When I was a child I was exposed to two ideas with the idea that they were good and true. First was religious belief in God and second was political belief in socialism. Both of these had large and powerful organizations supporting them, both of these were supposed to do good for people through those organizations, and both were presented as requiring my faith in them to make their good magic happen.

     To fill in some details, the Reform-Judaism God I was presented with was an Old-Testament version without any New-Testament stuff. Judaism is utterly satisfying in an Occam's-razor sense with one god with no offspring, no afterlife, being judged on our behavior rather than some concept of our attitude, comfortable that the world is fine with both Jews and gentiles, and our holidays being almost all based on calendar or history. The Last Supper of Christianity was a Passover seder which was a centuries-old tradition by then. The politically-liberal socialism presented to me was a government-centric economy with social control. The near-universal deviation from Democrat ideals in our Philadelphia-suburban political universe was a choice of Republican civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King over Democrat leaders like George Wallace with no mention that these civil-rights leaders were from the Republican side because anything Republican was Bad by definition.

     By my tenth birthday I had serious doubts about God. There was no evidence that religious believers were better people and faith was an anethma to me. In matters of reason and fact I was tought to question authority (complete with upside-down QUESTION-AUTHORITY buttons) and I saw no reason to change that in matters of theology. I had role models like Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and my uncle Burril B. Fine who were aggressively and derisively against religious faith. When asked why Job continued to be faithful to God my uncle said because he was an idiot. If something is real and good and true, then it should be understandable through reasoned belief without blind faith.

     By my eighteenth birthday I had similarly-serious doubts about liberal politics. The compelling argument for me was that government never seems to solve problems and, more often, only creates more problems. Modern liberalism, formerly called progressivism, is the notion that more government and bigger government with greater power is going to make things better. That hasn't worked and I realized it's not going to work, not because we're not doing it right, but because it's inherently evil.

 

I'm going to tell another story here. I went to a talk about a bunch of goofy mathematical methods, "solutions looking for problems" as I call them, algorithms that are, at best, more complex and more mysterious repackaging of simple ideas that work without the fancy fluff. As I try to recall, these were things like genetic algorithms, tabu search, GRASP, and maybe neural networks. (I believe the speaker was Harvey Greenberg from Colorado.) What convinced me that he knew these techniques weren't real is he put simulated annealing on the list, a genuine, useful, fascinating algorithm that I actually used to solve a hard problem in my work. He gave simulated annealing three minutes of the two hours and then dove into the fluffy stuff. He used the validity of one method to lend credibility to the others.      Karl Marx did something similarly clever. He started with atheism, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." In my experience the smarter people get, the less likely they are to believe in a specific deity or to have religious faith in general. So somebody like me who rejects theism is immediately attracted to Marxism just for that and only later might realize the rest of it doesn't make any sense.

     Once I realized that our rights and values can't come from government if we want good things to happen, I had no desire whatsoever to scurry back to God. Religion is no way out of socialism. I believe in traditional-American-foundation rights and responsibilities and values because the world has worked better that way, should work better that way, and will work better that way. I think that makes me a utilitarian libertarian.

     By my twenty-fifth birthday I realized that religion and socialism were really the same thing. Deep within most people's human psyche is a strong desire for an indubitable, collective authority and a willingness to cede control and rights and property to it. I'm not the only one blessedly free of this need, but most people seem to have it. There are many good and wonderful people who accept this authority with personal satisfaction and without harming others, but I learned that much, if not most, of our world's evil comes from this collectivism.

     Don't get me wrong, there are very-bright people who believe in the gods of institutional religions, who choose God over a bare, godless view of the universe, but the fraction rejecting religious faith as a world view goes up as general intelligence goes up. I believe God is a choice rather than a mandate for smart people while more average people feel driven to believe in some religion. I call that innate urge to have religious faith the God Gene.

So who am I, what are my credentials, and why should my opinion be interesting to anybody?      Well, I'm a Bright and Unconverted observer looking at how more-usual people respond to the mental forces behind religion.      Just as Ptolemy's model of the solar system required increasing adjustments called epicycles to explain planetary movement not otherwise explained, religious faith deflects questions that a logical and reasonable person would have to ask about it.      I'm not talking about semantic questions like, "If God can do anything, then can he make a rock so big he can't move it?" or "If God is the history of the universe, then what existed before God?" or even "If God created everything, then who created God?" One may ask similar questions about the Big Bang without doubting the fundamental soundness of physics.      Whatever large and conscious spirit there may be in the entirety of the cosmos can still care what happens to some insects called the human race. My major beef with Judaism is the amount of time the observent spend worshiping their deity instead of doing whatever good that deity might expect of them. I noticed that Jewish liturgy in the Saturday Sabbath services I attended suggest that God's plan to fix what's wrong with the world is on the verge of being revealed, presumably by next Saturday, and that same liturgy was in the Jewish services thousands of years ago, so that revelation probably isn't coming anytime soon. At least it's just one god judging us on what we do. The rules of conduct mostly pertain to matters of law. Personal prescription surrounding diet, hygiene, and sex make sense given the diseases of the time.      Christianity leaves questions unanswered that we would never tolerate in a world view outside religion. How can it be monotheistic with three gods? If Christ was resurrected going to heaven after dying, then howcum other good people who die and go to heaven aren't similarly resurrected, is Christ dead or alive? How are were supposed to be good people if we have to figure out the will of God in our spirit and soul when we can't possibly fathem the complexity of the will of God? Are those in the afterlife still somewhere out there or are they truly lost and gone forever like the Jews believe? If it's impossible to be a good person without being Christian, then why did God create a world that is 70% non-Christian? Maybe there are answers, maybe not, but any other pursuit of knowledge or truth would not leave these doubts without pursuit of more and deeper knowledge. These are epicycles in the planetary orbits of Christian faith, far more, I feel, than Judaism.      Islam seems to have even more intolerance of others built into its principles. I believe that a good belief system will be tolerant of differently-founded belief systems. I don't know enough about Buddhism or Hinduism to know how they feel about these kinds of issues, but I have been thrown out of a Hindu temple because I was not a believer (and did not look like a believer).      The universe may have consciousness and order well beyond that contained in the equations of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, or Albert Einstein. There's no reason the universe can't contain both physical science and godliness. The firm insistance of incompatibility between religion and scientific observation among religious types I know makes me increasingly skeptical of religion's desire actually to explain the universe. Atheists seem more comfortable with religious people than religious people seem with atheists or people of different religions.      In a nutshell, I believe one can be a good person with religious faith of many kinds and one can be a good person without religious faith. There's room in this world for all kinds of people.

     I do wonder from time to time what survival mandate is served by an innate, presumably-genetic drive towards irrational religion. It's easy to understand the survival mandate of similarly-irrational sex drives as celibacy is not a recipe for reproductive survival, but I don't see similar survival value from genetically-predisposed belief in some collection of gods. Just as sex drive begets rapists, necrophiliacs, perverts, and pedophiles, religion leads to crusades, inquisitions, and jihads.

     In Old-Testament fashion I judge actions rather than feelings. I believe most believers in gods are good people with good values and the horrors of organized religion come from the organized part rather than the religious part. Still, theistic faith is the catalyst of the horror show of crusades, inquisitions, and jihads.

     There is one asymmetry between the collectivisms of religion and socialism. There are a lot more good religious people than good socialists. Good practicing religious people fill our synagogues, churches, temples, and mosques all over the world while good practicing communists or socialists seem confined to the kibbutim in Israel.

     Bad socialists have killed 262 million since its emergence as a major political force in 1912 (I'm using Woodrow Wilson's election as the starting date) and bad religion has given us myriad centuries of tyranny and agony.

     Cancer can help people lose weight and avoid unhealthy foods, but I still maintain a strong negative feeling towards it. Similarly, while religion and politics can do good things, for nearly half a century I have maintained strong resistance against both of them.

     It's not "either-or." I can figure out neither religious people who despise socialism nor political liberals who are against religion. They are two flavors of the same bad food. My quote summarizing all this is, "Religion is the right profile of the monster whose left side is politics."

     One may say, "Adam, do you think religious people and socialists are deluded?" Actually, yes I do. "Are you sure you're not similarly deluded?" No, I'm not, but my delusions are better. I haven't seen atheistic crusades, inquisitions, or jihads and I haven't seen capitalist or anarchist lashings, lynchings, gulags, gas chambers, or genocides. I find my reality or delusions more pleasant than theirs.