Why I Am Not Religious

I am not religious. I am secular.  I use the same epistemic standard for religious claims that I use for claims in history, medicine, psychology, biology, other sciences, and everyday life. Extraordinary claims require evidence proportional to their improbability. Throughout this essay I examine whether religious claims meet that standard.

An inherited belief is not usually an examined one

The single most predictive variable for a person’s religion is not argument or evidence. It is where and to whom they were born. A child born in Morocco is overwhelmingly likely to be Muslim. A child born in Bangkok is overwhelmingly likely to be Buddhist. A child born in Alabama is overwhelmingly likely to be Christian. This is not a contested observation. It is found in every survey of global religious demography.

Every one of these religious traditions makes exclusive, mutually incompatible claims about reality: how many gods exist, what happens after death (if anything), which texts have authority, and what conduct is required of followers. They cannot all be correct. Yet adherents in each religion claim the same certainty, the same felt experience of their God’s presence, the same conviction that their religion is the true one.

I attended Seventh-day Adventist schools in Maryland for twelve years, elementary through high school. Adventism is young earth creationist, patriarchal, and in opposition to the scientific facts of human origins. My history as an Adventist was the accident of where and to whom I was born, exactly as the pattern predicts.

What followed was not a single break from religion. It was steps. I left Adventism for non-denominational Christian fundamentalism, which I thought at the time was a more serious version of Christianity. From there I moved to progressive Christianity, which kept the tradition while discarding most of the backwardness of what I had been taught. Each move felt like a correction rather than a retreat. In 2007 I de-converted from religion altogether. I started deconstructing.

I did not go from Adventism to atheism. I spent years inside two other religious traditions first. The final step was prompted by a particular encounter. I met Christopher Hitchens in Washington, DC in 2007. A confluence of factors came together, and so I left religion for good.

The evidentiary standard is suspended

Religious claims are the one category where many people suspend evidence. Faith is presented not as a tolerated weakness in the argument but as its greatest strength. The claim is arranged so that confirming evidence counts in its favor, disconfirming evidence is a test, and absence of evidence is an invitation to trust. A claim built that way cannot be evaluated. It can only be adopted or declined.

I was taught the suspension directly. In twelve years of Adventist schooling, young earth creationism was presented as fact with the age of the Earth claimed to be just thousands of years old and the fossil record the result of a global flood. In every other subject those schools taught me to check a source and follow the evidence where it went. In biology and physics that evidentiary standard was set aside.

There is a historical detail here I did not learn until long after I left. Modern young earth creationism is not a generic feature of conservative Protestantism that Adventism happened to adopt. Historians of science trace flood geology, the specific framework I was taught, to the visions of the Seventh-day Adventist prophet Ellen White. The position spread outward from there into American Christian fundamentalism at large. I was not receiving a diluted version of somebody else’s doctrine. I was at the source. Now I accept the fact of an Old Earth that is billions of years old.

The suffering does not fit the claims

Does the world we actually observe fit religious claims? The classical formulation is attributed to Epicurus and was given its sharpest modern statement by Hume. If God is willing to prevent suffering but not able, he is not omnipotent. If able but not willing, he is not good. If he is both able and willing, then why is there any suffering? This is a logical contradiction because these three claims cannot all be true together.

The "free will" defense claims there is no contradiction, since a world containing agents who freely choose, and who therefore sometimes choose wrongly, may be better than a world of compelled goodness. I dispute this. “Free will” does not account for what people do to each other.

The stronger version of the argument, which I have never heard answered adequately, concerns suffering that no free choice produces and no known good appears to require. Pediatric bone cancer. Cholera. COVID-19. HIV/AIDS. Car accidents. Plane crashes. Mass shootings. Terrorism. Neo-Nazi groups. And the quantity is not incidental. There is overwhelming suffering in the history of our species that has occurred across hundreds of thousands of years.

Theodicies are serious. Philosopher John Hick claims that a world containing real hardship develops moral and spiritual character that a comfortable world could not. This may have explain some suffering. However, it does very little for suffering that destroys a person rather than developing them, for infants who die before any character can form. Some Christians argue that horrendous evils are not justified but defeated, absorbed into a good so large that it retroactively redeems them. I doubt that is so. It is also unfalsifiable, and it asks me to accept, on no evidence, that something I cannot observe makes acceptable something I can.

I want to be precise about the scope of this. It is not an argument against religion in general, and traditions that decline any one of the Christian God's three attributes are untouched by it. What it bears on is a God who is simultaneously all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, which is the God I was raised to believe in and the one most commonly defended in the arguments I encounter. The believer’s remaining move is that there is a reason, and it is beyond our capacity to see it. This is not a response to the evidence. It is a decision to hold the position independently of the evidence or despite the evidence.

A God who wanted to be known would not be this difficult to find

Christianity claims that God loves each and every person and wants to be in personal relationship with them. A loving parent who wanted a relationship with a child would not make their own existence a matter of inference. They would be present, and if circumstances forced them to be absent, they would at minimum ensure the child knew they were real. Yet the world contains a great many people who want to know whether God exists, who have looked, and who have found nothing. Not people who refuse to look. People who are open, who ask, and who receive no answer. I am one of these people.

The standard apologetic is weak. The claim that God remains hidden to preserve human freedom fails, because knowing that someone exists does not compel you to love them; people who know their parents exist reject them regularly. That divine hiddenness produces a valuable spiritual search may hold for some people but cannot account for those who search their whole lives and find nothing at the end of it. That the evidence is already sufficient for anyone honest is the reply I find least defensible, since it requires holding that everyone in my position is either lying or not trying, including people who spent decades on the attempt and lost their communities and sometimes even lost their families when they stopped believing.

The biblical texts do not support the weight placed on them

For years I assumed that serious biblical scholarship would be an argument against my current position. The opposite turned out to be true, and this is the point on which I have changed my thinking the most. I went to biblical studies as a Christian, expecting it to supply a strong defense of Christianity. It did the opposite.

The scholarly consensus, including a great deal of it produced by practicing believers within institutions, describes the Bible as composite human documents. They were assembled over centuries by multiple authors and editors with distinct theological and political agendas, transmitted through copyists who introduced thousands of variants, and canonized through processes that were substantially political. There is not one Bible as in "the Bible." There are multiple cannons and thousands of versions within each cannon.

The gospels are anonymous (we don’t know who wrote them), written decades after the events they allegedly describe, in a language their central figure did not even speak. Passages now treated as settled by some, and entire doctrinal positions, frequently rest on translation choices that the underlying Greek and Hebrew do not compel and in some cases actively resist.

None of this is fringe. It is what you encounter in any accredited graduate program in the fields of biblical studies or comparative religion. What struck me is the size of the gap between what scholars in the discipline take as settled, and what is preached from most pulpits as obvious. That gap is not accidental, and it is not maintained by scholars.

Bibles are some of the most consequential collections of literature ever assembled, and I would recommend teaching them in my secondary English Language Arts classroom on those grounds alone. But it is not what it is claimed to be, and the claim cannot survive the disciplines that study it most closely.

The central figure of Christianity is more complicated than what is claimed

When the evidentiary case for religion stalls, the argument frequently goes to claimed moral authority. I have heard this presented as the argument that survives everything else. So it is worth actually going to the biblical text so we can see.

The Jesus of the gospels is not a morally exemplary figure as we are taught. There are many difficult passages about Jesus. In Matthew’s temple, he makes a scene. He violently drives merchants out and overturns their tables. This is physical aggression and destruction of property. Moreover, Jesus says explicitly that he has not come to bring peace but a sword, and that his message will divide households against themselves. These passages portray Jesus as far more confrontational than the popular image suggests. In the book of Mark, a woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter, and he initially refuses her, saying it is not right to give the children’s bread to the dogs. Jesus speaks repeatedly about eternal punishment, most explicitly in Matthew, giving infinite consequence in hell to finite conduct, which I and secular thinker and writer Peter Smeallie consider very unjust.

"Turn the other cheek" is usually read as a command to stay passive, and it has been used that way, urged on oppressed people to be accepting rather than resistant. But there is serious scholarship reading it instead as a strategy of nonviolent confrontation, and I find that interpretation more persuasive.

The gospels present a historicized figure, a first-century apocalyptic Jewish preacher who was at times confrontational, usually serious, and working inside the moral assumptions of his own time, culture, and place. Although most historians conclude Jesus existed historically, some scholars such as Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald dispute this. From their scholarship, I know Jesus may have never existed. He may be a myth. Mythicists hold their view primarily because there are no surviving eyewitness accounts of Jesus written by anyone outside Christian scripture, and in fact none of the non-Christian sources have any eyewitnesses at all. Sources historicists cite are all second-hand and later.

Josephus (writing around 93 to 94 CE) was born after Jesus died and reports what was said about him; his two passages are also textually compromised, the Testimonium being at least partly a Christian interpolation. Tacitus (around 116 CE) is early second century and may simply relay what Christians of his day claimed. Regardless of whether Jesus Christ is myth or historical, he is not reducible to the gentle universalist the moral-authority argument requires him to be. Rendering him as the product of a specific century explains the difficult passages with less strain. Rendering him as a timeless moral exemplar requires explaining every one of the difficult passages away. No one has been able to do that satisfactorily.

The predictions were testable and they failed

Religious predictions with dates attached are testable, and the record of them sheds light. The one I know best is the one my own education came out of. William Miller (1782 to 1849) was an American Baptist preacher who led one of the most famous failed apocalyptic movements in United States history. Miller, interpreting the book of Daniel, puzzlingly supposedly calculated that Christ would return in 1844. His followers settled on October 22. They sold property, settled debts, and waited. Nothing happened. Adventists call this the Great Disappointment, and George Knight, a living Adventist historian, recounts it without softening the blow.

The movement did not conclude that the prediction had been wrong. It concluded that the prediction had been right about the date and mistaken about the event: on October 22, 1844, Christ had entered the most holy place of a sanctuary in heaven and begun an investigative judgment. “Investigative judgment” is a unique Adventist doctrine.

In the investigative judgment, Christ has been conducting a judicial review of the records of everyone who has professed Christian faith, the dead first and then the living. When the review reaches the end of the list, probation closes and the Second Coming of Christ follows. Nobody knows the date: the return waits on the completion of a process nobody can observe.

That doctrine remains a distinctive teaching of the church that educated me. Here’s the general pattern: when a dated prediction fails publicly, and the believers have paid a high price for holding it, the belief is more likely to be reinterpreted, and promoted harder, than dropped.

The difficulty is not confined to nineteenth-century America. In Mark 9, Matthew 16, and Matthew 24, the Jesus character is presented as telling his flock that some of them will not taste death before the kingdom arrives, and that the generation then living will not pass away before all of it takes place. Paul, writing earlier than any gospel, expects to be alive at the return and includes himself among those who will be. What these passages describe did not happen in the timeframe they specify. By the second century the delay had itself become a problem the texts needed to reconcile, and Peter reconciles it by explaining that God does not handle time as we humans do.

An apocalyptic preacher announcing an imminent end is exactly what the historical reconstruction predicts, and this was said so more than a century ago. The failed timetable is a serious problem for historicists and theological claims about Jesus.

Prayer is testable, and it has been tested

Intercessory prayer is a claim about outcomes in the physical world, and unlike most religious claims it has been put to controlled test. If prayer altered outcomes, then clergy, who are prayed for more than anyone else, ought to live longer than comparable groups. They do not.

The largest trial is the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer enrolled 1,802 cardiac bypass patients across six hospitals, randomized them into three groups, and had congregations pray for two of the groups by name. Prayer produced no effect on recovery. The one statistically notable result ran the wrong way: patients told with certainty that they were being prayed for had a higher rate of complications than those left uncertain, which is most plausibly explained by performance anxiety rather than by anything supernatural. The study was funded by the Templeton Foundation, an organization that exists to find points of contact between religion and science, so it cannot be waved away as a hostile design. The Cochrane Collaboration (an independent, not-for-profit international network of researchers) systematic review of the trial literature reached the same conclusion.

The usual apologetic is that God is not subject to experiment and that prayer was never a mechanism to be tested. But then what good is God? A claim cannot be advanced as effective where it is useful and exempted from testing where it is not.

Morality does not require religion

The most common objection I receive is not evidentiary. It is practical: without religion, what grounds your morality?

The question assumes that moral behavior is based on religious belief. The evidence does not support this. The most secular societies on Earth, in Northern Europe and East Asia, are not lawless. They exhibit lower rates of violent crime, incarceration, and infant mortality than the most religious wealthy nation, the United States. This does not demonstrate that secularity causes those outcomes; the causal pathways run through wealth, welfare policy, and inequality. But it does destroy the claim that widespread religious belief is a precondition for a functioning moral order.

Atheists have the lowest prison incarceration rate of any religion or religion-related group. There is a further logical problem inside the religious framework itself. If an act is wrong because it is forbidden, then the wrongness is arbitrary and could have been otherwise. If it is forbidden because it is wrong, then the wrongness exists independently, and the framework is describing morality rather than grounding it. This is an old dilemma, and it has never been resolved. Harm, consent, and justice are concepts we can reason about directly, revise as we learn more, and hold each other to without appeal to authority.

Reasoned ethics has an advantage that revealed ethics structurally cannot have. It can be corrected. Slavery, the subordination of women, and the criminalization of gay people were all argued from and defended from scripture, at length, by serious religious people, but were dislodged by moral argument that had to work against the biblical text rather than through it.

This is not abstract to me. The tradition I was educated in was patriarchal by design and taught it as doctrine, and I held many of these positions for longer than I would like to admit. The commitments I hold now, that women, people of color, and LGBT people possess equal worth, dignity, and rights, are not ones I reasoned my way to from inside the text. I got to them by working against it.

Authority without accountability

I am not arguing that clergy misconduct disproves religious claims. A tradition can be true, and its leaders corrupt. But the pattern is worth naming, because it is a structural finding rather than a collection of anecdotes: institutions that claim divine sanction for their leadership, discourage external scrutiny, treat internal reporting as a matter of spiritual discipline, and enjoy broad legal exemption from oversight produce serious failures that recur with remarkable regularity. These failures and scandals have been well documented as occurring in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptists, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Independent Fundamental Baptists, and in denomination after denomination, and in religion after religion.

Unfalsifiable authority claims and closed accountability structures are a combination that fails the same way. I do not think the people inside these religious institutions are worse than anyone else. I think the design is bad, and the design follows from the theology.

Objections I take seriously

Three, and I do not think any of them are weak.

Community. Religious institutions supply something secular life has not replicated at scale: sustained, intergenerational, non-transactional community with built-in rituals for birth, marriage, and death. The decline in American religious affiliation has not been matched by an equivalent rise in anything that does that work. This is a real cost and I do not have a complete answer to it.

I organize for the Washington Area Secular Humanists across DC, Maryland, and Virginia, which in practice means organizing the speaker series, the social events, and the ordinary logistics of getting people into a room. It works, and it matters. It makes a difference in the lives of secular people. However, it is also not the same thing as a religious congregation. A congregation reaches people across generations, holds them through a death in the family, and does not require anyone to opt in again every month. Secular organizing has not achieved that.

Motivation. Religious conviction can do good, including the American civil rights movement, and it has done so at personal cost that pure self-interest does not explain.

Cultural Practices. Many thoughtful religious people hold nothing like the propositional claims I have been examining. They treat their tradition as a set of practices and a vocabulary for meaning rather than a set of factual assertions. My argument does not touch them.

What I have instead

I do not experience my position as a loss (“losing religion”), and I want to say what it actually consists of, because “not religious” sounds like an absence, but I am not experiencing an absence.

I take this life to be the one I get, which raises rather than lowers the stakes of how I spend it. I take moral obligations to be owed to people, who can be harmed and helped, rather than to a supernatural being who cannot.

I take the universe to be intelligible, which is the single most remarkable fact about it, and I take the project of understanding it to be unfinished and open to me. I find the actual account of how a species like ours developed more astonishing than any of the stories that preceded it, and it has the additional bonus of being true.

There is a name for the resulting position. Secular humanism holds that people are both the source and the object of moral obligation, that the equal worth and dignity of persons does not depend on any authority conferring it, and that the work of improving conditions falls to us because there is nobody else it can be assigned to. That is a positive commitment. This took me twenty years to work out.

Since an essay of this kind is easier to argue with when the positive commitments are visible. Here they are.

The values I hold

How I treat people

1. Empathy. Consider the interests and needs of other people when deciding how to act.

2. Do no harm. Avoid causing harm and accept it only where it is necessary to protect someone from greater harm.

3. Helpfulness. Extend assistance to people who need it whenever it is possible to do so.

4. Egalitarianism. Reject hierarchical distinctions and recognize the inherent worth of every individual, regardless of membership in any unchosen category. Women and men are of equal worth. Every race holds equal inherent ability, worth, and value. LGBT people possess the same worth and dignity as heterosexual people.

How I conduct myself

5. Honesty. Deal with people truthfully, forthrightly, and transparently, and be someone whose word can be relied on.

6. Civility. Absent a direct physical threat, do not react impulsively. Conduct oneself with civility and dignity.

7. Dialogue rather than debate. Humanist author Steve Ghikadis reminds us that rather than going in circles, hold an intellectually honest conversation aimed at reducing or solving problems.

How I decide what is true

8. Evidence over intuition. Most people reason from personal experience and common sense. Common sense is frequently wrong. Base a position on evidence and data and think critically and independently.

9. Science. Anyone may hold whatever beliefs they wish, but on questions about how the world is, the matter is settled by science rather than by culture, politics, dogma, ideology, or religion, with the understanding that scientific findings are revisable in light of new evidence.

10. Openness. These values are themselves open to revision when there is new information.

How I relate to authority and to change

11. Question authority. No authority should be exempt from scrutiny. Authority is frequently exercised to preserve the existing order, system, and power structure, and it is prone to error and to abuse.

12. Progress over tradition. That something has long been done a particular way is not by itself a rational reason to keep doing it.

13. Shared responsibility. Causes are multiple. Outcomes have internal causes located in the individual and external causes located in society. The individual is responsible, and so are the systems the individual acts within.

How I make judgments

14. Correct judgment. People who harm others, and the harmful actions themselves, are open to judgment. Judging is legitimate, and it carries an obligation: the judgment must be proportionate to the evidence and revised when the evidence changes.

Conclusion

I am not religious. I arrived at that position through evidence, reasoning, and a willingness to question my own assumptions. I continue to hold it provisionally, not because I lack conviction, but because I recognize that every conclusion should remain open to revision if compelling new evidence emerges.

The issue is whether someone is willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it overturns beliefs they have held for years. A belief that cannot, even in principle, be revised in light of new evidence is not a conclusion reached through reason. It is a commitment insulated from evaluation.

We can all strive to believe as many true things as possible and as few false things as possible, adjusting our views whenever the evidence warrants it. This is the thinking of the logical, reasonable person I strive to be and hope that I am.

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