Despite my beliefs and activism, I do recognize that religious people generally do have good intentions. Most of the time, they want people to suffer less and be happier, same as me, same as anybody else. We’re a social species. The question that needs to be asked, then, is the following: if so many religious people want to have a positive influence on the world, then why is so much evil done by religion? Good people doing evil must be at play. I have realized that it’s people’s inaccurate convictions about the operation of the universe that are the root cause of the problem. With that insight, one can understand how parents who have a sick child with a completely curable illness can wind up praying their son or daughter to death instead of going to the doctor, something that happens almost monthly in the United States. It’s not that these parents didn’t love their child, it’s not that they didn’t want their child to get better as much as any other parent, they just had bad ideas about how to help the situation. There’s only one institution in and of itself that tells people not only that it is okay to hold bad ideas about the way the world works, but that they must hold on to those bad ideas as a matter of faith and principle. This strikes me as a recipe for a tremendous amount of suffering. Because I see this reality, there is nothing for me to do but pull out the claws and fangs against religion, which is what I have wound up dedicating my life to.
It’s interesting for me to try to understand this point in time from a historic perspective. If one looks at any study that’s tracked the religiosity of the United States, they will realize that the U.S.’s religiosity goes in waves. What I can say with confirmable certainty is that the atheists and the secularists are growing at a clip that is unprecedented in any era.
Information is anathema to religion, which is in large part why I think the secularists are currently winning the battle of ideas. We live in an age with the internet. Information is out there. There was a time when, if someone wanted an answer to a religious question, a person went to a pastor or a priest. No longer is that the case. Everybody is beginning to learn about the moral monstrosities that are in the Bible. That understanding could create a permanent skid in our direction. If we ever get to a point where religion is eradicated or marginalized to a point where it’s not a threat anymore, where it’s not harming anyone, I would view that as a victory.
I love what I’m doing with my life. If, for some reason, I wind up as a shoe shiner sometime later, I will still be a secular activist. As long as religion exists, as long as the idea exists that we should be proud to hold bad beliefs, indefensible beliefs, I will be opposing them.
IX.
______________
Damon Fowler: Ostracism in Bastrop
“I do spend probably a little bit more time than I should on religion, and I have a certain amount of hostility to it. I think the most rational reason for it is because of the harm that I see it does…
Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that.
Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.”
Given the location of his upbringing, Damon Fowler wasn’t a likely candidate to be featured in this book. Damon grew up in a poor, rural section of Louisiana. He always had plenty of questions about Christianity and no one around him to talk to about his skepticism. In high school, he defied his family when he spoke out about a long-standing graduation prayer. He worked with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and his school was persuaded to remove it from the ceremony.
The day after graduation, Damon came home to find that his parents had thrown all of his possessions out on the lawn. He moved in with his brother in Texas, trying to restart a life that he had hoped would include college and a career in animation. Hearing about his story, “The Friendly Atheist,” Hemant Mehta, another subject in this book, set up a scholarship drive for Damon on his website. It raised over $30,000. Despite his hardships, Damon doesn’t regret his activism and is grateful for the incredible generosity he has received from the secular community.
I was born in Louisiana and grew up in the city of Bastrop. I went to various Assembly of God and Baptist churches throughout my youth. I was forced to go to church twice every Sunday and on Wednesday as well. I have two brothers and two sisters, and they were put through the same thing. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family. When I was younger, I never knew nonreligious people and was always taught to view other religions negatively. I was told that atheists were bad people, that they steal and do drugs.
I never read the Bible, like almost all other Christians in Louisiana. When I actually learned about some of the things that were in it, such as passages where God commands people to kill everyone, including children and livestock, that was very disturbing to me. I was baffled at how other people didn’t find that troubling, too.
The first time that I accepted Jesus into my heart was when I was four years old. When I was five, my mom remarried, and my step-dad came into my life. He was pretty religious, and he got even more religious when he married my mom. I think they played off of each other’s religiousness. They began praying more often, reading the Bible, and going to church together. They believed that Christianity would influence God to give them money, even though they didn’t know how to maintain or manage their finances. Their religiosity got more intense over the years. I think my mom was mentally unstable; she probably still is. My step-dad has always been rather gullible and often believes what other people tell him without thinking about anything on his own. In retrospect, it seems that Christianity was a crutch because we were a very poor family. I think my parents used religion for hope.
I remember being pressured into being a Christian during my entire childhood. I was constantly asked if I knew Jesus. I didn’t want to say no because if I had, I thought that I would be punished. Church sermons were always torturous for young people. Preachers would constantly say that we would burn in hell for eternity if we did certain things or had certain thoughts. Even though I was questioning religion, the church had a pretty big impact on me. I thought religion might be stupid, but I also thought that there was a possibility that it was true, that I might burn in hell if I didn’t believe in it.
My family and I always went to two different churches. One is called Assemblies of God, which is in Sterlington, Louisiana, and the other is Trinity Assembly of God in Bastrop, Louisiana. The churches seemed very much like cults. If my family stopped going to church or missed one Sunday, members of the churches would start calling us to try to find out what was wrong. They were very involved with everyone’s personal lives and tried to tell everyone how to act and how to live. One preacher would often give examples of things that kids might be doing and say with certainty that their behavior was the result of the devil. He also believed that Harry Potter was witchcraft. It was very difficult to watch because people in the church would take anything the preacher said and apply it to their lives without question.