A selection that I particularly like from the red notebook. I like the first paragraph more than the rest:
The idea of God offends me on a spiritual level. I have a deep loyalty and spiritual connection to this world, the material world that I live in, and the other people in it. I live my life for this world and the people in it, not for the post-death approbation of God. God is oft invoked to give credence to us: a beautiful natural thing is said to be the work of God — is nature not beautiful enough as it is? A good outcome is ascribed to the goodness of God — are we not good enough to achieve a good outcome of our own accord by working together? The genesis of life over millions of years as an amazing and sublime fact; God takes credit for this as well: of course this world could never achieve such greatness without his help. Everything good about this world is attributed to God, who is not of this world, but who belongs to a different superior world. Without God, this world would be terrible. Thus love of God and hatred of this world go hand in hand. God is like a boss who would have his workers believe that they are nothing without him. In reality the boss is nothing without his warriors, just as God is nothing without the people who believe in him and worship him.
People claim to love others out of love of God. The argument goes something like this: I love God, and
also loves God / is loved by God / is a child of God / is a creation of God. Therefore I love
Things that [people claim] God explains:
- Love
- Beauty
- Morality
- Fortuitousness
- Life
- Afterlife
- Consciousness
- Creation
Some context: in the beginning of high school (2010) I was a militant atheist and believed that religion was responsible for all of the world’s problems. I would argue with people about the existence of God all the time as a way to make friends. I had a year-and-a-half long argument with a Muslim student that took place during lunch, after school, and on Facebook. Eventually I realized that religion wasn’t actually the cause of the world’s problems, rather it was a pretext used for lots of bad things. Really, religion was just a tool which could be used to justify good things or bad things. Around the same time that I realized this (sophomore year of high school), I figured out that people didn’t actually believe in religion because of all the complicated philosophical arguments that they gave to justify their beliefs. Rather, they just had faith — they believed for non-rational reasons. Now a lot of atheists think that the argument stops there — when a religious person admits that their beliefs are founded on faith, there’s nothing more that can be done: they have renounced their rationality. Well I didn’t think so! I figured that the argument could be continued to a discussion of the merits of faith. There are various benefits of faith in religion: community, perceived love of God, the security of feeling that you know the answers to the “big questions”, etc. I had a precise list of these benefits in mind when I thought of this, but I don’t remember them now. Anyway my argument was that all of these benefits could be attained without religion, so religion was unnecessary. The above is a refinement of this argument — it argues the stronger point that faith in God is actually wrong, not just unnecessary.
However, faith is not wrong in general. I think that it makes a lot of sense to have faith in people. I have faith in my friends (which includes myself, since I am one of my friends), which means that I have unjustified beliefs that they are trustworthy and that the things they try to do will succeed. I believe these things not because of rational justification, but because of ethics and pragmatics — ethics because believing in your friends is the right thing to do, and pragmatics because my friends are more likely to succeed at what they do if their friends (e.g. me) believe that they will. I do not have a belief that my friends will succeed easily, without trying — such a belief is dangerous and statements like “don’t worry about it ur rly smart you can get anything you want in life without trying” are unhelpful. I don’t ignore the obstacles and the things that make it hard to succeed, but I retain a belief that my friends will succeed in spite of these things. (Statements relying on faith in God like “don’t worry about it God will provide” are unhelpful in a similar way.) And obviously I’m not talking about “success” in the narrow capitalistic sense.
Similarly, I believe that we will overthrow capitalism and create a better world. I don’t believe this because I’ve weighed everything and figured out that it is likely, and in fact it is really unlikely. I believe it because it definitely won’t happen if we don’t believe that it will.
Revolutionary Mathematics 