The Problem of Irreligion
Morality is the biggest problem in an increasingly secular world.
I was raised a Christian, but I haven’t stayed that way, for better or for worse. A few thoughts struck me a few years ago and, long story short, I dropped out of the faith.
For a little while, I struggled: if God isn’t, what is?
I was plagued by metaphysical concerns about what reality was and where it came from. Everything just being plain old physics didn’t sound very nice to me; there was no spice to life anymore.
I was also worried I was wrong. After all, if you get a thing like religion wrong, you’re pretty much screwed for eternity.
I was angry, too, about the bad things faith was doing in the world.
I saw Abrahamic religions forming the fracture zones along which the Middle East was tearing itself apart. I saw fundamentalists everywhere from 9/11 to Westboro Baptist Church, and as behind the great scandal of our time: the election of Donald Trump. I saw the ways in which ancient verses were twisted — if they ever needed twisting — to spawn hatred and chaos. What I saw as old books seemed to have an unwieldy grip over the minds of the new. I saw how even the successful liberal democracy I called home — the UK — was really a theocracy, with bishops of the…
