Where do religious people get all the weird beliefs that make up their religions? Well, according to their own scriptures, it seems those beliefs came from prophets, who claimed to speak for God. But according to how their own scriptures describe them, the prophets seem to have been insane.

Prophets were known for acting like maniacs, going naked in public, and intentionally getting people to injure them. They would elaborately attack inanimate objects, cook with turds, and claim to see bizarre things that no one else saw. Why would anyone believe anything that these madmen told them?¹ In the Bible, God describes his own messengers as metaphorically “blind” and “deaf”, so why would anyone expect them to have any special insights?

Since the biggest religions are centuries old, they tend to incorporate a lot of the ignorant beliefs that were common back then, when people were even more likely to fall for superstitious ideas than they are now. These religions were developed in times when most people couldn’t even read, science hadn’t really been invented yet, and all the ordinary phenomena of nature that we now understand so well were seen as inexplicable magic and the work of invisible spirits.

Most of the things that come to mind when you think of “superstitions” originated from religious ideas. Christian religious ideas, as often as not.

Religion involves belief in highly desirable things like miraculously answered prayers, universally enforced justice, and immortality. But these things are how we wish the world was, not how we actually observe the world to be. This seems like wishful thinking, not like the result of the kind of thinking that reliably produces true beliefs. And if people have beliefs based on wishful thinking, that means they have these beliefs for reasons unrelated to whether these things are actually true.

One way religion manipulates people’s beliefs is by promising them endless bliss if they believe certain things, and threatening them with endless torture if they believe certain other things. Can you imagine a worse obstacle to true belief than that?

To varying extents, religious people tend to completely ignore large portions of their own religion’s teachings. The actual requirements and claims made by religions are so unreasonable that most people convince themselves that a lot of those parts of their scriptures don’t mean what they say, or that those disagreeable parts don’t matter for some reason. And they also convince themselves that rejecting those things somehow doesn’t constitute disagreeing with their religion.

Because religious beliefs are mostly false, incoherent, or mutually inconsistent, people have to adopt all kinds of irrational thinking habits if they want to preserve their belief. Which is something religious people will tend to want to do, as a result of another irrational thinking habit which religion directly promotes: Faith.

Faith is unquestioning belief in a particular thing regardless of evidence. This is a mix of gullibility and closed-mindedness and other forms of stupidity, which religion pretends is somehow a virtue. This kind of mindset will generally lead to false beliefs and bad consequences. A lot of people have died because they had faith that talking to their imaginary friend would save their lives, so they didn’t bother to get any real help.

Faith means you have no real reason for what you believe, and it means you refuse to change your mind for any reason. Faith-based beliefs are by definition completely disconnected from reality, so if you want to have true beliefs and not false ones, having faith is the worst possible way to think. The fact that religious beliefs are based on blind faith is one good reason to think that those beliefs are most likely false.

If people believe something on faith, there is no reason to think it’s true, since it would be believed whether it was true or not. A true belief wouldn’t need to rely on faith, because people would be able to arrive at that belief by following the evidence, and also because it wouldn’t be threatened by people considering the evidence.

Most people believe in a particular religion just because they were born into it, which is clearly not a very good reason to believe something. You would likely have different religious beliefs if you had been born in a different time or place. Even worse, religions have often been enforced by law or spread through violence, leading to people believing arbitrary things for non-truth-based reasons.²

Anti-intellectualism

A lot of very influential people throughout the history of Christianity were blatantly against science, philosophy,³ critical thinking, reason, understanding, and learning. Because the Bible is against that kind of thing, and because they correctly reasoned that people who avoid those things would be more receptive to religion.

Once Christians gained enough power, they therefore started burning all the biggest libraries in the world and shutting down nearly all the schools in Europe. Christian authorities murdered intellectuals because they imagined that their discoveries were things God didn’t want man to know,⁴ and that their technological achievements were witchcraft.

They also opposed the use of dead bodies for medical research, thereby holding back progress in knowledge of anatomy and physiology for centuries, because they thought people’s bodies had to be left whole in order to be properly resurrected. People assumed based on the Adam and Eve story that men must have a missing rib, and since they weren’t allowed to open up bodies and check, nobody found out that that wasn’t true until the 16th century.

The works of the few philosophers and scientists that were deemed acceptable were treated by Christians like scripture, as unquestionable sources of truth, contrary to the intentions and methodologies of the original authors of those works. As long as Christians held onto this unscientific attitude, they were unable to notice and correct the errors in those works by testing their claims, and unable to advance beyond that level of knowledge.

Because of their faith, Christians severely held back the intellectual growth of humanity for almost a thousand years. And even as Christianity’s absolute power has declined, they have continued to do whatever they can to oppose any scientific discoveries that don’t seem to fit the preconceived worldview of Christianity at the time.

(I say “at the time” because the Christian worldview does actually change over time, even if Christians don’t like to think so. When Christians inevitably fail to suppress the truth, when it eventually becomes too obvious to everyone that certain beliefs they’ve been holding onto are absurd, then they pretend they never literally believed those silly things anyway. Sometimes they’ll even try to take credit for disproving the things that Christians had always insisted were true.)

There are now organizations of religious fundamentalists who pretend to be scientists, but require their members to agree to a statement of faith requiring them to stick to predefined “conclusions” regardless of what evidence they find. That kind of methodology couldn’t be less scientific. Unlike real scientists, creation “scientists” have an anti-curious mindset, thinking they already have all the answers, and that there’s no point seeking new knowledge that isn’t what they already believe.

Some examples of religious stupidity

• When the Romans sentenced Ignatius of Antioch to death, and some other Christians were planning to try to get him acquitted, he told them to stop trying to rescue him. He wrote them a letter telling them how much he wanted to be eaten by lions, because he thought the lions would send him to God. Origen of Alexandria was similarly eager to get persecuted to death. His mother had to hide all his clothes in order to convince him not to go out and turn himself in to the Romans. So Origen missed his opportunity, and didn’t get to get persecuted to death until about 50 years later. But he apparently did castrate himself, because he thought Jesus had recommended it.
• A lot of very influential Christians of the past (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Augustine, etc.) thought sex was a sin, even for married people. They thought the existence of sex and marriage were sinful consequences of the fall of man. At best, they thought reproductive marital sex might be a pardonable sin or a necessary evil. Even in recent times, some Christians (including Pope John Paul II) have concluded (based on a reasonably understandable interpretation of Jesus’s unreasonably nonsensical thoughts on adultery) that it’s wrong for a man to feel lust for his own wife.⁵
• In the past, one of the main ways guilt was determined in legal trials was to subject the suspect to a dangerous experience. And one of the rationales for this practice was that people figured God would always miraculously intervene to rescue an innocent person. So if you’re accused of a crime, they’ll put you in prolonged contact with something burning or boiling hot, or something like that. Then if that ordeal hasn’t killed you already, they’ll probably kill you when they see that God didn’t prevent what they did to you from harming you at all, which means you must be guilty. Or if you preemptively say you don’t want to go through that, then that too means you must be guilty.
• In the late middle ages, Pope Innocent VIII and the inquisitors he appointed decided that wicked witches were real (because the Bible and Aquinas said so), that witches had sex with the devil and magically caused illness and destruction and disaster, that they all needed to be killed, and that anyone who disagreed with any of that needed to be punished too. One of their methods for detecting witches involved searching someone’s body for anything that might possibly be a third nipple, which they thought witches had so they could breastfeed demons. When the victim denied being a witch, the inquisitors would torture her to extract a confession. Then she would be burned at the stake, either because she had “admitted” she was a witch (just to make the torture stop), or because she stubbornly refused to admit it. These inquisitors completely failed to account for the possibility that an accusation of witchcraft might be false. And it never occurred to them that the only reason anyone was confessing to being a witch was that they were being tortured to force them to confess. Another witch-detection method was an even stupider than usual version of the trial by ordeal: If somebody says you’re a witch, you get thrown in the water. If you drown, that means you’re innocent, but now you’re dead. If you float, that means you’re a witch for some reason, so now they kill you.
• Starting about a century ago, some churches encourage their members to handle venomous snakes and drink poison, because the Bible said that Christians would be able to do those things safely, and they believed it. Of course, the Bible was wrong, as usual, and members of these churches regularly get injured or die as a result of believing it.⁶ But the other members somehow don’t see this as evidence that the Bible was wrong.
• The Christian apologist who has a book and a website called “Reasonable Faith” has repeatedly confirmed that his faith is not reasonable at all: He says his own direct “experience of the Holy Spirit” trumps all other evidence, so no evidence could ever possibly change his mind. He says he would still believe in the resurrection of Jesus even if he was there and saw it not happen. He says when he came to believe, it was “not through any careful consideration of the evidence”. He says reason and argument and evidence should not be used to evaluate the claims of the gospel, and should not be the basis of anyone’s belief. He says he is troubled and dismayed that other people think it’s good to doubt your current beliefs and to follow reason wherever it might lead you. He says if he ever found that his beliefs conflicted with reason, then he would reject reason.
• When people try reading from the King James Version of the Bible, they often can’t believe it’s the real thing. That’s because most Christians don’t really read the Bible, so all their memories and expectations of what’s in the Bible, and of what the King James sounds like, are based on what they’ve heard from second-hand sources which tend to change things to sound less awkward, not based on having actually read the text. Style-wise, the actual King James Bible contains some surprisingly modern-sounding language, because a lot of words are older than you’d think. It contains words that sound jarringly informal or vulgar compared to the dignified tone that we now tend to associate with the language of the era when that translation was made. It’s also full of grammar that is now considered improper and sounds really dumb, and spellings that are now considered incorrect and look really dumb. Some of the more obscure ancient Hebrew names in the Bible are extremely foreign-sounding names that most people have never heard of, and a lot of people are more likely to associate Middle-Eastern names like that with Islam than with Christianity or Judaism. And of course, Christians don’t tend to know much about the actual content of the Bible, either. Including all the ways that it constantly contradicts itself. Now the really dumb part is that a lot of Christians persistently can’t believe that what they’re seeing is the real King James version of the Bible, no matter how many Bibles they look at and see that that’s how it is every single time. They find it easier to believe in a conspiracy theory that all the Bibles have somehow been secretly replaced with corrupted counterfeit Bibles, than to accept that their memory of a book that they’ve probably never actually read before was mistaken.