I’m going to say some nasty things about moderate religion here. That means I’m going to be negative about the beliefs of a lot of people that I love, including my family, my own friends, and indeed probably about half the population of the UK. This doesn’t mean I think these people are stupid, or bad, or anything like that. As far as I am concerned, people and their beliefs are different things (beliefs change after all). I can empathize very well with why people adopt moderate religious stances because I did once myself: it’s where you often get to if you are brought up in a religious culture and you can think a bit for yourself. The point of this letter is not to cause offense. I am simply worried. I am worried that religion, including moderate religion, is a great threat to the things I hold dear, that might collectively be called civilization, and that we need to do something about it (specifically, create some conversational pressure on religious views). Most of the above people can understand why I would take offense at religious fundamentalism, because they probably do too. I want to explain why I also worry about moderate religion, and consider it a threat to things I value and love.

Let’s start with some definitions. Religious moderates are those who do not subscribe to an exclusively literal interpretation of their holy texts or doctrines (unlike religious fundamentalists). Christian moderates are moderate because they realize that the Bible is not exclusively true or nice. Instead, they pick and choose what elements of their divine texts to obey and which to disobey. The discarded texts become “metaphor” or are “interpreted within the context of their time”, and de-emphasised in church.

The next thing to say about religious moderates is that because of the moderation of their beliefs, they do less harm than religious fundamentalists. They don’t fly planes into buildings, or burn heretics at the stake, or teach creationism in science classes. This is a good thing. And it’s also why it feels harsh to criticise a religious moderate. They generally don’t go around obviously causing harm. Indeed, there are a lot of nice sides to being religious, which moderates try to maintain, whilst minimizing the risks and harm caused: the benefits include organized charitable or social action, encouraging moral behaviour, friends and community, quiet times of reflection, music, culture and so on.  These are all worthwhile things that I also enjoyed as a Christian. So what’s the problem?

1.       The harm done to the cause of truth: subscribing to unsupported dogma.

Truth is important. Knowing how the universe works is: a) a powerful tool for improving people’s lives b) central to making informed decisions on what the best course of action is, hence living a moral and considered life c) an inspiring thing for those who love the natural world or value discovery. The search for knowledge is a great human enterprise, and one of the best reasons to be a human rather than some other animal. Many people are capable of working up a great deal of enthusiasm for it, to the extent that it drives their lives and gives them a sense of purpose. We are also fortunate enough to live in an age where this enterprise has revealed rather a lot of fascinating, meaningful, and useful stuff. This will only ever be more so in future, as long as the fundamentalists don’t manage to establish a worldwide theocracy.

In this context it is important to know if the claims of religious moderates are true. We can deal with this relatively quickly: the one thing that is consistently true of all religious people is that they accept some claims on faith, rather than on sufficient evidence. This means that they don’t have good reasons for supporting these claims, which can only be correct by accident. Given the vast variety of, even moderate, religious claims, this means that the vast majority of them must be wrong. All religious people are also inconsistent about whether different claims require proof. Most would demand a high burden from medical research, or most things taught to their children. Most would make the most of a good piece of evidence that, for example, Jesus really did die and come back to life. But, when it comes to their specific religion, faith is the get-out-of-jail-free-card. They don’t even apply the same standards to other peoples’ beliefs. By exempting their own religious beliefs from their burden of proof, religious moderates contribute to a world where nearly everyone is mistaken over some of the central tenets that run their lives. How do moderates know that their religious tenets are true? They don’t. The techniques that are used to generate religious dogma (intuition, tradition, authority and revelation) simply have an appalling track record on being correct. All theistic religions are therefore harmful to the prevalence of truth in people’s beliefs, and hence, the appropriateness of their actions. In contrast, most atheists are simply people who are consistent in applying appropriate burdens of proof to claims before accepting them, hence explicitly try to minimize false beliefs.

2.       The harm done by the encouragement of faith: the irrational society.

We live in a world where it is socially perfectly acceptable to adopt beliefs on faith alone, and a major cause of this attitude is the pre-eminence of religious institutions and people, including moderates. Just ask yourself where in school a teacher ever led you to think that it was acceptable to exempt your beliefs from evidence. Only in religious studies would you ever get that impression. Where else did you get that impression? In church, or from religious people. And yet we let religious institutions run our schools, our communities, we pay them out of general taxes to perform counselling services in hospitals, we give them tax exemption, and we give them privileges in law and in government. It is, literally, giving people with unjustifiable and unaccountable Bronze Age views free positions of authority and responsibility. It’s madness: it’s a really crap way to run a country, and moderate religion keeps it that way because it retains and encourages faith as a central part of people’s lives. I would like to move to a position where people treated their beliefs responsibly, that they felt answerable to evidence, that they saw the value and importance of truth, and what is more they understood how to get it: by rejecting any claim that has so far failed to meet its burden of proof. I therefore distinguish between the legal and democratic right to freedom of belief (which we all need in order not to feel oppressed, and which is necessary for the process of inquiry and enlightenment, which we should value) and the social responsibility to adopt beliefs only in proportion to the supporting evidence. This doesn’t mean that you can’t hypothesise, but it does mean that you should not accept hypotheses as true until the evidence obliges you to. Once the evidence is sufficient, people simply believe helplessly, because the evidence won’t allow any other attitude. Anything else is just blind guesswork or worse. That’s not the way to run a considered life or a society.

3.       The harm done to children and education

Religious moderates encourage faith in the very young, where it is most readily engendered. They want faith to be presented to them as acceptable, normal, positive, a source of morality, and good for society, and they want them to experience faith.  There is no education on the negative consequences of faith, on where morality really comes from, no discussion of the relative truths or merits of different religious beliefs (that would undermine the whole enterprise), or harm done by them now or in the past, and normally very little on alternatives to faith based approaches. There is hardly any mention of the horrors that abide in Holy texts, or criticism of Jesus’ teachings. There is no education on how to increase your chances of being right about something (i.e. sceptical evidence based reasoning), or on social responsibility in matters of belief. They simply start with a belief system, which is beyond reproach, and take it from there.  They create children who have little idea how to arrive at truth, who are encouraged not to think about important issues but accept them on faith, who are unaware of the negative consequences of faith, and who think that it is acceptable to just believe whatever you like willy-nilly, because that is what the grown-ups do. This is bad for children, because it discourages them from using their brains, it shuts them off from more enlightened sources of meaning and purpose in life, it’s a failure of our responsibility to them as educators, it’s an abuse of trust, and bad for society.  And it’s how virtually all our schools are run.

4.       The harm done to democracy:  privilege and exemption from criticism.

Religious moderates like their faith, and want to keep it. They want a world that will support them in their faith, and they often want a world in which other people are encouraged to come to the same faith position. They may differ from fundamentalists in the methods that are used here. But they dislike criticism of their faith, and of faith overall, which underpins their beliefs. Moderate Christians hesitate to criticise other religions, lest they get it back. They think that faith can be a justification for something, whereas it is simply an admission of an unjustified stance. In supporting moderate churches like the Anglican church moderates support exemption from equality laws, they support faith based “education” of children (see above), they support similar highly dubious programmes for adults such as the Alpha course, they support political privilege (e.g. Bishops in the Lords), and diminish inclusivity in our society. The church does this stuff because it has the support of its members. Worse, in not engaging in active criticism of faith (faith as a whole I mean), and discouraging it, moderates promote the conditions whereby fundamentalism flourishes.  As long as people think it’s socially acceptable to adopt positions on faith, we’ll have religious fundamentalism and all the joys that flow from it.

5.       Harm done to morality: becoming blinded by moderation.

Religious moderates think faith is good. If harm is caused by religious people then they put it down to fundamentalism, or human nature, or an “exploitation” of religion. “That isn’t true faith”, they’ll say (Tony Blair’s words actually). They don’t want to blame faith because that’d make them just as culpable. This generates a position where most religious people just don’t see the harm done by faith at all: they are completely blind to it. They have faith, they think it makes them good, so they conclude that faith is good. In reality, not all faiths are equal: some are truer than others, and some are more moral than others. Recently I pointed out to my local church that they were supporting a fundamentalist charity that is exploitative of donor good will, and harmful to the people they pretend to help. The moderate Christians were shocked to find this out, but because the charity had the label “Christian” and purported to be charitable, they had assumed it was all good. Indeed, until I pointed out the specific problems with the charity, one of them jumped to its defence. Their null hypothesis was that faith is good. They were blinded by moderation and the exemption from criticism that they accord faith. This is also the attitude I see most commonly at my childrens’ schools. This has got to change.

In summary, my position (I’m open to argument if you think I’ve got it wrong) is that moderate religion is inadvertently: anti-truth, anti-democratic, anti-educational, anti-moral, abusive to children, and irresponsible.  It doesn’t aim to be these things, and individual moderates are mostly not these things, but just as meat-eaters inadvertently support animal cruelty despite never actually hurting an animal themselves, so moderate religion supports these things despite not intending to. It does this because it supports faith. What would you have to do to moderate Christianity to eliminate these sources of harm? Make it reject intuition, authority, tradition and revelation, and adopt sceptical evidenced based reasoning as the method of finding truth. Give up all claims to divine authority and purpose. Reject the holiness of the Bible or any other text. Admit to and educate people about the harm caused by faith. I can’t see the church doing any of that in the near future, can you? It’s why I felt I had to leave.

What are the alternatives and what should be done?

I am sure that some religious moderates think that it is impossible for them to give up their faith. They have this intuitive feeling that God exists, a longing for him, and they think they can’t do anything about it: the feeling is just always there. I don’t buy into this claim. We all adjust our behaviour everyday in ways that are contrary to intuition or primal urges for the good of others and society. We expect others to do so too. It is not asking a lot to expect similar acts of responsibility in peoples’ beliefs. We are simply not used to demanding this of each other’s beliefs. All it requires is education and awareness: awareness that your own intuition, or tradition, or authority, or revelation, are not indicators of the truth of something. That’s why we need reason and science in the first place. All you have to do, when you get that urge to praise the Lord, is hold your horses and think a bit (remind yourself where the burden of proof lies and whether you have met it): the sort of thing you have to do fifty times a day anyway. What you are doing, when you make that effort, is attempting to avoid all the problems I have identified above. It’s not that hard.

But giving up religion is difficult for people who get a lot out of it, even if they accept some of the arguments I’ve outlined above. If we give up religion, do we have to give up all the benefits of religion? I would argue not, but because it requires a culture change, we might have to work a bit harder for them. First, we need to be aware that there are alternatives to religion. The major one is Secular Humanism. Humanists are non-theists who attempt to live a good meaningful life. They are generally sceptics; they value reason and science; they think that morality stems from human brains and can be informed by data and discussion but does not stem from holy commands, and that the moral life stems from consideration of the consequences of our actions; they think that meaning in life is derived separately by each individual and does not stem from any divine purpose. They are open to the idea of spiritual experience in the sense of elation or profound events, but not in any supernatural sense. They regularly seek out such experiences. They are often active in charitable or other work, and many have strongly motivated and creative lives full of purpose.

Because of the presence of local humanist or sceptic groups, and through an increasing amount of online communities and material, they can also find fellowship and community with like-minded people, and discuss ethical issues or social action. My own limited experience with a local group is that it is effective in these things. It is also something that I never got from any religious community: educational. Humanist groups engage in active inquiry instead of praying. They read, they discuss, they learn new things and new ways of thinking, they exchange ideas, they criticise stuff, and they ask what it means for them. It’s a humanist form of “spiritual” growth. My group does this by a programme of invited speakers and a book club. They do not have priests, or rituals or services, except with major events like weddings, namings and funerals. But they may enjoy art, or music, or literature, or architecture, in general appreciate beauty.

What do you have to give up? Church, for one thing (if desperate for that, you could try a Unitarian church, though you’ll have to share it with theists, and you’ll be part of an organization that encourages faith). If you don’t want faith, you probably won’t miss church. I don’t personally see any way that a sceptic could go anywhere near the Lord ’s Prayer, or the Nicene Creed. You don’t have to give up Xmas and Easter, though they have different emphases, because they were only usurped pagan events anyway, but you might find, for example Humans Rights Day, or Darwin Day, or Bertrand Russell’s birthday worth celebrating instead. You can still read the Bible if you like, but chances are you’ll start to favour other secular material instead (there’s a surprising amount of it and it’s so much more, well, moral). You’ll probably find greater motivation for moral or social action: it’s a perennial issue for humanists in a world dominated by theists. You’ll probably see the world in a new light; even shopping or travelling becomes a highly considered action requiring thoughts about consequences. If you were only ever lightly religious (as many moderates are) chances are you won’t miss anything through the change.

Consolation is something people often claim to get from their faith. If something goes wrong, it’s all part of Yahweh’s plan, and he might make things better if you just love him a bit more, and anyway, things’ll all be perfect in the next life. What can the humanist say to this? First, that if you have rejected theism, it makes a lot more sense that bad things should happen. The universe was not created with you in mind, and there is no imaginary friend looking out for you but looking incompetant at it. There is just natural law doing its stuff, and occasionally we get in the way of it. You therefore have to expect shit to happen sometimes. So for the humanist there is no wondering why your creator did this to you: he simply doesn’t exist. There is also no hoping for him to put it right: if things are going to get better, we have to hope for nature to change the circumstances on its own, or see if we can alter them ourselves through action. This rightly puts the responsibility for making lives better in human hands. You will also not get a humanist councillor lying to you about who cares about you or about your future in the next life. A friend who gives false consolation is not a true friend. But this doesn’t mean that consolations are not there to be had: since you are not the object of nature’s anger, things might change on their own, or you or a friend might be able to change them. And people can still care about what’s happening to you and help you to get through difficult times. And to a humanist, there is also something useful about the bad times; that they provide breadth to the human experience that, once over, can help you to live your life more fully.

A final issue is that a change in beliefs can affect family and friends. I was coerced into Christianity by my schools and family and by constant social reinforcement, and nearly all my friends and family are religious moderates. Being openly atheist does change things between us: by just making my views known, I point questions at their own beliefs; my mere presence is a challenge to them. I knew this would be true, and it is one of the things that stopped me coming out as atheist before. But when I turned 40, I started to ask myself if it wasn’t time that I started living my life the way I wanted to, instead of compromising for other people’s comfort. So here I am.

In the end, people come to humanism for the same reasons that moderates become moderate: they want to live a good fulfilling life, they don’t want to sign up to obviously false beliefs, and they want to change society for the better. In this regard, a major preoccupation of humanists is combating the negative influences of religion in society, and standing up for human rights, freedom and democracy.  Because of the threat to all these things that humanists perceive in even moderate religion, they are increasingly using their voice to draw attention to it. This means not giving religion exemption from criticism in the public sphere. And, you know what: change may happen very slowly (like it did with women’s suffrage: 100 years of campaigning and it took WW1 to wake men up), but it may happen very rapidly (like with the gay rights or racial equality movements in the 60s-80s). At the end of my life, whenever that is, I want to be able to say that I supported a campaign to change society for the better. To me, ditching our bronze-age beliefs and growing up in the universe is the big social issue of our time. I want to be part of it.

There are now lots of online sources of information for people considering alternatives to religion:

The really simple guide to humanism. A really easy and informative guide for dummies.

The British Humanist Association. The home from home of Humanists. News, local groups, volunteering, action, information, inspiration.

New Humanist magazine. Ideas for Godless people.

The Pod Delusion. Weekly podcast about newsy things from a sceptical/rationalist perspective. A weekly point of sanity for me.

The Atheist Experience. Weekly call-in TV show promoting positive atheism. Another weekly “must” for me. From the Atheist Community of Austin. The ACA hosts some fantastic resources including a blog, FAQs, podcasts, and a wiki site on apologetics.

There are loads of humanists/sceptics/rationalists to follow on Twitter or Facebook: Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Paula Kirby, Greta Christina, Sam Harris, Andrew Copson……

Books: anything by Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, A C Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Barker, Stephen Pinker, Bart Ehrman, Richard Dawkins. I particularly like A C Grayling’s works, and generally keep one of his books by my bedside: a kind of Bible substitute; a humanist thought for the day. All these people are worth searching on YouTube. The BHA (above) publish loads of good short books on humanism.