Humans seek explanations and answers: learning about our environment is a good survival strategy. Discovering, investigating and exploring form an evolved behaviour that has served us well, especially since we learned the best way to do it: by using the scientific method. It’s astonishing what we have discovered in the last 150 years, and our technological achievements are worthy of celebration—a semi-autonomous helicopter on Mars, for heaven’s sake!
However, our desire for ‘closure’ is so strong that, prior to that process breakthrough, we were prepared to accept fictional solutions to mysteries in preference to ignorance and doubt. In the historical sellers’ market, what made a good offer was the same qualities that make a hot product today: great names, slogans, exciting stories, and music. In other words, a commercial presentation delivered by a good salesman.
An early successful enterprise came in the form of services that purported to offer comfort to the insecure. Those people had fears and needs; they were shoppers craving a cure. That was spotted as an opportunity by some shrewd but unprincipled entrepreneurs. For their businesses, the ability to hold the attention of an audience was useful, and a good script was vital. Certain key story elements are always popular—mysterious origins, magical powers, and a death-defying climax. Recognise anyone? Superman? Dr Who? Jesus? God is like that: fine clothes on an invisible emperor.
Even Shakespeare doesn’t deserve to be adopted as an ideology or worldview. Entertainment must not be confused with information. Narrative is not evidence.
It is dangerous to make that mistake; religions can be used like a drug to control people, to amass an army of dogmatic sheep. It is especially risky when their power is used to dehumanise non-members. Even riskier when they victimise homosexuals, denigrate women, and mistreat children.
A clue is revealed when religious leaders start demanding that their privileges become rights. Notice that they often use, or attempt to use, the law to protect their doctrines from criticism and satire. Faiths cannot abide challenge. Only belief systems that lack evidence find it necessary to resort to suppression and censorship. There is no blasphemy in science… Beware of stories that masquerade as truth and are used to control.
We need to Break FREE!
We want to Break FREE!
We must Break FREE!
Atheism UK (AUK) launched the Break FREE! campaign at ‘Hitchmas’, which featured Sir Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray, and Lawrence Krauss celebrating the life of their late friend Christopher Hitchens in the Royal Geographical Society’s hall on 14 December last year. You can join AUK or make a donation and receive a Break FREE! button badge at our website: atheismuk.com.
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