A short guide to understanding religious texts for atheists.

When a religious text mentions that a snake told someone something, it’s a metaphor. Nobody thinks that an actual snake talked. A snake is a metaphor for a dangerous, sneaky, untrustworthy entity which gives crafty advice that is to be the downfall of those who embrace it.

When I say “embrace advice”, I don’t literally mean to hold it against my body with my arms.

When I say “crafty advice”, I don’t mean advice related to carpentry and masonry.

When “hand of God” is mentioned, it doesn’t imply that God is an ape-like entity with hands. It means “influence”.

Human language is complex, and it used to be even more complex in the ancient times, where literal and metaphoric meanings were so deeply interconnected it is difficult to tell them apart, and the best example of this is a myth.

A myth is something that never happened but keeps occurring. No Cain ever killed his brother Abel and said “I’m not my brother’s keeper”, but things like that keep happening. However, some things can be based on factual history and are later mythologized. An example of this is the great flood; it keeps occurring in so many places in mythological form it is quite likely one of the earliest racial memories of mankind, of the great meltdown at the end of the last glacial period, when the global sea levels rose by about 125m.

When Odysseus is said to have heard the voice of Athena counseling him, it is the poet’s way of saying that the guy had a clever, strategic idea on how to solve a conflict to his advantage. Psychological activities and states were anthropomorphized; when one was ruled by sexual desire, it was said that he’s under the power of Eros or Aphrodite. In war, when one was experiencing a certain pattern of bully/coward behavior, it was said that he’s influenced by Ares. If one approached war and problem solving strategically, he was said to be under the influence of Athena. The natural phenomena were anthropomorphized in similar ways; for instance, the known, familiar sea was thought to be under the influence of Poseidon. The unknown, wild sea beyond their reach was thought to be under the influence of Titan Okeanos, in a “hic sunt dracones” manner of the medieval maps.

When it is said that Eve talked to the snake, it means that an evil external spiritual force created a line of thought in her mind, and that she succumbed to temptation.

The fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil isn’t an apple. It’s suffering the trials and consequences of choice. Similarly, the fruit of sin isn’t a cherry. It’s punishment. If you think a tree of knowledge of good and evil grows in a garden and bears fruits that can be eaten physically, you’re stupid. If you think religious people believe that, you’re much more stupid than you think they are.

Not all religious imagery comes from the same place. Some of it is a metaphor for emotional states. Some of it is a personification of natural phenomena, like weather. Some of it is a lesson in ethics, and some of it is an attempt to say something about the nature of reality. Some of it is silly, like the cult of Priapus, the god of erect penises. Some of it is quite sophisticated, like the cult of Hecate, goddess of magic and illusion. In all cases, it is meant metaphorically, in the same way in which colors of the quarks are not meant literally, and “red matter” isn’t really red, and there’s nothing really charming about the charming quark. There is also nothing remotely amber about an electron.

When it is said that Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn’t mean he’s a zombie. A zombie is a dead body animated by an external magical influence. The Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead because he’s God, in order to show disciples that his power reigns supreme over death. This conveyed a very deep meaning that was absent in antiquity, that afterlife offers a form of existence that is not a mere shadow of the physical one, inferior in every way (as Achilles says to Odysseus who called his ghost, “it’s better to be the slave to the lowest peasant in life, than to reign over the dead”), but is in fact glorious and full, the true life to which this one is merely the cave of Plato, the existence of hints, guesses and hopes, and not the fullness of knowledge.

The Christians don’t see Satan as an ugly, repulsive goat-like entity. They see him as a powerful spirit that seduces one to evil, and you can’t seduce one if you take on a repulsive form. In fact, they think he is quite capable of looking like one of the angels of heaven; that is, holy and beautiful. They also don’t think Satan lives in hell. They think he is the prince of this world and has temporary dominion over it, and that hell will be his final destination after the hour of final judgment.

They also don’t think that good people will experience only good things and that evil things will happen only to evil people. They think this life is the valley of tears, filled with suffering and injustice, and if one is to survive all this and keep faith in the Lord, that fullness of true life awaits him on the other side, in eternity beyond space and time.

If you have a problem with understanding those basic concepts, you’re too stupid to offer any kind of commentary on religion, and furthermore, I would place you firmly on the autism spectrum. Personally, I am tired of intellectual and emotional invalids who attempt to claim the smug position of superiority. Also, the religious people who don’t understand the metaphoric imagery of their own religion are too stupid to be religious, and their emotional age is 7. When they reach the emotional age of 8, they’ll become atheists, and when they reach emotional maturity they’ll be able to understand religion. I’m not saying they’ll necessarily adopt it, but they will at least be able to understand it.

I often encounter the “creationist Christian vs. atheist” debates everywhere and I must admit that I find them quite disturbing, in a way one would find it disturbing to hear zombies and vampires arguing at night in front of his house about whether to drink his blood or eat his brains.

Essentially, what it’s all about is that the creationists use arguments like “this or that tiny little thing in science isn’t right, therefore Adam and Eve”, and the atheists use arguments like “there is no spirituality outside of matter, and we should get rid of religions and other historical relics and go forth into the bold future of science and space exploration”.

The problem is, they both argue for the approaches to civilization that have already been tried before. The creationist religion produced the darkest period of the dark ages, when scripture was given priority over any other form of evidence, and atheism already tried to get rid of the primitive past. It’s historically known as “enlightenment”, and produced the bloody reign of the guillotine during the French revolution, where all the “reactionary elements” were purged in a very literal sense. But that was only the modest beginning. When the ideas really took hold, in the age of modernism, the concept of the “new age” for mankind, whose time has come to claim its destiny from the hands of darkness and ignorance, resulted in the terrible genocides of Communism and Nazism in the 20^th century. So, when the atheists say that the world would be much better if we sent all the priests to Mars, know that it’s been tried before, only Mars was out of reach so they used ordinary graveyards. So, when the creationists argue for God they in fact argue for the dark ages, and when the atheists argue for science they in fact argue for Stalin. Atheists often invoke the argument of horrible crimes committed in the name of religion, but what is actually true is that the crimes, committed in the name of “modernity” and “enlightenment” in the centuries where science showed itself on the map, were so brutal and massive, it’s almost without a historical precedent. In fact, only Islam showed to be the equal of atheism in sheer cruelty, and it’s probably because they both think that being on the “right side” justifies them in everything they do.

I think we need a different approach to those things, because we can’t leave things of such importance to those idiots.

On the religious side of things, I think we need to understand that the issue is much deeper and more intellectual than the American Christians make it sound. Their main problem is the idolatry of the Bible, and very poor understanding of what they are actually talking about. I am going to use the arguments of St. Augustine, who had a much wiser approach, and I am going to modernize his points in order to make them more comprehensible to the audience. You see, what he would say is that God didn’t create the Bible. It’s not the word of God. It’s history of the Jewish nation’s understanding of its relationship with the transcendental. Since they were inherently sinful and therefore unable to receive God’s point of view in the purity and fullness of its truth, their understandings remained flawed and limited until the appearance of Jesus, who revealed God for what he truly is, which is not God of the Jews, but God of certain principles: reality, truth, love, kindness, forgiveness. Furthermore, St. Augustine is not a deist, he is a theist. It’s an important distinction, because a deist sees God as the distant creator of the Universe who involves himself with the matters of men only to reveal the Law and to judge men at the end of their earthly lives. A theist, however, doesn’t see God as distant, but sees God as pervading the world with His being, as eternity beyond space and time that nevertheless pervades space throughout time and guides the beings from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge and from selfishness to love. A theist sees God as a presence in his life, a presence that guides him and tries to reveal itself to him, a presence that left breadcrumbs of truth and reality for him to find in the world and, if willing, to accept guidance and be lead out of the confines of this world, and into the infinity for which there are no mortal words. For St. Augustine, God’s word isn’t limited to the Bible. In fact, God never ceases to speak to us, his word is not limited to the people of the past who wrote some of that down, for other people to include into the biblical canon. It is good to know how other people perceived God, and that is what Bible is for, but for each of us individually God has guidance and a destiny and a plan, and He is the silent yet very vocal presence in each person’s mind, and in each person’s life. The crucial part is that we are free to choose what we are going to do about it. We are free to refuse or to accept. We are free to ignore and to ridicule. Each of those choices puts us in a certain relationship with the truth and the light, and each of those choices determines our fate in eternity, beyond space and time. So, instead of adopting idolatry of the Bible, you should rather adopt the attitude that Bible didn’t do mankind much good in the dark ages, and that this literal approach did not serve to reveal the depths of the reality of God to mankind. It was a failed attempt. However, you should also understand that science revealed much more about the nature and functioning of the world than religion, and it is quite likely that science is actually a better way of understanding the ways and intents of God than worshiping ancient scripture. Science has the attitude of actually listening to what the world has to say about itself, instead of trying to find some simplistic explanation that would fit the world into some nice intellectual drawer. So, how about trying that with God? How about trying to listen what God has to say about himself, instead of trying to jam him into some narrow intellectual drawer? How about listening to what the difference in the spiritual taste between gentle kindness and indifferent cruelty has to say about God? That, too, is a way of listening what the reality has to say.

As for the atheists and their faith in the way science “disproved” God, just let me remind you that science today is actually closer to disproving materialism and atheism. It suffices to invoke Occam’s razor, which the atheists routinely use to reject God as a superfluous supposition, and remember that the choice of scientific cosmology today is to either assume that the Universe was deliberately fine-tuned to an incredible degree in order to allow for our existence, or to invent the concept of Multiverse, an infinity of Universes with an endless number of variations in basic constants, for which there is no evidence whatsoever and is a mere figment of imagination.

So, basically, it’s a choice between saying that the Universe was created in a deliberate act by a conscious entity which you cannot directly prove, or that there is an endless number of Universes with endless number of variations in basic constants, which you also cannot directly prove. So essentially, since you can’t prove any of it, just shut the fuck up about science disproving God, because you simply chose to believe in one interpretation you couldn’t prove, while the others chose to believe in another, equally valid interpretation which they, too, cannot prove.

For all you know, this entire Universe could be a virtual reality that runs on some graphics card that’s only a few years ahead of our current technology*, and this interpretation could completely encompass everything science showed us so far, and could actually be proved if at least some people could temporarily wake up from the simulation and return to bear witness, and various spiritual experiences of the yogis and saints, as well as the near-death testimonies, are actually proving this hypothesis quite nicely, while the official materialistic science has no explanation for them other than pretending that they are not what they obviously are.

So, both the religious people and the atheists have quite an abundance of reasons to shut the fuck up and learn some humility for a change.

* For those who don’t believe that computers could render convincing universes, this can, as of today, be rendered on a $200 graphics card, and the real-time render is actually much better than the video:

https://youtu.be/8R5DOUXvBo0

There are a lot of people who think justice is a bad word, something associated with cruelty, formality, cold application of the rules without mercy. Mercy, however, is seen as a good thing, as something that corrects the merciless nature of justice.

How wrong you are.

Let’s first define justice, so that we know exactly what we are talking about. Justice is when good is victorious over evil. Justice is when good deeds are rewarded, exactly as much as they need to be. Justice is when evil deeds are punished, exactly as much as they need to be.

Justice is not only when a perpetrator of a crime is punished, and his victim is restituted. Justice is also when the power of God stands guard over the righteous ones, protecting them from evil, not allowing them to become victims in the first place. Justice is when one’s righteousness is a shield that protects him from all harm. Justice is when your evil deeds expose you to harm, in exact proportion with the gravity of the deed.

Justice is when one’s good and evil deeds are weighed separately, and the punishment for evil is such that it allows the good in the person to prevail and overcome evil, instead of destroying the good together with evil. Justice is also when trickery and deception are seen through, and the truth is known.

There is nothing more beautiful or merciful than God’s sword of justice. There is nothing I would like more, in this life or the next, than to be judged by this sword, without mercy.

Some people think that God, being the greatest and the most powerful, is somehow the most distant, inhuman, cold in his justice, not able to understand the human situation and view it with mercy, and so they seek the refuge of saints, the lesser holy beings, who are somehow closer to them and thus presumably better able to understand them and to forgive them.

But this is so wrong. God is not the greatest in the sense that he is most distant, bigger than the biggest object, more powerful than any weapon. No, God is the greatest because he is the underlying reality of all. God is the greatest not only because he’s above the galaxies of the Universe, but also because he’s between every two atoms that make up your mortal flesh. When your thoughts move, they do so in God. God knows you more intimately than you know yourself, and much better. He knows what you would ask if your mind were clear enough to do so and in knowledge of the greatest good you could possibly imagine, and beyond. The saints, they are the distant beings. You need to contact them, you need to call their attention, you need to explain things to them. They don’t know you, they are so far away, because they are more human, distinct from you, but God is already here. Your brain is made up within his thought, your feelings whirl the substance of his spirit, your most intimate desires and longings are known to him before you become aware that you have them. You think that your self is the closest to you, that you know yourself best, but God is closer, and knows you better. You cannot even imagine what it feels like, because you would probably instantly die of pure joy if you were to truly feel that.

That is why I would take his justice over anyone else’s mercy. You trust in mercy of human-like beings with human-like traits all you want, but I will stand to be judged by the perfect justice of the one who knows me better than I know myself.

By willing to be judged without mercy by the sword of perfect justice, I discover that I am the hand that wields it, and that it is the greatest mercy.