Religion As a Mirror: Are People Inherently Good?

 

Why are atheists passionate about their non-religion?  I mean, if you truly believe in nothing, wouldn’t the appropriate action and emotion be, well, nothing? Why would you bring energy into nothingness?  That makes no sense.  True atheism would be spiritual disinterest with no energy expended whatsoever.

So what causes people to be passionate about nothingness? (And I’m not talking about the Buddhist nothingness, that’s different and does have a religious context.)

I have a working theory, which is that these atheists actually do believe in God, but are so terrified at the thought of their own unworthiness that they violently reject God to protect themselves from the pain of their on spiritual unworthiness.

“If I don’t believe in Hell, then I can’t be sent there.”  But if you don’t believe in hell, then that entire sentence makes no sense. 

Religion, when applied faithfully, serves as a mirror – you see yourself and all your good and bad aspects.  People who reject religion aren’t rejecting the mirror, they’re rejecting the reflection because they can’t deal with the reality of their own imperfections.

This brings me to a fundamental philosophical question:  Are people basically good?

A lot of people, especially people in various forms of “love and light” spiritual bypass will say, yes, people are basically good and “turn evil” through corruption, etc.

But if one removes this distortion and answers the question honestly, the answer is much more troubling.  Throughout human history, people have not been basically good.  In fact, most people are pretty fucked up.  That’s not to say they’re “bad,” but they’re not inclined to goodness.

Thus the mirror test.  Some people look at the mirror with rose-colored glasses and say “I’m all good, even the bad parts are good, isn’t this wonderful?”  Well, no, it isn’t.  Humans are selfish.  They kill.  They fight.  They hurt each other.  They’re lazy.  They’re corrupt.  Outside forces didn’t corrupt people, people themselves did that.

It’s hard-wired into our brains to kill, to steal, to rape, to lie, to hurt.  Our primitive brains tell us we need to do these things to survive and pass on our genes.  The fantasy that people long ago were good people is 100% false.  People long ago were literal savages and did horrible things to others without any second thought.  They had no mirror.  They had no angel on their shoulder.  They were fucked up people doing fucked up things.

And the worst part? Every one of us walking the earth is a genetic byproduct of those fucked-up people.  Nobody on earth comes from a pure, good lineage. We all come from savages.

And when you take off the glasses and realize you’re as fucked up as “those other” bad people, or at least on the same spectrum, and that is in fact the human lineage, it can be jarring.

No, we are not all divine light.  We’re mostly fucked up people from fucked up lineages.  And that fucked-up-ness is literally the reason we are here.

Some people look at that and see hopelessness.  We’re all doomed.  Therefore there cannot possibly be a god, because that would mean God would condemn his entire creation and what would be the point of that?   If we’re products of the universe then the universe must also be fucked up and it’s all for nothing.

Some look at this reality and deny it.  No, no.  Everyone is good, we just need to “integrate our shadow” and recognize the divine light in every other person.  All is one. 

Different justification, same result:  nothing changes.

Religion, when applied properly, holds up the mirror, shows us the evil inside, allows us to identify it as evil and reject it, and serves a path toward eradicating that evil and building a good life.

Now, here some would say, well, we’ll never get this.  Only a small fraction of people on Earth are even mostly good.  Another small fraction are mostly evil.  And the huge majority are in this broad spectrum of “fucked-up-ness” and every time we make an effort to get better, we just fall right off or find some other avenue to vent our evil.

The promise of religion isn’t that you’ll achieve perfection on your own, but that you learn to identify good and evil and set your thoughts and actions more and more toward good.  You’re not perfect, but you seek betterment, not to gain something but to actually become a good person.

That in itself is an act of goodness.

God does not promise us perfection in this lifetime.  God does not promise us that if we go to church or follow his rules that everything will work out just fine.  In fact, all religions “promise” that the world around us is fucked up and there’s no getting around that because it’s literally in our DNA.  What God does promise is we don’t have to resign ourselves to this fate.  We can turn our gaze toward good and move – however imperfectly – toward the good.

Trying to bridge the gap through the “most people are good” delusion ignores the truth and denies the work.  Collapsing into denial is also a lie – it’s saying your DNA is more powerful than God. Which is nonsense.  It’s not easy.  It may feel hopeless at times.  You will fail far more often than you succeed.  But none of that overcomes the truth that goodness does exist and is available to us, no matter how fucked up our reflection in the mirror is.

At this point people will argue that this is exactly the language bad people use to control others.  And that’s true, it is.  Bad people are drawn to power, and especially religious power, because this is the ultimate means of control.  So yes, a lot of organized religion is corrupted and run by bad people.  Not most, certainly not all, but “the devil quotes scripture” in all its forms.

So critics point to bad people who misuse religion to get people to do very bad things.  Yes, this happens.  People also do very bad things for no reason at all.  The commonality isn’t religion, it’s people.  People do very bad things.

Religion can certainly be misused as a trap, but that doesn’t make religion itself bad.  God is still there, even if his word is being misused.  And rejecting God doesn’t make the bad stop happening, it’s throwing away every tool you have to become better than your DNA. 

Rejecting God actually makes it easier for bad people to manipulate and control you.  Notice how communist dictatorships all seek to stamp out all religion and impose atheism.  In order to give the evil complete control they need to stamp out any hope for goodness. Then they can control the language to make evil sound good with words like “equality.”  (“Equality” is one of those “nice-sounding” evil words that literally replaces a good concept (fairness) with a cruel and amoral measurement system.)

Those who seek power – and evil people are profoundly drawn to power – tend to be those most passionate about getting people to turn away from the mirror.  Don’t look at yourself and try to get better, look over here, this is your problem, and I can fix it and then you’ll feel good without having to try to be good.  This is a fundamental aspect of communism, but also every other oppressive, evil structure that has come about through human history.  Evil Roman emperors engaged in this deception.

There are modern “spiritual leaders” who also seek to bypass the mirror, or sell the idea there’s some magic fix where you wave a wand and the “evil structure” vanishes leaving our goodness in its place. And notice how they also seek to appoint themselves as the source of truth and the final arbiter or goodness, often under the false pretense of “freedom.”

The reflection in the mirror sucks.  It’s supposed to suck. That means you can see good and evil and that you don’t like the evil you see.  This is actually good!  It doesn’t mean you should collapse into shame, that’s another bypass.  You see the evil, you reject the evil and you change thoughts and behaviors.  And for this to happen, you need a clean, good, strong, accurate mirror.

And yes, breaking that mirror is very bad luck.