Many people today say they are unaffiliated, or don’t have a religion. They are against organized religion, and distrust historic institutions or hierarchies, so they feel that they have no religion. But everyone has a religion. There may not be weekly meetings that are attended at traditional brick and mortar churches or mosques or synagogues or ashrams or hermitages or monasteries, but there are worship services that outperform traditional liturgies and there are pilgrimages that would rival the Canterbury Tales. People will drive across the country to see Mickey Mouse, or wait outside bookstores for the next Harry Potter book. They will meet up for costume and role playing parties where the fantasy is accepted as reality. They will sleep outside on concrete to get the next iPhone. They will fly ten thousand miles to hear the keynote speech from the Apple CEO. The sports pilgrimages that men make to football stadiums is spoken of with hallowed tones, as if to stand where Joe Montana or Joe Namath or Joe Theisman once threw a hail mary pass is a more highly regarded holy ground than where Gabriel said the actual words “Hail Mary, full of grace” to the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.

As a non-believer, when I reviewed my worldview, I realized I’d found a similar replacement for what I’d had before in traditional religion, with curious parallels. A trick of the mind happens when we abandon our idea of religion. When we declare that we have “no religion,” we have already replaced our concept of religion with something different, but the parts are all there.

To sum up the modern view that I held - my worldview that I felt had removed all religion - it went something like this:

The universe was formed from a massive explosion of pre-existing matter, and gradually over time we evolved from single-celled organisms into fully sentient beings, assembled from far flung star parts and activated by solar power. Whether any pre-existing power or intelligence existed is unknown and unimportant. The creator acted as a clockmaker or artist, and he crafted 100 types of atoms and various physical laws to govern the universe, finely tuning key variables like gravity to keep the dance of atoms and chemistry valid throughout the ages. The laws governing the behavior of matter and energy cannot be broken; the creator cannot or chooses not to poke his finger into the game to disrupt nature and produce miracles. We inhabit a speck on a speck, known as the planet earth, which may be one of many habitable planets in the universe. Pursuit of knowledge and progress is the way, as knowledge is leading us toward a promised land of equality and plenty for all. Against the forces of superstition and ignorance, progress moved forward. From the first living organism, our earliest ancestor, until today, the accretion of knowledge is leading to higher life forms. This progress creates stepping stones of knowledge toward when we will be fulfilled in our understanding by advances in science, engineering, and technology. The rapid leap forward we are experiencing today should have, could have, and would have happened much sooner, but free thought was kept imprisoned by religious institutions until the age of the Enlightenment dawned on the dark ages. Embattled by its enemies, science has finally been unshackled to reveal the truth of the universe. We were only kept from this future by the backwardness of traditional culture, childish superstition, patriarchy, powerful institutions, and primitive tribal structures. In the near future, planetary death will occur through climate change unless we repent of our wasteful ways and adopt a purely rational, scientific view. Through green energy we will be saved. The day is near when we will be able to transfer our conscious mind into a digital immortality. One day we will escape death, shake off our bodies, and have limitless knowledge and pure freedom. Finally, in the distant future, the solar system will collapse, the sun will swallow the earth, and the universe will consume itself into a singular dense spot of matter, and explode once again to restart the cycle.

This modern view has it all. By “all” I mean this worldview contains everything that constitutes a religion. I was taking part in a modern religion that has all the trappings of any religion that has ever existed. This modern religion also has its own vocabulary and language and revelations and sacrifices. The priests of this religion even have uniforms or vestments called lab coats and, in the software world, hooded sweatshirts. There are monks and priests in today’s secular religion as much as there ever were in Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. Not only that, but this “Scientism” has the key elements that form a creed: a beginning, an ending, a progression, a hero, a villain, and an apocalypse. I realize the word Scientism sounds strange, but what else could it be called? The only thing missing from it is God. But then it is we ourselves that take his place, so it certainly does have a god, but it’s just an evolved ape who wears clothing and stares at screens all day.

This realization was an unexpected discovery to me, but so obvious once examined and dissected. We cannot live without some kind of religion. Everyone walking this earth has a religion, whether he or she knows it or not. Consider how people will wait outside for three days for a Harry Potter or Star Wars movie, or will camp out all night on Black Friday for a sale. Consider just how devout members of the Democratic or Republican parties can be, how they will spend hours a day trumpeting the good of their own party while calling out the evil of the opposition. Monks could hardly show such dedication in a cloistered desert hermitage. Fashion and musicians and car companies and cosmetics and guns and pornography have their constant followers, ever faithful in defense. The willingness to defend these modern things makes traditional religious defenders and apologists appear to lack zeal in comparison.

While I pretended not to have a faith, I most certainly did have a religion. We are wired for it, and if it's not Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, a religion will surface in something else, like money or health or technology or Harry Potter or socialism. Science, Post-Modernism, and Socialism are religions in disguise. The body itself can become a kind of religion. Literally, millions of devout gym members are attending their worship services on treadmills and leg press machines right now. Everyone is living according to some kind of ultimate faith, whether they admit it or not.

As someone who once found that science and religion could not co-exist, I now reject that division. In fact, I find it to be the opposite, as faith and reason are both needed if wisdom is to be found. I’ve mentioned this several times, but faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly. A bird with one wing cannot leave the ground. To find meaning and purpose in this life we need both reason and faith. The imaginary battle of faith vs. science that has been heated and hammered into a modern worldview is pure invention, but children are being steered to believe that invention. Those driving us in this direction have a clear agenda, and they don’t know it, but it’s an agenda that will backfire. This way forward will backfire, because a worldview that lacks an ultimate meaning results in a lifetime of trying to fit square pegs into the God-shaped hole in the heart. There is another blowback that is coming, but this one is for those who guide children away from God, as words directly from Jesus stated plainly: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” Note: this blowback is coming for those with and without faith.

The first commandment of Jesus was to love God, thus the very first sin, the worst sin, is to reject God. American culture has fully adopted rejection of God, and I fell for this bait, hook, line, and sinker, for about fifteen years. Unfortunately, there is a blaring warning about this for our souls from Jesus, as teaching children to reject God or causing them to lose faith is called out specifically as a guaranteed path to hell. Turning away from God violates the first rule - not just the Old Testament rules - but of the two commandments of Jesus. The first sin in Genesis was a rejection of God, hence the name original sin. Funny how things all tie together in this strange book. This theme of “turning away” and “turning back” is a story arc, a loop, a core truth, a central point of it all. And of course, the point of the entire body of scripture and church and worship and faith is to remember to have humility before God.

I don’t think I know a single person who doesn’t believe that “humility before God” sounds like a bad idea, and that includes atheists and scientists and rednecks and hippies. Most of the atheists I know say they don’t believe in God, but scratching the surface a bit you come to realize that they mostly hate arrogance in religious people and, therefore, they hate God, as if God were some sidekick of a certain person, or group of people. This is an example of throwing out the baby Jesus with the bathwater. It can be a newsflash to some people that Jesus himself also hated religious hypocrites, which may shock people because they realize that they are not that far from God after all.

That's the joke on us moderns who mock traditional religion and “organized” religion: we think we've shrugged off religion, like it was a dirty shirt, because we are now too smart, too busy, and too enlightened. But turns out that we had another shirt on underneath, with the same brand name, titled: religion. We run from one religion right into the arms of another religion. Why? Because we have no choice. We must. Our hearts require it. We cannot help it or hide from it. If we get rid of our Rosary we’ll go find crystals and horoscopes. If we discard daily reading the Gospels, we’ll do daily readings on politics or sports or technology. We want meaning. We need reasons for belief, and we need a sense of right and wrong, and like it or not, the built-in urge for religion surfaces in every person in all ages. This feature of human experience cannot be stifled, or not for long, and even when stifled it’s still peeking out though we may be unaware.

“God and country” provided the old banners that gave people meaning, and all of history has shown how those can be abused and twisted into cruel and unusual manifestations of evil. God, country, and even family are being replaced with a variety of distractions today, but this will not last long. A time of plenty and peace leads to diversion and distraction. The period of relative peace held now will fade, and along with it, so will these new religions. The new religions revolve around the individual. The old standards, with all their flaws, provided a sense of purpose and meaning in people’s lives. The book of Genesis did not take shape by accident. It is the result of thousands upon thousands of generations of understanding how human life and society stay together. The story begins with God, then leads to a family, and finally that family forms a nation. Literalists miss this because they are not looking for it. This order matters, because as soon as we attempt to ignore God, we begin to destroy the family, and as the family goes, so goes any nation.

The 20th century smashed the notion of national pride as always being a good thing, as disorder and death can drape itself under a flag. The nations of Germany, China, and the Soviet Union all tossed out God as the first casualty and followed that attempted murder with millions of actual murders of human beings. Today it’s less fashionable to have national pride, but if you doubt that national pride still exists, you don’t need to look for a redneck with a jacked up pickup on the gravel roads of America. Watch the opening of any World Cup soccer game, when the national anthem rings out for each team. Look at the faces of the players, eyes wet with tears, their cheeks and foreheads steeled like flint for the coming match, their arms linked in solidarity with teammates and somehow even the crowd. The bond of nationhood cements the people through the playing of the song. The crowd sings at the top of their lungs to give strength to the men on the pitch, like soldiers set to fight a 90 minute war by sport, as proxies for the hordes of citizens at home; to win glory for the symbol of their common flag; to bring honor to that shared patch of dirt that the nation calls its home, where all its dreams and feats and failures and hopes and history, good or bad, has tied them together. That nationalism and tribalism is very much still there, just as our sense of religion may appear hidden but is ever-present.

National pride must be checked by the higher power of the divine, but whenever the policy of “God first” slips, nationalism becomes a brutal god, and so now we are rightfully wary of leaders who promise the moon and stars. Even family pride must be checked by the divine, or the same problem arises. Further yet, even when “God first” is replaced with “religion first” then the religion itself becomes a God, and God gets shoved to the side. This can happen with Catholics or Muslims or Jews. Anything replacing God marks the end of truth and results in guaranteed chaos, because there is no ultimate truth or justice. Nationalism is good, in the right dosage. Individualism is good, when kept beneath the Creator. Religion is good, when humility before God remains the focus. In other words, all of these things are good, when ordered correctly and not in themselves the ultimate goal. Religion is best when it does not wield state power, but rather acts as the moral compass of state power. This is why the arguments for religious freedom, from Tertullian and Justin Martyr to Thomas Jefferson and Dignitatus Humanae, remain critical for future generations, perhaps even more today than when those writers first shared their ideas. Any attempts at coercion of faith upon people will fail miserably, and cannot avoid devolving into a horrifying totalitarianism. This applies to nationalism, individualism, or religion. If this sounds like exaggeration, you need look back no further than 100 years at the many dictatorships and attempts to crush all forms of dissent. And again coercion has re-appeared, with its current manifestation in America taking up the banner of individualism as the ultimate good. The saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” is not true. We will repeat history whether we know history or not.

Today, politics and career often take a front seat over God, family, and flag, as we attempt to provide meaning through votes and jobs, and at our peril ignore the crusty old dangerous ways of nationalism and organized religion. The idea today is that we must smash the old. “Smash the patriarchy” is as meaningless a phrase as “Support the troops” or “Defund the police” but all of these work as slogans because of their vague intention and unfocused aim. All three of these slogans pretend to preach virtue, but only make the speaker feel superior for selecting a side. What we have today is a situation of personal feeling as truth, which means that we clamor for a stamp of approval for whatever is we want to do, and in doing so we deem our desires themselves to be good and just. Why? Because we want them. Whatever we want is right. At the end of the book of Judges, the final line matches our times today: “In those days there was no king; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

That is where we sit today, and history will play out what the old civilizations and peoples found out the hard way, from thousands of years of mistaken pathways through war and peace and seasons of change. In the book of Wisdom chapter two might have been written today, in our age of rising atheism and indifference, as the sacred writer uses the voice of the culture of the self to describe its beliefs. There is nothing new under the sun. The author of Wisdom states plainly what those without faith in God seek: to craft a world to satisfy delights and to never stop partaking of those delights, right up to the last day, since if there is no afterlife, judgement, or resurrection, then what else is there but food, drink, entertainment, and “fun”? Virtue is for suckers.

For by mere chance were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been; Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark from the beating of our hearts, And when this is quenched, our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like empty air….Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are here, and make use of creation with youthful zest. Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no springtime blossom pass us by…But let our strength be our norm of righteousness; for weakness proves itself useless. (Wisdom 2)

This is summing up the “will to power” three thousand years before any German tackled it. All of this chapter of Wisdom sounds familiar today. We have middle-aged men gulping testosterone pills and protein shakes, worshipping the god of youth, with the enemy being old age. Marriages are sacrificed for pornography every day, as the sacred desires of our fickle minds must be satisfied. Technology is a god that promises to solve all of our problems, even though it actually created the problems that it now needs to solve (see: Climate Change, the threat of Nuclear War, Cyber attack, mega-earthquake from fracking, Coronavirus). Consumerism presses forward with the latest fads, gadgets, vehicles, and fashions to occupy our wants and desires. Rampant self-indulgence runs riot as “to each his own” plays out in real time before our eyes. Sin is seen as only that which could harm another, which is the masterstroke of our egos to allow us to keep us clinging to the seven deadlies because they only harm ourselves, and even self-harm is denied, as the addictions cut so deep that even senior men cannot give up habits that should have died as they passed adolescence into adulthood.

At least the Greeks gave names to the gods. We pretend there is no god while we live out full lives worshipping them. Hephaestus, Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Eros. I challenge you to watch TV ads and see if you can tell exactly which god is calling for worship in each commercial. There may be a good opportunity for a board game or Bingo cards for finding which Greek god is being dialed in each advertisement.

This religion of “science” is not the only modern replacement for religion around, it’s just one of the better and most complete candidates because it has a full cosmology. By definition it cannot extend into matters of faith and morality, but for many followers it does. The role of science is to observe and explain the natural world, but when it extends past that it becomes philosophy and often bleeds into religion.

Our modern cosmology and understanding of the universe looks back on that of the book of Genesis with a sneer, but a thousand years from now it’s just as likely that our understanding will look equally silly. Our concepts of black holes and quantum physics and string theory could sound as ludicrous as the “firmament” that held the waters above and below the earth. It’s even possible that the firmament theory of Genesis will seem more wise, should the next round of cosmological definition be something completely strange to us moderns. But in either case, the structure of the universe that we “know” at different points in history tells us nothing about faith or morals, and advances in telescopes and computing cannot mine truth any better than the old thinkers and storytellers. Plato and Paul and Confucius and Buddha and Shakespeare and Dante have deeper insights into truth than all the scientists in history, even if they had never heard of calculus or chemistry.

Science makes for a good religion because it can explain so many things, make sense of our world, and provide an answer for all questions. Ever since Voltaire’s lifelong relentless attack on religion made headway, legions of science apologists stand at the ready to take up arms in defense of Nature to act as a check against the slightest whiff of religious fanaticism. It has become every bit as religious as religion, as can be seen in the long crusade of ink and letters from Voltaire to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud to John Dewey.

The claim is that we are creatures caught up in a cosmic accident, where knowledge can only be ascertained by the scientific method. Only what is observable, repeatable, and testable is real. Consciousness is merely a result of evolution. Our morality and stories are but guardians and guides for our own self-preservation, learned through a cruel history of pain and suffering. Art, literature, and religion are side-effects of overactive imaginations of weak and primitive tribes that invented magic, superstition, God, gods, and goddesses for psychological and sociological survival.

This modern god of science has a scapegoat for blame, for redemption, for justification, just like the old religions. A religion must have an enemy, as all gods promise approval, cheerleading, and ultimately righteousness, which means someone else must lose. Christianity has the devil, The Fall, and Original Sin. There has to be a loser, an opponent; you cannot be a freedom fighter today without an oppressor. You cannot be freed without overcoming a master. For the modern gods, the enemy is still there if you look for it. The other political party must be wrong. The ravages of age and deterioration is to blame. Diet, sugar, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup are to blame. The anti-intellectuals are to blame. The hillbillies are to blame. The immigrants are to blame. The rich are to blame. Those on welfare are to blame. The capitalists are guilty, squeezing blood from the workers. No, the flip-side, the communists are causing the problem by killing all motivation. There is a hero and a villain.

My favorite quote about the grand left-right argument of economics is from John Kenneth Galbraith who said, “In capitalism, man oppresses man. In communism, it’s just the opposite.” While that is funny, it’s also a true statement. But it’s also worth noting that one of those ideologies has proven repeatedly to embrace wholesale slaughter of humans much more readily than the other, and I don’t even have to mention which one for you to know the answer, and it is the same one that inherently denies God as one of its core tenets.

And then there’s the most popular villain of all: the Christians. Science fundamentalists tend to take aim most pointedly at Christians, and often Muslims, too, but in this cultural moment it is the Christians. Never mind that fact that modern science would not exist without Christianity, or that most of the great breakthroughs were made by God-fearing people. Let’s set aside those minor names, like Mendel, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Einstein. Ignore those thinkers for a moment.

Because there is some truth to the accusation of blame, of course, as many readily point at the Spanish Inquisition and behavior of “Christian” explorers in the New World that followed on Columbus’ heels. Yes, Europe has horrific segments of history, as religions can be abused and twisted. For instance, read the letters of St. Bartolome de las Casas to hear about what Spanish wealth-seekers were doing to natives in the Caribbean, some under the banner of their supposed faith. It is revolting. Were it not for de las Casas writing in the 1520s to alert about the horrors of the Spanish running amok in the New World, the Church would not have written Sublimus Deus in 1537 condemning all enslavement and re-asserting the fact that natives are created in the image and likeness of God. And even then, could a letter from the Pope suddenly halt the evil of men running wild who want nothing more than gold, violence, and sex? No. But it does make me wonder how much longer and how much worse this state of butchery would have continued if no one like Bartolome de las Casas had been present to witness and report on the evils, because he was one of the few voices crying out from the literal wilderness of the New World.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event in human history restricted to Europeans, as you can read stories of the gulags in Russia or the lengthy list of massacres in China or find numerous accounts of similar gruesome events coming from the Ottomans or Romans or Zulus or Mayans or Incas or Hawaiians or First Nations or literally any culture that ever existed, try as we might today to gloss over the shared flaw in our hearts, which has always been with humans wherever we have lived. Thanks to the 20th century, when nationalism and socialism reigned, Europeans lead in all body count statistical categories for brutality and inhumanity, but to assume that only one continent of people is capable of atrocity is to ignore reality and all of history. We want to plug our ears and close our eyes, but to pretend that one group of people has this flaw while other human groups do not carry this same disease is to bury our heads in the sands of a version of history that would be more aptly called fantasy.

One undeniable fact is that as we gain knowledge and mastery over science and technology, we become increasingly deadly, as each invention increases the death toll, from the longbow, to the broadsword, to the stirrup for riding horses, to the musket, to the cannon, to mustard gas, to the atom bomb, to the inter-contintental-ballistic-missile, to biological weaponry, to whatever unexpected coming attack will slay our modern energy grids and supply chains and water supplies. The reason why is that with each advance, the greed of opportunity is seized by people. The question is always, “How can we make money or benefit from this new knowledge,” and rarely “Should we be doing this at all?” I have seen this firsthand in product meetings where the ability to do something is adopted, such as spy on shoppers, or install keystroke logging software, and the uneasy question usually arises about ethics from mousy engineers, but is quickly knocked down by an executive or manager who wants a good fiscal quarter. To observe this human tendency to exploit others does not require a war to observe. We are all seeking to find an advantage using whatever tool is available, just as a younger sister learns to cry tearfully to thwart a bullying older brother, because she learns it can summon a father or mother to arrest the bully. If the younger sister had a taser that proved more effective, they would just use that.

Christians never needed any extra assistance from its own followers to earn the hatred of its enemies. No, they are hated even when they are preaching the Good News with humble hearts and mercy in mind. But rest assured, any atrocity or horror committed under the banner of professed Christians never came from Jesus Christ, the founder of the faith. Anyone who says it does, doesn’t understand Jesus, and needs to start again on Matthew 1, verse 1 and proceed to John 21, verse 25.

The evils people do in Jesus’ name have never come from Jesus. This is something quickly forgotten. Whether or not those who acted in God’s name as a wolf in sheep’s clothing were true believers does not even matter, because the bloodstain remains. The wound of scandal brought by someone professing faith remains for a long time. The lion is supposed to lay down with the lamb, not eat it, no matter how delicious the lamb. The believer is supposed to give unto Caesar, not become Caesar. Christians in error have become the example held up in pop culture. Many TV shows today have the villain as a Christian. It’s easy to see who the villain of American society is by watching movies or reading books from a specific year, as once the Soviets held all the roles of villains, then it was middle-eastern Muslims, and today it’s almost entirely Christians.

Yet Jesus still remains risen up, glorified, and no matter what evil men carry out, he himself can never be sullied. This is why Christianity can be stood up time after time, after every apparent deathblow. It rises again with Jesus himself. Because of the high standard set by Jesus, we can never live up to it, not fully, and often not even minimally. For this reason the sex abuse of children by Catholic clergy hurts all the worse, because Jesus’ Church on earth is meant to be the keeper of the light of faith, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” yet for all the truth, beauty and goodness that the faithful see in our Church, in its essence and meaning, its buildings, its art, its Catechism, in the history, the mysteries of the Holy Mass, in the Sacraments, in the Rosary, in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, it hurts terribly when the attack comes from the Church itself, when trust has been eroded from the inside. Still the beauty of all those parts can never be destroyed or diminished, no matter how far fallen followers have gone in the ruination of their own souls.

Betrayed trust among non-Christians brings bruises, but among the faithful, from inside, the betrayal gives a nearly fatal wound. The saying, “There is no honor among thieves” is meant to be intended for non-Christians, which is why the sex abuse scandal provides endless firepower for powerful guns aimed at the Catholic Church. For the billion people who have known and trusted good priests, this was especially painful, sometimes too hard for words, to the point that excuses were made, and sometimes even excuses for the excuses for the behavior, when there is no excuse that can be allowed. The pain of the victims supersedes all guilt and shame. But it was not God that committed the crimes, nor the Church, but corrupt men who abused their power and violated every precept of the faith and caused immeasurable scandal.

For the many that would like to see the Church wither and die, thinking that this event will surely be the final death of Christianity, they will be sorely disappointed. Scandal has rocked the Church for 2,000 years and each of those looked like the last punch, but the Church will never die because it cannot die. I’m not claiming this to be arrogant. I’m not writing this to be rude. I’m saying it because it is a fact. In every age, Jesus somehow gathers a people to his Church.

Every generation of humans rediscovers the power of the same man from Nazareth, over and over, again and again, because nothing comes close to its power, nothing touches the completeness of the life of Jesus, and nothing overcomes the resurrection once you come to believe it. Clearly, I have no right to speak for anything regarding the Church. I have no status. I’m not even a very good Catholic. I should probably just shut up and not share my opinion on these topics. But I know what I’ve found, and it’s something quite different and far more meaningful and powerful than what my old religion of science could offer.

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