I was raised evangelical1 Christian, and let me tell you, Christians believe some crazy shit, and they hurt people. (They are not unique in this regard.)
In the 90s, when I was still religious, I loved apologetics, the defense of the faith. (Unfortunately, I also loved ApologetiX, the band answering the question “man, how cool would it be if Weird Al Yankovic were a Christian?”.)
I read books on how to defeat the arguments of new atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, and attended creationist seminars arguing against the theory of evolution. Much later, after leaving religion, I reread Dawkins and Hitchens, this time in order to understand rather than debate. The anger that these atheists expressed comforted me. I was hurt by religion too. I was adjusting to my new culture outside of American conservative Christianity.
For those authors and others in the new atheist movement, religion was to blame for the pain I experienced, and the pain that I caused, when I was religious. Man’s natural state is not one of homophobia, but the belief in a “magical sky fairy” introduced original sin into the world, and now we have misogyny, child abuse, war, slavery, and a conspicuous lack of gay wedding cakes.
At first, this felt as true to me in the early 2010s as it must have to new atheists in the 90s. (When they hear that I was homeschooled, people do tend to ask whether I was behind the curve socially.) If it weren’t for religion, I wouldn’t have had to experience a lot of the negative aspects of my childhood, and I wouldn’t have inflicted pain and judgement on other people who didn’t share my beliefs.
But to blame it on religion is, I think now, a mistake. Plenty of people are religious in ways that are in harmony with their larger communities, not at odds with them. What’s the difference between a kind pious family and a member of Westboro Baptist Church? It isn’t religion.
What is it instead? I think part2 of the answer is infinity.
Christians have been told that their words can be hurtful. That doesn’t really land, though, when we’re talking about eternal suffering. And for some churches, at least including mine, the people cared deeply about the impacts of their actions. That’s what “love the sinner, hate the sin” was trying to get at. They have been told, they know – it is hurtful to hear that your sex life or your divorce is an offense to god. But if a little emotional pain prompts you to go from damnation – a literal eternity of suffering, a forever hell in a literal way, a place of burning, weeping, gnashing of teeth, a lake of fire – to a place of eternal ecstasy, wouldn’t that be worth it?
The twist
It’s for this reason that I think that an eternal hell is to blame, not religion in general, not belief in magic, not the cultural norm of tithing to your place of worship. What my former sect of Christianity believed about hell was terrifying. I’m not exaggerating to say there is no horrible experience you’ve ever read about, no torture-porn movie, no real life pain you could ever experience, that is worse than hell. Even further, the worst thing that’s ever happened to the most miserable wretch that ever lived is better than anyone’s best day in hell. And, lest we forget, hell goes on forever.
Hell is infinitely horrible. Simple math, really. Hell is eternal + hell is bad = hell is eternally bad.
What else is infinite?
If something is evil enough, we might treat that evil as basically infinite. Child abuse falls into this category. There is nothing that some would not sacrifice to save children. The Amber Alert system is famously inefficient, contributing almost nothing to the world except a sea of ugly segmented-display billboards, at tremendous nationwide cost. “But if it saves even one child…”. Or consider how we think of child abusers in prison. People get a death’s head grin when discussing prison time for a child abuser, someone for whom no mistreatment is off limits. Everyone knows, or at least imagines, what happens to people like that in prison, and they fucking love it. The cruelty, as Democrats loved to say in the Trump era, is the point.
What else? The value of a human life is widely seen to be infinite by pro-life activists. If you could end 800-900 thousand miserable, torturous murders per year, what rules would you be willing to break? If you really believed that ending the life of an unborn child was morally equivalent to murder in a back alley, well… I mean why wouldn’t you bomb an abortion clinic? Why wouldn’t you consider the lives of people in the system that enables such a cruel evil to be, if not worthless, at least acceptable collateral damage. Do you spare any thought for the Nazi tabulator? Then I’m not sure why you’re worried about a medical billing specialist who happened to be working late when the bomb went off.
What’s interesting to me about abortion is that the pro-abortion left agrees with the framing of infinity. For the pro-life activist, human life is infinitely valuable, so ending human life must be morally wrong. For the pro-choice, human life is infinitely valuable, so abortion must not be ending a human life. Absurd! The only rational pro-choice stance is that human life is not infinitely valuable. The thing is, this is the only rational pro-life stance as well; if every abortion is a miscarriage of justice that justifies legal remedy, then every biological miscarriage is a similar tragedy that justifies not just sadness, but medical intervention. This is not scalable, and the pro-life community rightly doesn’t take it seriously.
What should you do with infinity?
In college, I took a history class taught by a lovely professor who said something that I strongly disagreed with at the time, when I was still religious, that “what is religion for if not to bring you closer to your fellow man?”. This was of obviously wrong; religion is fundamentally about your relationship to God.
But from my new viewpoint as a godless atheist, I think he had it right, and religion and spirituality are fundamentally about man’s relationship to man, at least once cultural Darwinism condemns two or more societies to the same arena. Whatever divinity founded the religion, whatever self-actualization was the original purpose of enlightenment, is either coopted or made vestigial in service of memetic survival.
So, at least in a realpolitik, Machiavellian sense, memes, including claims of infinity, are about how groups interact with each other – therefore religion is indeed fundamentally about how man relates to man.
And I think that, at least from the point of view of our society at large, we should dispute and delegitimize claims of infinity wherever we find them. If infinity is on our side, there is no reason to even hear another side; you could grant every counterclaim and still remain unmoved.
Both in law and in personal life, acting on belief in infinity causes unnecessary absurd outcomes and suffering.
In summary, my point is this: infinity makes for bad policy.