More than two billion people self-identify as Christian. 1.6 billion folks identify as Muslim. 1.2 billion identify as Hindu. Together, these three groups amount to almost five billion human beings.
The main features of these religions are projection, superstition, custom, and wishful thinking. In my opinion, no religion amounts to a genuine philosophy of life, if by philosophy of life one means a reasonable set of beliefs, rooted in a fair appraisal of human reality, that lead to thoughtful self-determination. Instead, religion provides dogmatic homilies coupled with primitive aggressiveness and rejects the very idea of life philosophy. You are not to figure things out on your own: you are to listen and obey.
Why do billions of people embrace this subservience? The main reasons must be comfort, custom, the sense of specialness that comes with tribal identity, a way to distinguish “us” from “them,” a need for magical answers to life’s grim questions, and a basic hatred of and antipathy toward reason. Think of what it means that billions upon billions of people are untruthful enough, disingenuous enough, hateful enough, and gullible enough to embrace this. What is a lone free-thinker to do?
Well, he or she can expect to be hated with that fiery hatred that is at the heart of religion, that same fiery hatred that created an Old Testament god. And so, the lone freethinker must stand up, advance, create his own philosophy of life (which may or may not look like kirism), all the while understanding that if his views get known he will be despised by billions. He advances anyway because he has set himself a simple goal: to do the right thing, the truthful thing, the thing that helps rather than plunders.
The great nineteenth-century freethinker Robert Ingersoll put it this way: “All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.”
Indeed. We see that age-old horror again today, as tens upon tens of millions of the religious cast their votes for a crime boss, rail against everything good, and support everything evil. No Catholic appears to care if all her nuns die in their convents from Covid-19. No evangelical Christian appears to care if children starve because their crime boss politicians refuse to vote for aid and relief. They are hell-bent on their same old crusade against reason, justice, honor, mercy, and the species itself. I do not know why they are on this crusade—I think it may be as simple as envy, envy of their betters—but they are on it and they have always been on it. That does make it hard on the lone freethinker, the lone kirist, the lone individual.
The odds are long. And the odds are also irrelevant. If the whole world is cruelly against you, your personal mandate remains exactly the same: do the next right thing. That is the essential message of kirism, that you stand up, with the many, if there are many, or alone, if there is no one else. Let the billions tsk-tsk at your self-determination. They have their hard beds to sleep on; you can sleep easy.
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Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]
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