The most dishonest position possible is knowing what the facts are and choosing to pretend that they are not so. This is exactly what the devout must do to continue believing. Thus, the devout are some of the most dishonest people that you are likely to meet.
The truth rarely matters to the devoutly religious. If it mattered to them, they would not be devoutly religious. The devout would not have faith in anything at all!
If they embraced reality at the expense of their faith, they would get none of the rewards and all those terrible punishments. Of course, it never occurs to them that fighting reality is impossible. It never occurs to them that those that fight reality must always face the consequences of their dishonesty.
As with any form of dishonesty, there are consequences for holding faith in anything. Only honest men can deal with reality as it is. Dishonest men hide from reality and pretend things are not what they are. To the extent they need this knowledge to deal with reality, the dishonest person cannot do so.
That is the harm in religion. It is the refusal to know reality and to accept whatever one wishes to believe. Assertions accepted on faith are almost always wrong about anything of consequence.
Faith is the epistemological equivalent of choosing to walk around blindfolded while declaring that you can see. But you cannot see. Reality is what it is, despite you trying to make it whatever you want it to be.
If you blind yourself to reality, then you cannot deal with it properly. You render yourself unable to deal with reality as it really is.
If you accept that morality is determined by the arbitrary decree from above, then you will never discover an objective morality in this world. You will never discover a proper moral code to guide your actions. When you cannot achieve happiness in the real world, you will have wasted your life.
If you accept that this life does not matter, then you will sacrifice everything in this life for happiness in the afterlife or the next life. This life will be a guardian of misery, which is what many religions teach. The thing is, this is the only life you get. If you squander this life in preparing for the next, this is all you get and you will have ruined your only life for nothing.
This is the only life you get. Do not waste it on accepting arbitrary claims for no reason. Those ideas cannot help you achieve happiness in this world. No, they are more likely to frustrate you and to prevent you from achieving happiness in the only life you will ever get.
And this is the great tragedy of every major religion; they encourage you to throw away your happiness in this world for happiness in the life after death. They encourage you to throw away your life in this world for nothing.
Every major religion of Earth is selling you the ultimate scam. Similar to those people demanding that you give your hard-earned money away for a timeshare you never get to use, religions are asking you to throw away your life for a cloud paradise that exists only on paper.
There is no life after death. This is all you get. Live your life for the sake of your happiness here on this Earth. Do not throw it away for the delusion of some unreachable paradise that you will never reach.
Is Biblical Faith “Justified Trust”?
Some might think that by “faith” the Bible means “justified trust”. Many people from other religions make this kind of claim. I am about to present several Bible verses to disprove this notion for Christianity.
One can study the religious texts of other religions, present similar evidence, and come to similar conclusions.
The Bible never uses faith in the sense of justified trust. By faith, it means blindly believing things for no good reason and against all reason. It openly tells you not to see reality but to just believe.
Why does it do this? Because that is the only thing religions can offer anyone. Which is to have faith in empty assertions that have nothing to do with reality, empty assertions of promises beyond the observable world.
That is why every religion always offers immaterial, unearthly rewards. Because they cannot offer anything that relates to reality. All it can do is appeal to emotion and irrational, baseless desires that have nothing to do with reality
For it to be justified trust, there would have to be a justification. Baseless appeals to emotions are not justifications. And therefore, Biblical faith is not justified trust. For that, they would require evidence and there is never any evidence for any of this. And as we shall see, there is never supposed to be, that is the entire point of faith.
Bible Quotes
I took all passages from New American Standard translations of the Bible. This is a translation that is a better word-for-word translation than many others, without being overly difficult to read.
I added all the emphasis you see for the sake of clarity.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”
Proverbs 3:5–6
You should trust blindly in the Lord. Do not trust in the Lord because he offers you demonstrable and real benefits. You should instead choose to believe in him because it is emotionally satisfying.
Do not believe me? Proverb 3 further clarifies what it means a few lines later:
Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and turn away from evil.
This is a command to do what the “LORD” says not because of the evidence of your senses, but because you fear an angry despot. Yes, the LORD says that he loves you. However, anyone that commands you to fear him does not really love you.
Just because it is emotionally satisfying to believe something does not make it true. Nor does it make it moral to believe in something which is not true.
It is no better if you choose to believe something is true just because someone threatens you. Yes, if someone sticks a gun to your head and says that you better believe them, tell them you believe them.
But that does not mean that you should actually take what they say seriously. Truth is not determined at the point of a gun nor by a lightning bolt from high above. No matter how much your god threatens you or claims to love you, the facts are what the facts are.
You should look at reality and study it instead of believing things just because your imaginary friend love bombs you or threatens you.
“Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Hebrews 11:1
Faith is the acceptance of claims for no reason, as this makes clear. To exercise faith is not to do so because you see a reason to do so, but because you want it to be true.
