Atheism as a Social Evolution:
As I’ve showed you in the first two books, societies transform into something new in three different ways. First, an exceptional person figures out a better way to do something and the idea spreads to everyone. Second, the people of the society run into some sort of environmental limitation that prevents them from continuing to do things the way they’ve been doing them and forces them to find a new way of doing things. Third, some combination of the two.
The hunter-gatherers of Mesopotamia hunted gazelles until there were no gazelles left to hunt. Then they figured out how to grow their own food. Their ancestors had been hunting animals for millions of years and they had never seen agriculture before, so what could possibly have motivated them to abandon their traditional means of food production and invent a completely new one?
The Europeans cut down trees for firewood just like their ancestors had always done, until there were no more trees left to cut down. Then they figured out how to mine coal.
People kept fighting bigger and bigger wars against each other, trying harder and harder to beat each other into submission, protect themselves, and make everyone not dare to attack them. Then the atom bomb was invented, and now there was no way for two superpowers armed with atomic weapons to win wars against each other anymore. So we invented the United Nations.
George Washington and the other Founding Fathers wanted a new form of government, so they got a bunch of people to join them and started the American Revolution. In other words, they made it impossible for the monarchy to survive in America.
Then that new idea caught on and made it impossible for monarchy to survive in a lot of other places.
Lenin and his comrades wanted a different new form of government in Russia, so they got a bunch of people to join them and made it impossible for the monarchy to survive in Russia. Their new form of government didn’t work as well as they thought it was going to though, and eventually the George Washington plan for governments spread throughout the world and replaced Lenin’s plan for governments.
Mahatma Gandhi thought of a new way to wage revolutionary struggles. He got a lot of people to join him, and eventually they made it impossible for the British colonial government to survive in India. His new ideas spread to people all over the world too.
Dr. King used Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas and got a lot of people to join him. Eventually they made it impossible for segregation to survive, so they forced Americans to think of something else and move on.
Atheism is a challenge to one of the oldest social institutions in the world: religion. Religion is so well entrenched a social institution that Atheism hasn’t been very successful in challenging it. But it is a new set of ideas, and they have spread to a lot of people.
Now things are about to change in a way that—hopefully—a lot of people are going to be able to understand. Now a new set of ideas is going to be crucial to meet the changing conditions of the world.
As I’ve demonstrated, believing in imaginary things, and building political and economic systems on the assumption that these imaginary things are going to intervene on your behalf, can only succeed when you aren’t stretching your environment to its limits. You can continue to live the way you feel like living, believing you have supernatural forces on your side, all the while inflicting more and more damage on your environment, and not noticing. Then when your environment is gone, the supernatural powers you thought you had on your side are gone too—or else you believe they start trying to kill you.
The only way out of this trap is for a majority of people—and preferably everyone—to start putting these new ideas to use. That means everyone ceasing to depend on the existence of supernatural powers to make their political and economic systems function, and to start taking 100% responsibility for their own actions. The alternative is global environmental catastrophe and everything that goes with it.
It’s no longer a question of whether or not it’s possible for Atheism to replace religion. Now it’s a question of: How badly do you want to live?
There’s nothing wrong with practicing religions for the sake of maintaining a sense of cultural identity, which is what I do. A lot of people I meet assume I’m an Atheist. But being an Atheist would just be too easy for me. I practice my religion in strictly Atheistic terms just to prove it can be done.
Practicing a religion—or even just believing in it—any other way is global suicide.