The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (31 page)

Early in my career, I worked with children and families as a psychologist. Even though I was still ostensibly a religionist at the time, I could see the huge influence of the god virus on parental behavior. Here are some of the things I witnessed: Parents punishing children for questioning religious ideas. Children feeling great anxiety because their elders told them they would go to hell if they disobeyed, masturbated, played with children of other religions, didn’t go to church every Sunday, didn’t get saved at church camp, etc. I saw family members using religious scare tactics like invoking Satan if children misbehaved; couples being torn apart because one spouse became fundamentalist and insisted on raising the children by the fundamentalist dictates. My own grandmother was fond of saying that Satan was in me when I misbehaved or questioned some of her religious beliefs.

As a non-theist parent, you may experience a lot of pressure to raise your children in a religion. Other children can be cruel to children of non-believers. Just as white parents in times past taught their children to hate or mistrust black children, religionists teach their children to hate or mistrust children of non-theists or those of strongly different beliefs. Children may come under peer pressure to join school prayer groups, to join religious clubs like Crusade for Christ or Fellowship of Christian Athletes. In some schools, coaches and teachers may subtly discriminate against students that are non-theist. In team sports, coaches may put pressure on team members to pray before a game. While this seems barbaric and unconstitutional to anyone who has read the Constitution, it is common practice in many schools in places like Oklahoma, Texas and Alabama.
⁴
The challenge is to teach your child how to think for herself and reasonably defend herself in a world that can be hostile.

You may find yourself feeling guilty about the “extra burden” you are
putting on your children for your beliefs or lack thereof. Keep things in perspective. Jehovah’s Witnesses send their children to public schools where birthdays and Christmas are celebrated. Jewish parents send their children to schools where Christmas and Easter are holidays but no mention is made of Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah. Pagan parents have beliefs that are reviled by most Christians. Muslim parents send children to schools where pork may be the only meat on the menu on certain days.

4
For an interesting example of this kind of coercion on a school sports team and threats to an entire family with an overt attempt to run a family of Atheists out of town, read the trial of Chester Smalkowski, at Guymon, OK. American Atheists,
Smalkowski Found Not Guilty On All Counts
[article on-line] (26 June 2006, accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://www.Atheists.org/flash.line/smalko1.htm
; Internet. For more information, examine the court documents also available on-line.

Your task is no harder than theirs. In fact, yours may be somewhat easier because you can teach your child to defend the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pagan, Muslim or Jewish parent’s child and use it as a lesson in what the god virus does to all children. Finally, raising children to think for themselves is the goal of child rearing and that is not easy in an world full of god viruses.

There are many places where non-theists can meet their emotional needs with little or no religion. Some of these include service clubs, the Unitarian Universalists, some Quaker meetings, Habitat for Humanity, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, American Atheists, the American Red Cross, and many more. Many groups need help and don’t care about your religion.

If you find the ritual of religious services comforting or gratifying, you can do at least two things. First, go to church all you want. There is no harm in it if you know how to resist the infection. For example, Daniel Dennett, noted Atheist and author of
Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon
, confesses to a particular enjoyment of religious ritual and claims to attend the Episcopal Church.

Second, you can use the feeling of needing religious involvement as a diagnostic tool to understand your emotional needs more precisely and explore alternative ways of achieving them. A friend of mine, after years of being frustrated with western religion, found a great deal of satisfaction in a Pagan group. Their irreverent and often irreligious attitudes seemed to fit her well. To her surprise, she learned that many of the members could be classified as Atheists or agnostics. They enjoyed the company of other iconoclastic people.

Religionists cannot conceive of living virus free. The terror they feel leaves them paralyzed, unable to consider other ways of living or being. To even contemplate virus-free living risks blasphemy and eternal damnation. It is similar to an alcoholic living without drinking. The very thought of it drives him to drink. The very thought of living virus free drives the infected to pray to relieve their anxiety. Their world is a fearful and dangerous world inhabited by demons, devils, gods, Satan, and angry Jehovah or Allah full of retribution and eternal consequences for not following the right virus. They can conceive of living without the Muslim virus or the Mormon virus, but not their own. The virus is like a child’s warm soft teddy bear that comforts him when he goes to sleep but sends him into fits of anxiety and terror when the teddy bear is lost and can’t be found before bedtime. Just as the child cannot sleep without the teddy bear, the adult religionist cannot relax and enjoy life without his virus.

Virus-free living is more a journey than a destination. We are all affected by the god virus and often carry ideas, opinions and beliefs that were programmed into us at an early age. Our continuing work to discover and change them is an important part of the journey. Natural emotional needs like the need for security and belonging are channels that the god virus exploits to infect. Gaining awareness of the ways the god virus uses them can help liberate you from the subtle effects of early religious indoctrination.

“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk.”

-Thomas Edison

In this chapter, we will look at how the god virus tries to use science for its own ends. The success of science has led to many efforts on the part of religion to associate itself with science and enhance the legitimacy of the god virus. We will also look at the fundamental difference between science and religion – error correction. Science has continuous error correction where religion has no method to correct errors. Finally, we will ask, “Why does the virus resist science?”

Many fundamentalists say scientific beliefs are no better than religious beliefs. In other words, religion should be given equal footing with science. The intelligent design movement is predicated on this notion. Proponents use scientific terms and arguments to push a religious view of nature. The whole enterprise was quite dramatically exposed in a Dover, Pennsylvania, case where a complaint went to trial under a conservative, Republican, G. W. Bush-appointed federal judge. The result was an unusually strong judgment from the bench that the arguments for intelligent design were nothing more than religion disguised as science.
¹

Throughout this book, I have argued that the god virus is primarily concerned with propagation. It infects a person’s mind and is passed from parent to child, from vector to host, without reference to objective reality. If a religion teaches that Joseph Smith received the corrected word of god on golden tablets and read them with magical glasses, there is no objective way to establish that. It is simply a viral idea that is embedded in the minds of the infected and passed along. If the religion says that Jesus was born of a virgin, there is no gynecological or genetic method to establish that notion in objective reality. If your daughter said she was pregnant but still a virgin
and conceived by an angel, you might want some evidence beyond her word. But somehow that idea needs no verification when part of a god virus.

1
Tammy Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. The entire 139-page opinion is available online and is well worth the read. It is exceptionally informative and clearly illustrates the viral attempts to usurp science in the interest of religion. Case No. 04cv2688 Judge Jones. 20 December 2005.

From these examples and hundreds more, it is clear that religion is a parasite that infects the brain of the host without regard for objective reality. The best interest of the host is not a concern, as we have shown in earlier chapters.

Scientific ideas also infect minds but with one caveat: those ideas have to create a link to objective reality in order to survive. Ideas are always moving through our heads. You may daydream about winning the lottery or marrying a movie star, but sooner or later these illusions bump against the real world and you discard them. If someone said, “I was abducted by space aliens who taught me how to live 150 years, I’ll teach you what they taught me for $1,000,” chances are that idea won’t infect you or many other people. You have effective defenses against that kind of idea.

On the other hand, you may speculate about a new marketing plan for your company. The speculation is part of the process of creating ideas you can test against reality to see if they increase market share. If they succeed, you will retain them and may teach them to your associates at work. Few people today, outside of perhaps an Amish community, think about better ways to make buggy whips. The buggy whip idea no longer meets the test of reality.

Scientific ideas are the same. Scientists may dream up ideas about how to break down DNA to identify specific disease-causing genes, but they then have to go out and demonstrate the idea experimentally in a way that others can understand and replicate in their laboratories. Once a link is made to reality, the idea can be taught and passed on to others, who, in turn, can do the same experiments or variations on the experiment to create more and stronger links to reality. The propagation of scientific ideas requires regular and multiple links back to something that can be objectively demonstrated to the wider community of scientists.

Science has a built-in error correction mechanism that does not exist in religion. If a scientific idea cannot be tested, or if it repeatedly fails testing, it won’t last long. No one debates the four humors theory of Hippocrates today. No one argues that the night air and poisonous vapors are the cause
of yellow fever. These theories did not pass the test of observation and experimentation and, therefore, were discarded.

The god virus, on the other hand, contains no reality-based error correction device. The Nicene Creed makes all sorts of wild statements, none of which can be tested against reality. To take just the first three statements, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty …” How does one test if there is one god or many? How does one test if that god is almighty? What exactly does “almighty” mean? How does one know the god is a male? While some Christians argue things like, “’God the Father’ is just a metaphor, god really doesn’t have a sex,” the minute one starts talking in female terms, most of them get upset. The Bible thinks he is a he. Jerry Falwell, the Pope, Pat Robertson, Ayatollah Khomeini and Billy Graham, as well as Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses, all think he is male. Benny Hinn, evangelical minister and televangelist
²
, wrote: “What does God the Father look like? Although I’ve never seen Him, I believe – as with the Holy Spirit – He looks like Jesus looked on earth.”

An Internet search using the term “god as male” resulted in 3,250,000 references. Looking through the first 25 or so revealed a hot debate among religionists, most of whom seem to think their god is a male. After 3,000 years, there is still no error correcting mechanism to determine the god gender, change it or discard it.

A little reading of religious history and theology quickly shows that the questions the god virus purports to answer are no better answered today than they were in 600 BCE. People still can’t conclude which god is the right one, which pope is the real leader of the church, which book is the true holy book, which creed is the correct one, or who exactly is Satan. At the same time, most people throughout the world can affirm that the earth travels around the sun, that bacteria and viruses cause a large percentage of diseases, that a mechanic does a better job of fixing your car than praying. In
other words, the progress of science is demonstrable. The progress of religion is non-existent. How is the Lutheran virus better than the Catholic? Is there some way to test the value of the Scientology virus against the Baptist? Is a Coptic Christian truer than a Sunni Muslim?

2
Benny Hinn,
Good Morning Holy Spirit
(Word, 1991), 87.