wrong. It takes faith to believe in something in the first place. A faithless person doesn't believe in what a person of faith believes in. A person who believes in something is the one saying there is the something to believe in in the first place. The difference between this form of psychosis and a nut on the street is the number of people sharing the same irrational delusion that the something in which they believe, for which they have no proof, no evidence, no way to legitimately and objectively substantiate their illusions, actually exists.

But is this why you're wrong about your faith? Yes, in part. This is because NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND HAS BEEN RIGHT.

Let's look at the whole of mankind's existence.

We started out with Unk, or Og, or Ub or some other such monosyllabic name for some imagined "god" who controlled something we didn't then understand. Little things like the weather, the earth, the sun, the stars and, well, pretty much everything else we encounter in our lives even today. We wondered where we came from. We wondered why we were here. So we mixed in a lot of guess work, a touch of philosophy and started a little thing called Religion. What religions asked for you was faith to take what these explanations for these things were (like gods and evils causing good andevil things to happen) at face value. To NOT QUESTION THEM.

Bad, bad move.

Then someone came along and came up with a "better" explanation. Of course, it was another god, or another rationalization with some philosophic overtone. Then some slightly brighter than normal people realized that other people sucked this stuff up like water to a thirsty person and decided to invest in it, reaping both secular power and wealth in the process.

You don't HONESTLY think the Catholic church is one of the wealthiest organizations on the face of the planet because they're saving souls, do you? Ever heard of their vow of poverty? If they believed it, the Pope would live no better than some street urchin in Cambodia. Please don't insult the rest of us who can think with your rationalizations justifying this.

Speaking of rationalizations, along comes another rationalization, and the faiths changed yet again. "Gosh, my faith didn't sound as good as this one does," people say to themselves and switch. More often, they switched thinking, "Hey, it doesn't matter who I give lip service to as long as I'm taken care of in the afterlife and I really don't want this driveling idiot fucktard to kill me for sticking with what I've believed all my life."

At the point of a sword, gun or by better rationalizations, faiths have been changed time and time and time again over the course of human history.

So why do you fucking think you've got it right THIS time?

"We've been believing this shit for thousands of years," you say.

Yeah, well, so did the Egyptians, the Norse, the Sumerians and the Greeks and Romans. Do you think we're worshiping the Sun God Apollo? Monotheism is just another rationalization foisted upon us by those seeking secular power and wealth over us.

It's all the same bullshit, served up with different garnishes.

So you are WRONG in your faith if you are one of the big three. In fact, you're probably wrong even if you're not one of the big three. If it relies on a rationalization instead of logic, it's certain to be wrong.

By the way, for the rationally challenged out there, this is an example of a little thing we who can think clearly and rationally call "logic". That's another thing you're functionally unequipped to deal with.

So, aside from a shared delusion, what's the harm? After all, Will Farrell is considered a good actor by a large number of people. A similar number of people thought "The Hangover" was high comedy.

Please see Fact 1 for the reason this happens. Please follow the advice for Fact 1 if you happen to be among those who don't think otherwise.

To be honest, it's not the irrationality or stupidity that is the major problem with faith. It isn't even the fact that people can't think rationally. Those factors are merely the predisposition held by those individuals who are afflicted by the phenomenon of faith. While I personally feel that the stupid shouldn't breed as a major favor to the future of humanity (mostly because they'll always remain susceptible to manipulation by those smarter than they are), it's not their lack of brain power that is the problem. Faith is the problem.

So why is faith the problem?

Faith is a problem because people believe in it and talk about it.

Really, that's the bottom line in this. It doesn't much matter if ONE person is irrational. It matters greatly when more than one person shares the same delusion. This is because they do NOT share the SAME ONE.

This concept is a touch difficult to follow, but bear with me for a while.

First of all, people are individuals. They have individual thoughts. They see the world from different perspectives. They sense the world in slightly different ways. Some hear better, some see better, things like that. And we all have things in our lives that impact the way we think from hormones to what we ate (or didn't eat). So although we may think we believe and have faith in the same things, we do not see them, experience them, or even think about them in the same way.

This is born out by the number of religions we have today. Look at the Protestant religion. A thousand faiths and growing almost hourly. People who can't agree with the dogma make up their own. (This also plays into the fact that your faith is wrong. What part of it don't you like? Why haven't you changed it? Others have.) They don't think about it the same way. They don't experience it the same way. It's different for everyone in some way.

Diminishing returns makes faith INHERENTLY an individualistic thing. Since you can't possibly know what someone else is thinking or EXACTLY how they experience it, you can only guess and chances are great your guess will be wrong. Faith is based entirely on guesswork and is founded by the notion that it's not okay to not know. Since when did "I don't know" become a "sin"? People aren't born with knowledge. They learn it as they go. Taking short-cuts by blindly accepting rationalizations only subverts the learning process and undermines knowledge.

So people don't see things the same way, and still think they're all following the same idea. Talk about demented.

Groups of people are dangerous in and of themselves. Why? See Fact 1.

More to the point, groups identify among themselves. Their ersatz commonalities based on these rationalizations give them a cohesion that would otherwise be absent. I mean, let's face it, if you didn't meet them in your church, or think they shared your faith, would you even bother knowing most of them? Would you even give two shits about them? You probably say, of course. Now, turn that around, WHY DON'T YOU GIVE THE SAME TWO SHITS ABOUT EVERY OTHER STRANGER? See what I mean about how a group dynamic is a bad thing? You're part of one group. That other stranger is part of another group who doesn't believe the same nonsense as you believe in. That creates an artificial difference between you and "everyone else". Your faith in that rationalization separating you from other strangers who don't believe the same myth as you is what turns you against them, and them against you.

(That inherent trust and group cohesion, by the way, is why con artists are most often church-goers fleecing the flock. You trust them because they share your faith. What a fucking moron you are to do that and you deserve to lose every penny you do (or did). Blame the group dynamic and your misplaced trust in your faith for it.)

So, toss in a bunch of rationalizations that inflict what others believe to be indignities on people who don't think the same way with that group dynamic, and you have a recipe for disaster.

We get repression of women, repression of men, repression of sex, repression of... Well, pretty much everything, if you were to follow every faith in the world. You wouldn't be able to eat meat, harm anyone (except, of course, non-believers), unless those anyones were committing some "sin" in which case you are allowed to stone them to death or beat them with a rod no thicker than your thumb. Oh, and don't forget it's not nice to own slaves who are countrymen, so be sure to own slaves from out of the country, but be sure they are properly documented or you could be jailed for abetting illegals.

I mean, seriously, people, what kind of twisted, fucked in the head thinking do you have to have to think you're RIGHT about ANYTHING involving blind faith? Others have exactly the same amount of faith in their twisted, fucked in the head rationalizations as YOU do. No single rationalization can possibly be correct. The alternatives are that all of them are correct or none of them are. Based on the fact none of them have been correct so far, it's pretty safe to conclude that none of them are.

Between a group dynamic that demonizes others who are not part of the group, the misconception of the faith by, literally, everyone IN that faith, and the fact that people are stupid (plus the other facts previously stipulated), we end up with a world that is fucked in the head and will likely stay that way until we abolish faith and start working on fact.

We're always going to have stupid people, until that average comes up, then we'll have smart people and really smart people. But because stupid people think they're above average, them not breeding isn't going to happen soon enough to save the species. So we need to get rid of faith. If it has to be explained in paranormal terms, using superstition and mythology, forget it. If you don't have a strong and overt element of doubt, and don't remain willing to entertain such doubts, you need to be "fixed" like Spot and Fluffy.

So all this begs the question: Do I have faith.

Not a blind one - which is what we're talking about here. I'm open to suggestion. I'm willing to say I may be wrong should someone be able to show me a more rational, reasonable, fact-based means of exploring that which we humans call the "spiritual". But I don't believe in afterlives - consciousness after death. I'm not entirely convinced we have a "soul", either. There's no evidence for it, but it's impossible to prove the non-existence of something. One has to prove it exists before proof exists one way or another.

Part of why I'm so against blind faith is this little fact: No proof of nonexistence. Someone asserts they believe in something - like a god - then says I have to prove it doesn't exist. Wrong order. They must prove it exists since they're the ones making the claim it does. Then they say they have to have faith that it exists, because if they don't have faith it exists, but KNOW it exists, then there would be no faith, so it wouldn't exist. The trouble is that the utter lack of rationality in this circular argument is lost on them. If it exists in the first place, why muck around with "faith"? To "accept it"? Hey, people don't accept the President of the United States and he certainly exists. So proof of existence isn't even remotely a hindrance to willful rejection.

And if some deity was actually all powerful and such, why would it allow all of the shit and strife we have in the world today over whether it even exists in the first place?

The places for gods to hide, where we can look at something, see what it's all about and understand it's not supernatural, it's not "god", but it's just the way the world is are growing smaller and smaller. We aren't here because gods created us and created this "perfect" world for us to fuck with. We're here because of a long line of improbable accidents. Then someone will say, "Well, God was behind those accidents." I say no, because last week, before we discovered we could prove we're here because of these accidents, you were saying we're here because God made us and our Perfect world for us and didn't say shit about these accidents.

If you know so fucking much, why didn't you mention that before?

It's a rationalization and you will NOT accept that you're wrong because of Fact 4: People are unwilling to admit when they're wrong to the point of violence.

But I digress...

Okay, back to faith.

Having faith and sharing it is a bad thing. Politicians and religious leaders rely on it to get their power on earth over you. Have no faith in people. Have no faith in rationalizations. Have faith in things that are real, or at least be open do doubt in those gray areas where the "we don't know's" lurk instead of trying to fill them with the deity that, before that place was understood, used to be lord of lords and king of kings and almighty in the universe. The domain of blind faith in a coming age of reason will not go away quietly or peacefully because people of blind faith are actively working - and fighting - against reason to avoid the inevitable time when all is understood and there's no reason to have faith in the first place.

The arrogance these people display that they're right and everyone else is wrong is what pisses me off.

I'm just one person, who believes in being reasonable and rational. We have enough problems in the world without inventing bullshit reasons to make things worse. If you can't handle the way life is arranged, that's YOUR issue. Don't expect me, or anyone else to buy into your lack of adult perspective. Grow the fuck up, get a back-bone and stop wishing upon a star for shit that you can never be as sure about as you think you are.

And for all that YOU hold holy, don't breed. The faster we get rid of the genes of people who can have blind faith, the more likely the human race will actually survive.