Richard Feynman:
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degres of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean….

But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.

You’d Better Be 100% Certain

Religions teach that natural human behaviours, thoughts and tendencies are sinful, and are therefore punishable by any manner of “natural” disaster or physical retribution in this life. Religions also teach that in many cases those sins are punishable by eternal torture in a purported afterlife for which there is no evidence in a place from which there is no escape – indeed no escape for anyone to return and report their experience, or in other words, for which there is absolutely no evidence. A place which in fact is not real at all. And yet religious people threaten really young, innocent children with the terror of being consigned to this non-existent place forever.

But not content with instilling this kind of fear and guilt for being normally and naturally human, religions additionally assert that “god is omnipresent and omniscient”. “He” is supposedly everywhere and knows everything. He can not only see every single thing you do even in the dark, but can also see into the most secret corners of your mind to judge and potentially punish your thoughts.

This makes dealing with unruly childish behaviour more manageable, of course. You don’t have to keep your eye on them all the time. It’s a sort of remote control for lazy parents.

And so most children’s first experience of emotional abuse occurs at the hands of their loving parents and of religious teachers.

The real terrorists in our world are the religious people because they intentionally terrorise their own and other people’s children in this way. They exhort parents on pain of their own eternal punishment to terrorise their children.

And what is a child to do? Children think the thoughts it is natural to think. They imagine, they speculate, they try to put the experiences of their lives together. That’s what humans do. That’s why we have been successful as a species. Children do the things it is natural to do because they are human. So they are in a double bind. Life itself is turned by priests and their devout parents into a horror story in which the child itself is the monster. Their spirit is crushed. Fear and worry is their life, instead of wonder and joy, and all they can do in order to manage their anxiety is to deny themselves and their natural humanity and wait for the supposed and non-existent afterlife in a place where mummy and daddy, and priests and god, won’t terrify them any more.

Teaching children that their natural humanity is sinful is an obscenity.

Who would lovingly do this to their own child or to other people’s children?

Stupid, ignorant, superstitious, scared, monstrous, insane terrorists would. Devout Christians, Muslims and Jews would. Pious Hindus would perpetrate their own version.

The devout truly believe the crazy hoax that there is an afterlife and a hell and a jealous, vengeful god.

The really devout believe that wrongdoers and unbelievers (in whatever brand of religion) have earned the wrath of their god and deserve their punishment in this life (or to be sent summarily to the next). They believe they are thereby given the authority by their “cruel, spiteful, vengeful, jealous and unbearable God¹,” through his sacred text (of whatever brand of religion) to mete out that punishment. In fact many believe they are commanded by him to do so.

But if you’re going to go around terrifying innocent children and crushing the spirit out of their lives in the name of your god and your beliefs (“purifying them”, as you may put it); if you are going to go around killing people, or urging others to kill people, in the name of your god and your beliefs, or with, as you imagine, the blessing and even the commandment of your god; then your belief is not enough. Your “faith” is not enough.

Mere belief is not enough. It is not enough to say, “I’m almost certain it’s true”, or “It must be true,” or “I can’t see how it’s not true,” or “Surely it’s true.” You can’t even get away with, “I had a personal experience of god.” Really? Perhaps you did. But how can you prove absolutely that it was a real experience of “god” and not one of the fairly common moments that many people have of hysteria, hallucination, the result of a brain tumour, lack of oxygen to the brain, wishful thinking, dreaming, all of which to the experiencing person seem real even though they are not in fact experiencing a close encounter with “god”. Of course it seems real. Hallucination does seem real. That’s why they call it hallucination. That’s why you can’t be 100% certain.

If you are going to go terrorising and murdering other people you had bloody-well better be absolutely certain and have utterly irrefutable proof that you are right. You have to know that if you are even ever so slightly wrong you are not the pious and god-fearing and devout person you have been pretending to be.

You are merely a child-abuser and a common murderer and a fool.

It is no defence to say that you “believed” or that you thought it was true, or that someone told you it was so and they seemed to know what they were talking about, or that they promised it was true and you trusted them, or, as some say, that you are “religious”. You absolutely must establish, not on the balance of probability, not beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond any doubt whatsoever, that you are right. And of course you know you can’t because that is impossible.

Also, you can’t do that because you are a person of “faith” and faith requires that you believe without evidence or proof and even in the face of evidence to the contrary. (This of course is a ridiculous posture to take.) And so you can’t know for certain, you don’t want to know for certain. And therefore you should stop bullshitting other people and your own children.

If you extend Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems beyond the world of mathematics into the system of axioms called your religious dogma, or your credo, you might say that there will always be statements within the system that are unprovable within the system. That is, there will always be elements of your belief system that cannot be proved. You have to at least allow that this may be correct and that uncertainty reduces the probability – however small you may think it is – of your being right below the required condition of absolute certainty.

You believe what you believe. And yet others believe equally fiercely that their opposing belief is true. Could they possibly be right? They think so! Just that fact introduces uncertainty. So your belief is, at best, simply a theory.

You can’t even be certain that this is not all a dream and that you are not actually a butterfly dreaming it is an elephant dreaming it is a human being. You can’t even be certain that this is not just a simulation you are living in. You can’t be certain that this belief in jesus christ, say, is not just a test that was sent you by the JuJu monster to test your faith in him and that by denying the JuJu monster you are condemning yourself to everlasting damnation.

The famous Aussie beach-bum, He-man Bondi, said:

The fact that stares one in the face is that people of the greatest sincerity and of all levels of intelligence differ and have always differed in their religious beliefs. Since at most one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. One would have expected this obvious fact to lead to some humility, to some thought that however deep one’s faith, one may conceivably be mistaken. Nothing is further from the believer, any believer, than this elementary humility. All in his power … must have his faith rammed down their throats. In many cases children are indeed indoctrinated with the disgraceful thought that they belong to the one group with superior knowledge who alone have a private wire to the office of the Almighty, all others being less fortunate than they themselves.

And by the way, acknowledging, as you inescapably must, that absolute certainty about your religious beliefs – whatever they are – is impossible, one might suppose that you would be a little more humble and act a little more modestly about them, especially in relation to your attitudes and actions toward others.

At least you could stop terrorising your children and other people’s children. You could stop killing people, or endorsing the murder of people, in the name of your (by the way, non-existent) god.

¹ Do you read the bible, actually? It is all, you know, the word of god, divinely inspired. Here’s what Thomas Paine says about the character called “Moses”.

Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. Of which I will state only one instance:

When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): “And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, “Have ye saved all the women alive?” behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, “kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves.”

Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.

Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? It is in vain that we attempt to impose upon nature, for nature will have her course, and the religion that tortures all her social ties is a false religion.

UPDATE: This is interesting:

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