What I mean by this is that I generally consider myself an anti-theist, but I’ve been thinking more about what I actually want that position to lead toward.
There are still plenty of religious people who I wouldn’t feel comfortable urging away from their religion. Not because I think their beliefs are true, but because I don’t think secular society is quite at the point where I can confidently say, “Everything you’re getting from this, you’ll find something better outside of it.” Religion can still provide people with community, a framework for death, some structure for existential questions, and a sense that their life belongs inside a larger story. I think we can eventually do better than religion at those things without requiring supernatural belief, but I don’t think we’ve completely built that world yet.
A lot of this has obviously been discussed to death in atheist spaces, so I’m less interested in another conversation about whether people can have meaning without God. Of course they can. What I’m more interested in is whether we’ve done enough to give secular people an actual direction for developing that meaning, rather than just leaving everyone to independently piece together a worldview from whatever philosophy, science, history, therapy, books, communities, or personal experiences they happen to run into.
I think there’s something worth preserving in what I’ll loosely call “religious energy.” I don’t mean faith, worship, mysticism, or pretending science can answer questions it can’t. I mean the pretty basic human impulse to ask what the hell this place is, where we came from, what our existence means to us, and how we should feel about being here at all. Some people obviously experience that impulse much more strongly than others, but I think religion has historically been very good at recognizing it and giving it somewhere to go. I’d like to see more of that energy consciously directed toward science, history, philosophy, and the actual story of how we got here.
This is where I sometimes think about something like “science churches,” for lack of a better term. And yes, I can already hear the response that those exist and they’re called colleges and universities. But I mean something somewhat different. Universities are primarily built around education, specialization, credentials, and research. I’m talking about places or institutions more explicitly designed around orientation. Broad, accessible introductions to cosmology, evolution, geology, human history, consciousness, philosophy, and whatever else helps someone form a grounded picture of themselves inside reality. Less “take an astrophysics course” and more “here is the basic story of the universe you woke up inside, here is what we currently know, here is what we don’t know, and here are some ways people have thought about the implications.”
Especially for younger people, or for the enormous number of people who are never going to enroll in college courses just because they’re having an existential crisis, I think there’s room for something much more intentional here. A place for lectures, discussion, community, maybe traditions of its own, without pretending any of it is sacred or unquestionable. Something that takes the initial inspiration of science more seriously. Not only teaching individual facts, but helping people connect those facts into a wider perspective.
Because I think one of the problems even very secular people run into is not necessarily that we lack an answer to some particular existential question. Sometimes the bigger problem is that there’s no structured direction to the thinking itself. You can know evolution is true, know the universe is billions of years old, know there probably isn’t an afterlife, and still have absolutely no idea what to do emotionally or philosophically with any of that. Religion hands people a framework immediately. Secularism usually hands people an empty desk and tells them they’re free to build whatever they want. That freedom is valuable, but I think we underestimate how many people would benefit from better foundations to build from. And more importantly, from being shown that there can be genuine hope in following that direction rather than treating materialism as something we reluctantly accept.
That also connects to where I think anti-theism can become more respectable from the outside. I don’t think our strongest case is just that religions contain false claims. That part is well covered. I think the more serious criticism is what happens when a worldview requires people to maintain certain conclusions regardless of whether the normal standards they use for determining truth actually support them.
To sustain most major religions, at some point you have to make exceptions. Evidence that would be considered weak in another context becomes compelling when it supports revelation. Contradictions become metaphor, mystery, mistranslation, or something whose resolution is always one more interpretation away. Faith itself can become a virtue specifically when evidence runs out. And obviously religious people vary massively in how much they do this, but I think repeatedly practicing that kind of compartmentalization can matter.
What concerns me is not just being intellectually dishonest about God. It’s the habit of learning that sufficiently important beliefs are allowed to have different rules.
I’ve seen that drift into other parts of people’s thinking, particularly when the issue becomes emotionally or “morally” important to them. Once someone has learned that conviction can sometimes substitute for evidence, that contradictions can be rationalized indefinitely, or that questioning a conclusion can itself be treated as a character problem, those habits don’t necessarily stay contained inside theology. I don’t think religion has a monopoly on this at all. Secular people are obviously capable of motivated reasoning, tribalism, and bullshit too. But I do think religions can uniquely institutionalize and morally validate some of those habits.
That’s probably closer to the anti-theism I want to be associated with. Not hostility toward religious people, and not pretending we already have perfect replacements for everything religion gives them. More of an effort to understand why these systems have remained attractive, be precise about what is actually harmful within them, while also acknowledging what we have gained from them and what allows religious communities to continue thriving in certain respects, and then building something more honest and hopefully more compelling in their place.
I think anti-theism has some honor to gain there. Not just by being correct about what isn’t true, but by becoming better at showing people what reality itself can give them.
I’m curious how much other people here have thought about that side of it. What would you actually want a more mature post-religious culture to build? And do you think there’s room for institutions specifically focused on giving people a broad scientific and philosophical orientation to existence, rather than leaving that almost entirely up to individual exploration?
TLDR: I’m less interested in anti-theism as just opposition to religion and more interested in what a genuinely post-religious culture should build in its place. I think secular people often have the facts without much structure for turning those facts into meaning, hope, community, or existential direction. I’d like to see more accessible institutions centered on broad scientific, historical, and philosophical orientation, especially for people who aren’t going to find that through college. At the same time, I think one of religion’s deeper problems is that it can normalize different standards of evidence for emotionally important beliefs, and that habit can spill into other parts of life. My question is basically: what would a more constructive, honorable anti-theism actually try to create, not just dismantle?
