The Invention of Religion

Comedian Ricky Gervais is a funny guy, a very talented comedian, and an outspoken atheist. In his movie The Invention of Lying, there is a scene where the character he plays invents religion. If you haven't seen the movie, you have to understand the concept: the film takes place in a parallel world where humans haven't evolved the ability to lie, and Mark Bellison (played by Gervais) is the first person to ever lie. Because of Bellison's ability to lie, and everyone else's inability, every time he lies, people believe him. Eventually, Bellison tells everyone that there is a powerful man in the sky who is watching over everyone, and this man rewards good behavior in a special place after death.

It's funny, but there's something about it that bothers me. Gervais is making a statement about religion as an atheist that I don't think is true. That implied statement is that religion wouldn't exist without lying. He's suggesting that the source of all religious ideas is someone telling a lie.

(Perhaps it's important to take an aside here and talk about the nature of lying in itself. I want to distinguish a difference between lying, which is to deliberately tell someone something that one knows is false, and merely saying something which may not be true but one believes it to be a fact. Gervais and other atheists may believe that there is no God, but when a theist talks about God, they're not lying, they're talking about the truth as they see it.)

Now this is the thing, and the point of this piece: while there may be religions that started by someone telling a lie (and I can think of a few likely candidates, but I won't go there), I don't believe that that's how most religions were started, even if all religion is bunk. I can think of a lot of other ways that religion could be started, and I actually believe they are more likely.

There are a lot of variations on the idea of religion starting as the result of philosophical thought; these are not quite lies, but rather people thinking deeply about the world around them and coming to conclusions that the world is a certain way supernaturally because it somehow makes sense to them. The most simple form of this is the likely scenario of people trying to explain natural phenomena without scientific knowledge. Imagine living in a primitive society and experiencing thunderstorms. Where is that noise coming from? A lot of polytheistic religions have a god of thunder, and I imagine if you don’t know where thunder comes from, you would think there's something in the sky making that noise, and maybe it's a powerful man with a giant hammer? If you start imagining things this way, it would likely follow that you'll assign gods to other aspects of nature. There must be a god of the sun, who makes sure it shines and always crosses the sky on schedule each day. It would also make sense that there's a goddess of the moon, then. And so on and so forth, and someone eventually gives these gods names and comes up with stories about them that stick in the cultural consciousness. None of this is lying per se, but attempts to explain nature and the world around us.

I think some religions start with someone thinking that surely there must be a higher power, and surely that power must care about humankind and our moral choices. That someone puts into words a moral code, and expresses that God or the gods endorses this moral code, because of course they would. This person or persons sincerely believe this to be true. (I think we see a bit of this in already established religions, such as the many doctrines of Christianity that were established hundreds of years after Christ. Original sin? The rapture? Not in the Bible, but someone thought they made sense, so they became doctrine.) Honestly, it's a fine line here between lying (this is truth because I want you to believe it's true) and pontification (this is the truth because I am certain that it's right).

I think one can't rule out the idea of religion starting because of a person just being the right sort of crazy. There are a lot of people who hear voices in their heads, and there are certainly more than a few who decided (or the voice told them) that it was the voice of God. If they hear the voice of "God" and it's telling them things that aren't too farfetched, then when they tell other people that God is talking to them, they could easily be believed, and a religion could be born. On a similar note, a lot of people believe that those who had visions of God or something divine were either crazy or had ingested some sort of hallucinogenic substance. If their visions made some sort of sense, it could start or add to the religion of a group of people who believe in those visions.

All of the scenarios I have suggested so far have suppposed no actual supernatural intervention, but really, I don't think you can rule it out, and if you consider the supernatural, there are all sorts of other scenarios. You don't even have to get into the concept of religion possibly being true (although I of course don't rule that out either).

If there are supernatural powers out there that can influence people in some way, then there's certainly the possibility of those powers influencing religious thought. If there was a powerful being that wasn't God as westerners tend to think of him (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and creator of the universe), that being might nonetheless for one reason or another want to be thought of as God, and influence people to think that way. I suppose in such a case, religion is technically still a lie, but not a lie from humans. If an angel (a word that just means "messenger") came to you with a message from God, and the angel looked very impressive, you might be inclined to believe that message.

There may in fact be multiple "gods" out there vying for people's attention, and each would have a message of truth that would be different from the messages of other gods. Perhaps these messages were even actually true, but only within a specific scope of time or region. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, but many have suggested that there are many gods, and these gods get power based on how many people they can get to believe in them. (Terry Pratchett actually has a novel that is largely about exploring this concept humorously as part of his Diskworld series called Small Gods; it's a terrific novel that I think is both entertaining and thoughtful about the nature of religion that I highly recommend.) The idea seems too farfetched for reality to me, but then what about religion isn't farfetched?

There are probably many other possibilities that could account for the start of religion, but of course, there is still the possibility that one or many religions is actually the truth. Certainly all religions can't be true, because a lot of them contradict one another, but that doesn't preclude at least one being true. And just because one is true doesn't immediately imply that all others are false. As a Christian, I am of the opinion that Christianity is true, but I feel that it's implied that Judaism is also true. In fact, it may be a truism of all the Abrahamic religions that Judaism is true, since all of them build off of that foundation in one way or another.

So, are there religions that are based on a lie? Almost certainly. Are most, or even all religions based on lies? No, I really don't believe that's the case. I believe that most religions are based on people trying to have an understanding of the parts of the world that they didn't understand without religion. Some of these understandings were accurate at least in part, while many were not. But it wasn't about lying. For whatever reason, I think that's an important thing to understand.

Trump’s America

There are a lot of people, probably mostly liberals, who are really quite shocked to find us where we are in America today. How did a terrible man like Trump become our President? This is not who we are as a country!

I think this sort of thinking requires a denial of the reality of United States history, both in the long view and in the more recent. Trump is, in many ways, the quintessential American President. Trump is America with the mask of politeness taken off and discarded.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about Trump that is so American is the racism. While we love to think of America as the "melting pot" of cultures, we're a nation pretty much founded on white supremacy. We were created by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and built by the forced labor of people stolen from Africa. The White House (so appropriately named) itself, the home of our nation's leader, as pointed out not too long ago by Michelle Obama, was built by slave labor. I myself am fond of reminding people that the founding fathers were made up of two groups: rich white men who loved Black slavery, and rich white men for whom Black slavery wasn't a deal breaker.

Trump’s sexism is also very American. We became an independent nation in 1776, but women weren't federally given the right to vote until 1920, nearly a century and a half later. (Oh, and that was only white women, of course.) And voting is just one right of many denied women; the right to own property, the right to have a bank account separate from their husbands, the right to not be discriminated against for employment or housing? All of those came later. Of course, one of the most important rights, the right to be able to control their own bodies and their reproductive choices? That one's still up in the air, as women are effectively given less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

What else defines Trump? Xenophobia? I would call it selective xenophobia, as ICE raids places known to have immigrants with black and brown skin, but makes no moves against communities of undocumented white immigrants. We build a wall on our southern border, but largely ignore undocumented immigrants coming across the northern border. Why? Well, those immigrants are white, aren't they? I may be wrong, but I believe the very first law in the United States limiting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because we can't have non-Europeans in the U.S., can we? Of course before that, when the United States won a large portion of the southwest from Mexico in the mid-19th century, Mexicans in those territories were assured on paper that they would be American citizens, but apparently in practice, most of them were driven off the land, deprived of property and rights. America has never been keen on accepting non-Europeans, so Trump’s xenophobia is really nothing new.

Oh, and putting the rights and needs of rich people over those of the poor and middle class? That's just capitalism, which has also always been us. White capitalists have always ruled this country, and pretty much every President has been at least a millionaire. Bigotry against LGBTQ people? That's a western cultural norm. We used to (really still do) have laws against them existing, and barely have half a century of progress towards equality, but conservatives will constantly make up stories about how drag queens and transgender women are attacking children despite the fact that the observed reality is that the people children have to fear are religious leaders and their own parents.

This unfortunate conglomeration of lies and bigotry is what America is, has always been, and it's that reality that Trump represents. Can we change? I hope so, and so do many other Americans. But no politicians from either of the two major political parties seem to be willing to make those changes. I believe it's going to take a major shake up of the status quo that's going to require either some restrategizing in the Democratic party, or a rejection of the outdated Democratic party for a newer, more progressive set of politicians. Really, it may take a revolution of some sort, because the status quo needs to be completely rejected, and that's hard to accomplish.

If you, like me, don't want Trump’s America, then don't wait for voting in the midterms in 2026. Start strategizing now, and pushing for changes that can happen now. It's going to take a fight to reverse 250 years of history, but it's not impossible if we put in the work.

Adultery in one's heart

Father Nathan Monk just did a piece focusing on a passage that's always been a confusing one for me. The Sermon on the Mount has a section in it where Jesus goes over a lot of sins, and he takes time on each one to further clarify the meaning and severity of these sins. What Jesus says about adultery has always been of particular interest to me:

Matthew 5:27 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

It's interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One of them is personal; lust has, to be honest, been one of my biggest weaknesses throughout most of my life. The other issue is that I find the typical Christian interpretation of this passage to be confusing; is it literal or hyperbolic? Perhaps not surprisingly, these two issues end up being quite intertwined.

Starting with the interpretation issue for those not familiar with the Christian take on this passage, it's like this: verse 28 is totally literal, 29 and 30 are completely hyperbolic. Now while it's good that Christians aren't literally encouraging people to maim themselves over temptation, it seems strange to me this sudden change of gears in just one verse. Why is 28 literal when the rest is not? It seems strange for Jesus to make a jump like that, right in the middle of a thought.

This is where my particular flavor of temptation to lust comes in, and has been a point of contention between me and several pastors. Yes, I have had a problem with lust, but look at how Jesus talks about it in verse 28: "...anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." If this is literal, there are problems both generally and particular to my own flavor of lust. Generally, the problem is that adultery in Judaism is a capital offense, so if you've literally committed adultery, you should be stoned to death, and so should the woman you lusted after! Does anyone believe that makes sense? Because it logically follows if you're taking it literally. As for my own lust, it has been my tendency that when I see an attractive person, I might be likely to imagine them naked, but I almost never fantasize about having sex with them; I just want to appreciate their attractiveness, and while I admit it is indeed lust, am I really "committing adultery in my heart" so to speak?

This is part of the problem of taking it literally: Jesus does seem to be saying that it's the act of fantasizing sex that is the problem, yet we get told that looking at someone naked is a problem in itself. I strongly disagree, as I am quite capable of looking at nude people without it being sexual at all. Even when I look at someone nude and do feel that I'm lusting after them, it's usually not fantasizing about sex, so does verse 28 apply? A literal interpretation of verse 28 is, in my opinion, really far too problematic. That's not to say that Jesus isn't saying something important about lust, or that lust isn't necessarily a sin in itself, but making it the exact equivalent of adultery? It doesn't hold water as far as I'm seeing.

So why do Christians want to make that leap to literal interpretation? I think a lot of conservative Christians have this desire to take the Bible as literally as possible...but not encourage cutting off hands or gouging out eyes, I guess? As I've heard it said many a time, cutting off your hand will maybe stop you from masturbating, but lust is in your brain, and you can't cut that off. I think there's more hyperbole going on in the Bible than a lot of conservative Christians give credit, even--and maybe especially--in the words of Jesus.

Agnostic Theism

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a crisis of faith that was induced by a very powerful email sent to me by Steve Wells, the editor of the Skeptics’ Annotated Bible. If you don't care to follow the link and read it, the short version is that he claims followers of God are a lot like Trump supporters: it doesn't seem to matter what the object of adoration actually does, it's somehow all excusable because we just have faith he's terrific.

I see this in Trump supporters, but as a Christian who is appalled at Trump’s politics and personal life, it's jarring to see that sort of misplaced devotion framed with God at the center. It's especially jarring because really, he's right. Christians are going to do that; it's sort of our thing, isn't it?

There's a lot of unsavory stuff in the Bible, but we just assume God had a good reason for drowning everyone in the story of Noah. There's a lot of unsavory stuff in history, but you chalk it up to “free will” and maybe man's fallen nature. Then, there's a lot of unsavory stuff that we're living through right here in the present, and for me at least, it gets harder to explain how there can be an all-knowing, all-powerful God who supposedly loves humanity.

Watching the acceleration of genocide in Gaza for the past 16 months, as Israelis seem to have no conscience and the American government seems to have no limit to what we will support, it got to me. I was suffering just watching it unfold on my phone; how much more the Palestinians actually living through it?

And then Americans handed over the government to President Trump once again, with virtually the blessing of the Democratic party, who showed very little interest in winning through taking the moral high ground. President Trump, upon taking office, quickly took us on a refresher course on the Third Reich, attacking transgender people, rounding up non-white people into concentration camps, and consolidating political power.

Where is God in all of this? I've been struggling for a year with my faith, and in that time, God has answered none of my prayers and the world has proceeded to go from bad to worse. It feels like something is broken, both in the world and in my connection to God. I've been through hard times, and it felt like God was somehow with me through the struggles. But this last year? I talk to God and it feels like nobody is listening.

I see so many videos of the Palestinians in this brief ceasefire coming home to see Gaza in piles of rubble and bones, and they praise God to be alive. Where does that faith come from? I can't fathom it. I only praise God that so many of my friends and family are not alive to see the destruction of what they once held dear. Is that really faith of any sort, or just cynicism?

I continue to call myself a Christian because I don't know what to label what I seem to have become in the last year. I've prayed, probably more than any other time in my life. I have gone to church and studied the Bible. I've talked to pastors. I just keep wondering that same question; where is God in all of this? He doesn't seem to be in Palestine or America.

"Process"

I now have over twenty subscribers to my Substack, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, because I believe all of my Substack posts combined have less than twenty likes. I suppose it's not like I've written any Pulitzer Prize worthy stuff, but I do wonder why the subscribers are there. What exactly are they subscribing for?

I thought I would talk about my writing process, because I think it's a little unusual, and that may be a big part of why my writing in general isn't better. Sometimes (I don't think it's happened since I joined Substack) I turn out something really extraordinarily good. When I was in college, I took a creative writing course, and the instructor told me my final piece was the only one out of the class that she thought was suitable for publishing. I was surprised, both because I didn't think it was that great, and because there were works by other students that I thought were quite extraordinary.

But this is the thing--well, two things--about that story. It was a story about caffeine addiction, and it was mostly autobiographical, which is to say, I didn't make much of it up. Secondly, my method of writing it was to drink four large cups of coffee and let myself loose on a ream of notepaper. The story just came out of me like I couldn't contain it.

That's not completely atypical of my writing process for most things I write, except for the caffeine. I don't plan it out, write an outline, make a rough draft, edit and revise. When I know what I intend to write about, it just comes out on paper, then I double check for typos. The advantage of this odd, very personal process is that my writing has a certain rawness to it that I like, and it's very cohesive, because it was something that I could hold in my head all at once. The drawback of this process is that I've never developed the discipline for the longer process of rough drafting and revising that would work for writing that could potentially be greater than what I could hold in my head all at once.

Like most writers, I'd love to write a book, but I could certainly never produce a novel, because I don't believe that I have the creativity to craft a plot of a story longer than twenty pages maximum. I could write a collection of essays, but it seems proper that they would be cohesive to a central topic, and really (obvious to anyone who has read much of my writing) my mind tends to be all over the place.

And then there's blogging and Substack. I don't know what, among the many things that I write about, really interests people. I get few likes and even less feedback, even though one of the main reasons I write is the hope that it will spark dialogue. It's not that I'm really writing for a target audience anyway, as I mostly just use it as an outlet to put what's in my head out there to see what others think. A lot of the time, what I'm about is not giving answers to what is going on in the world, but coming up with questions that I think need to be asked.

Is that really sufficiently good writing? Twenty-odd people may think so, or maybe people on Substack freely subscribe the way some people on Facebook make "friends" with 600 people. I don't know, I just keep writing. Give me feedback sometimes, though?

I debunk transphobia so you don't have to...

So, what I have below is an exchange I had on another social media platform with a transphobe that I found intetesting as they managed in just a few short paragraphs to run through the full gamut of transphobic tropes, giving me an excellent opportunity to address them all in one comment. Since it was so exhaustive, I decided to make it a full post.

Basically, your biological sex is indeed determined by what's ‘between your legs’.

No, it's not, and that's one of the big problems with you transphobes: almost none of you understand the biological definition of sex. (You don't understand gender, either, but I'll get to that...) Many biologists talk about "3G sex", which is genes, gonads, and genitals. Typically, people of the female sex have the XX genotype, ovaries, and a vagina, while people of the male sex have the XY genotype, testes, and a penis. However, somewhere between 1% and 3% of the population has a mismatch between these characteristics for a variety of reasons. Generally, biology recognizes the ability to create gametes (eggs or sperm) as the most crucial of the three, but most transphobes are more obsessed with one of the other two. There are people with penises who have ovaries and people with vaginas who have testes, and of course, chromosome makeup can be all over the place with women who are XY, men who are XX, not to mention other chromosome combinations like XXY, XYY, XXX, XXXY, etc. I didn't even get to the SRY gene, which is far more important than chromosomes.

Your supposed ‘Gender’, which used to be used as a synonym for biological sex, is a compete fiction that is nothing but a Social Construct that has no basis in fact, anymore than it does in language.

No, "gender" was originally a linguistic term, and the English language doesn't have gender, unlike a number of other languages, like Spanish, which has two genders, German, which has three genders, and Kinyarwanda, which has sixteen genders. Of course, the concept of "gender" was later extended to the classification not just of nouns but of people, but once again, many cultures have more than two genders, including ancient Israelites, who had nine "genders" that they recognized. Many cultures in the world have three or four genders that are recognized, and while you can certainly call genders a "social construct" that doesn't make them any less real. I mean *money* is a social construct, so are you going to throw your paycheck in the trash? Probably not, I'm guessing.

It is a misguided attempt to align the spectrum of personality and behaviour with the biological sexes. As stated, it is both misguided, and irrelevant.

Well, you can tell that to all the people in the world who consider themselves to have gender and see how it goes. There are thousands of "women" right here in the United States who, unbeknownst to them, have the XY genotype, and are therefore by some estimations "male", so tell them they have to use the men's restroom and participate in men's sports and see how they take it.

No-one can possibly ‘feel’ like something else. They have no actual basis upon which to make such a determination. At best they can only claim to feel like what *they think* it's like to be the other; and that's fine.

Funny thing is, by that same logic, I as a cisgender person can't tell what it "feels like" to be my own gender, since I've never experienced anything else, and the same can be said of you. All that I know is that transgender people almost always feel a sense of relief at transitioning, whether that may be wearing different clothing, taking hormones that align with their gender, or having surgery. (The regret rate for gender-affirming surgery among transgender people is lower than 1%, which is almost unheard of for surgical procedures. Knee replacement has a regret rate somewhere around 25%, for instance.) I think the fact that these people feel happier living as the gender they believe they are is pretty good evidence that they actually know what they are.

They can dress and act and live like they think a member of the opposite sex dresses, acts, and lives; but they aren't that. They are just cos playing by wearing a woman or man suit.

Yes, another fan favorite of the transphobes, "cosplaying as a woman/man". Yet nobody can explain who is being harmed if that's really all that it is! Transgender women aren't attacking cisgender women in restrooms. Transgender women aren't dominating cisgender women in sports. (Also, so many transphobes ignore transgender men for some reason, some of whom are doing quite well in men's sports, and would cause a commotion if they were forced into a women's restroom, but whatever.) In short, these attacks on transgender people are completely baseless. I've been interacting with transphobes like you online for years now, patiently letting you make your case, and without fail, it never holds water. There's no real understanding of biology, sociology, medical technology, or psychology, all of which are fields of science that in consensus agree with transgender people and not the transphobes. You're against this harmless, powerless, small portion of society for reasons that make no logical sense and deny science at the same time.

One of *them*

I like to try and assume the best of people, even though I'm a bit of a cynic, so I'm prepared for disappointment. Sometimes it can nonetheless be a bit shocking to be let down.

There's an understanding that I have about Christianity, and--silly me!--it's based on the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. There's this idea that is driven home repeatedly by Jesus and the various New Testament writers that foundationally, Christianity is supposed to be about love.

In the gospels, Jesus says that the whole of religion can be summed up by two rules, paraphrased by me as A: love God, and B: love people. The Apostle Paul has a whole chapter about love in the letter of 1 Corinthians. The Apostle John talks extensively about how God is love and how we should be loving because of this. So yeah, love, right?

Unfortunately, in America, there's this stereotype of Christians that are far from loving. They're harsh, judgmental, bullying, and downright bigoted. I say unfortunate because I have, for a large portion of the 30 years I have been a Christian, not seemed to have met these Christians. I thought they were actually rather rare, perhaps largely living in red states. On social media, I have often assured people that these stereotypical Christians were actually a quite vocal minority who seemed larger because of how loud and obnoxious they were.

And then this week I learned something. A lot of Christians voted for President Trump. Like, not just a sizeable chunk, but a majority of them. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%, actually. I had to ask myself, who are these people? They're certainly not Christian leftists like me. They're not not even conservative but reasonable people like my wife, who despite having a lot of conservative values has never voted for Trump. No, I had to face up to it: it's them. It's those kind of Christians.

They're not a minority at all. The ones who claim persecution when someone says, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas!" The ones who consider the unborn more worthy of life than born people. The ones who want to legislate LGBTQ people out of existence. The ones who support Israeli genocide. It's those kind of Christians, and they're actually everywhere.

Maybe I should have guessed. It's different when you're an apparently white cishet Christian yourself and you interact with these people. They can be quite charming when you're considered one of them. But how many times have I seen the mask slip, even here in very blue California? Let someone know that you support the rights of Palestinians? Let someone know you don't condemn LGBTQ people or abortion? Let someone know that you *gasp* might consider not voting Republican? The incredulity, the confusion, even the ugliness and the anger that comes out can be shocking. Often, there's even an accusation that, "You're not a real Christian!"

I was wrong about American Christians. This is who they are. With Trump in power and Republicans controlling all three branches of government, I fear they're just going to get worse, too, out of boldness.

I've said a few times, and I've heard it from others, that sometimes it's embarrassing to admit that you're a Christian in America. I feel it now more than ever. I am an American Christian, and I don't want to be. God help us.