God Has Far Too Much Time On His Hands

From a very young age, I remember reading and being told that God knows everything. He knows what you’ve done, and what you will do. He even knows your thoughts. Hell, he even knows what you will think before you do.

I’ve heard Christopher Hitchens call this the “celestial surveillance camera”. How perfect. God, with all his responsibilities for creating universes and making sure everything works tickety-boo has the time and interest to spy on each and every thought we will ever have.

The evilness of this mental torture has no equal… except perhaps for the concept of eternal punishment. Children are brought up thinking that even a fleeting bad thought is being recorded, tallied and judged. As an adult, you cannot even look at the spouse of another person without the thought that God knows that you have coveted, and are therefore guilty of breaking one of his commandments. Punishing natural, human desire is a despicable concept in my books.

Spirits Among Us?

Even ‘spiritual’ people who don’t think much about God are susceptible to the idea that their most private thoughts may not solely be their own. Because so many of them badly want there to be an afterlife, they gravitate toward mind/body dualism and, from there, invoke the supernatural idea of souls.

Unfortunately, where there is one disembodied soul, there are probably going to be others (e.g. ghosts/spirits) with otherworldly abilities who carry with them a cornucopia of surveillance possibilities.

Atheism is Peace of Mind

There is no feeling of mental intrusion in a skeptical, naturalistic, atheist view of reality. In our world, consciousness is merely what trillions of brain cells do and, since a mind reading machine will not likely exist in the near future, our thoughts are purely our own so we feel safe thinking whatever we want. After all, to us, thoughts are just thoughts.

This godless gift is truly, truly awesome, and I can say without reservation that this one thing alone was worth the price of admission. Being godless brings a freedom and peace of mind I never even came close to having when I was a believer.

Highly recommended.
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Point taken. However, becoming an atheist didn’t affect me in that way at all. In fact, becoming an atheist was accompanied by a rejection of the paranormal. Why?

The answer is that becoming an atheist was an outcome of examining evidence and arguments for and against the existence of god. In other words, it was an act of dedication to critical thinking. Applying that same process to the paranormal led to the same outcome – I rejected all of those things.

I remember quite clearly how rejecting god was like pulling out the bottom of a house of cards – belief in the paranormal came tumbling down as well. Not only was there no god, but there were also no boogie men hiding in the dark. I’m not saying I used to believe in the paranormal but, when I began examining god more closely, I also examined the paranormal and stopped taking pseudo-science seriously.

My world changed practically overnight.

The Reverse Must Also Be True!

I’ve been watching my kids grapple with the imaginary stuff of the world. They want Santa to be real. They fear monsters under the bed. They think there are scary, wild things in the basement.

Why?

It’s my fault. Our fault. We parents of children. We adults of society. We teach our children that there are things – imaginary things – around us that we cannot see. We teach them that fairies come while they sleep to take fallen teeth. We teach them that a big, jolly magic man slides down the chimney to leave toys. We teach them that there’s a white-haired old man in the sky watching their every move, listening in on their every thought. We teach them that there are devils in the world trying to hurt and make people do bad things.

All this. All this teaches our children to be superstitious. It is the building up of the house of cards I just tore down in my own life.

Every time we teach a young child that there is something imaginary that they cannot see – that they cannot ever see, it opens their minds up to be superstitious in other areas. We provide a doorway for superstition to stay with our children into adulthood. Frankly, I’m surprised people aren’t more superstitious.

Ghosts, God, Santa Clause, Satan and the Tooth Fairy are all attacks on our ability to be rational and accept only what can be proven with evidence and critical thinking.

If I got to start over as a parent, I’d eliminate every imaginary thing. There would be no tooth fairy (but there would be fun around the loss of the tooth). There would be no Santa Claus (but there would be presents and an appreciation for life’s gifts). Imaginary things would be banished in my home based on the notion that imaginary things do real damage to a child ‘s mind.

Imaginary things impede children from fully growing up…

…and that’s only a good thing if you’re Peter Pan.

One of the first aha! moments I had after letting go of my god delusion was the realization that leading one’s life according to the laws (?) of Karma isn’t much better.

The Stoke-On-Trent Humanist Group has it partly right:

These people are deluding themselves. Karma is an Eastern idea, popular in sophisticated quasi-religious philosophies like Buddhism, and is a way of dishing out false hope to the down trodden and wretched without the need to invoke a god.

False hope. Sound familiar?

What’s also familiar to me is the idea that the good and bad stuff you do is being recorded somewhere. Only, instead of gods doing the tallying, the universe somehow is. Make no mistake however, that you are being judged. Everything you do goes into a score book which will be used to determine your reward (coming back as a more enlightened human) or punishment (coming back as a dung-beetle).

I think a lot of people who let go of gods replace them with mysticism of this sort – the supernatural idea that, somehow, the universe has taken a personal stake in your moral behavior. To me, karma sounds a lot like sin.

Let’s stop the madness and give up this perverse idea that someone or something is watching us and judging for the purpose of determining where we fit in after we are dead.