Religion of Freethought Series: MEETING HUMAN NEEDS

When a new tool is invented to do something, an old word is almost always attached to it. Our language is littered with such things. At most, a new adjective is added. This is how we come to have pneumatic hammers and electric lights and frost-free freezers.
Sometimes an innovation becomes so widespread that the adjective is dropped. When you go to the hardware store to buy a hammer, it’s understood that you’re interested in one made of tempered steel. Stone hammers are the province of archaeologists. Likewise, frost-free freezers are now so common that many people might consider it fraudulent for an appliance store to sell anything else without prominently displaying the fact.
This is how it is with religion and Freethought. Religion is not distinguished by what it’s “made of” – the ideas and principles that distinguish one way of addressing “religious questions” from others – but by what it’s supposed to do. People lose sight of this fact because, when it comes to religious questions, they tend to be quite certain that they are in possession of The Truth. What else matters when you have that?
We’ve talked before about the many purposes that church and religion serve. But most people especially fail to think about the purposes that religious beliefs serve. At most, they are willing to explain other people’s religious beliefs as serving some purpose, and usually a sinister and self-serving one at that. Freethinkers are not immune from this tendency, though most often they do so while denying that they have any religious beliefs whatsoever because they have accepted the lie that religious belief means – and can only mean – supernaturalism.
But just consider how religious beliefs – both superstitious and rational – serve the these human purposes:

• People need to have a sense that moral values are justified. God(s) serve this purpose for many. For Freethinkers, logical consistency is sufficient. That is, the religion of Freethought is predicated on the idea of reciprocal rights and responsibilities: we are justified in doing as we please so long as we are willing to respect the right of others to do the same. And this principle applies to any deities that may exist! If any god(s) exist, it would be immoral for them to create the HIV virus, tapeworms, earthquakes, and other injurious things.

• People need to have some means of coping with the inevitability and finality of loss and death. Again, for many people the idea of god(s) who live “on the other side” of death serves this purpose. For Freethinkers, everyday experience is sufficient. For we reason that if we can abide the finite nature of such things as our breakfast, this service today, and everything else that we enjoy, then the finite nature of our own lives ought not to fill us with despair. Although none of us will live to see it, even the universe will one day die, it seems. Closer to home, tonight every one of us will gratefully welcome the embrace of sleep which will dissolve the integrity of our conscious minds. And not even faith-believers worry about where they will “go” when they sleep.

• People need to feel not only that their moral values are justified, and that the limited nature of their existence is no cause for despair, but that there is some reward in behaving well and hoping for the best. This need is especially acute when people see others behaving badly and yet being rewarded with wealth, fame, and political favor. A system of future rewards and punishments in an afterlife – or a wheel of reincarnation – is the solution for many. For Freethinkers, a clear conscience is its own compensation as well as our guide in so arranging our laws and society so as to ensure both that crime doesn’t pay and that we do not corrupt ourselves in exacting retribution from wrongdoers.

• Most importantly, people need to feel either happy or that happiness is within their reach, which may or may not be the same thing. For many, persuading themselves that an invisible supernatural power loves them and is looking out especially for them is the solution. For Freethinkers, something else is needed, which is the subject of our service today.

The point is that all these needs and more, including many not yet appreciated, are among those that religious beliefs – beliefs about the personal significance of the nature of reality – are intended to or are adapted to meet. Last month we saw that the very idea of god(s) is about satisfying human needs. So religion itself is not about god(s) and every assertion to the contrary is but a distraction from the fact that religion is a human invention meant to satisfy human needs.
Most people – though certainly not all – have these needs. But the important fact is that these needs can be addressed without abandoning facts and reason. So the more it is said that these are foolish needs, unworthy of self-respecting people, or that trying to satisfy them inevitably leads to supernaturalism, the more will superstition flourish and the more will people suffer because of it.
For the time has come, and is now here, when supernaturalism is no longer the only way for people to make sense of their lives. The day came long ago when facts and reason were recognized as the best way to make sense of and gain control over the world of objective reality. Nor does any credit for this attach to those who simply ridiculed the fairy tales that once “explained” the natural world without actually doing the work of helping to create a scientific alternative. But the day has now dawned when facts and reason will be recognized as the best way also of making sense of and gaining control over the worlds of our subjective reality. For that is what the religion of Freethought is all about. And we who are building it are about far more than jeering superstition, as richly as it deserves it.
The religion of Freethought is simply a rational way of addressing the same human needs that all religions seek to satisfy. It consists of our personal beliefs about the nature and significance of reality, both the one that we share and the private, subjective realities in which our experience is constrained. These beliefs serve the same purpose that any religious beliefs do and, as such, they are religious. They certainly aren’t scientific! To deny that Freethought, understood in this sense, is a religion, is to fail to understand what religion – as opposed to superstition – actually is. It is as if someone examined a stone hammer and, seeing only the stone, insisted that it could not be a hammer.
But now here is the trick. We can understand, once the archaeologist has explained it to us, that a stone found in some dig is, without doubt, a hammer. But if were to show what all of us today readily recognize as a hammer to the person who fashioned that stone, what would they say it is? It is that kind of incomprehension that we are up against. Nevertheless, we have an important advantage and it is this: facts and reason are considerably easier to demonstrate than supernatural powers.

©2001 by Dr. Tim Gorski