The Death of God and The Birth of Tolerance and Critical Thought

God died first, next was altruism, and then began the deliberate design of real human happiness

I was raised in a traditional religious family; nothing extreme but we went to church most weeks.

My parents are kind and compassionate people from whom I learned how to be a ‘good’ person when I was a kid but along with all the wonderful things that they taught me, they also instilled the belief in God, a religious doctrine, and altruism.

I grew up to be a proud stubborn adult who failed to realize, for too long, how much those three seemingly benevolent concepts make identifying and correcting character and behavior flaws almost impossible.

As a boy, I dreamed of being an astronaut so I enrolled in a university science program in hopes that it would help me get there. I did not expect, however, that after many years of preparation and university degrees in mathematics, physics and rocket science, I would have to move across the Atlantic because there was no work for me in the ‘land of opportunities.’

I got tired of hearing the same answer at every interview: “your grades are great, your research is great, your profile fits the position like a glove, but we cannot even consider your application because you are on a student VISA and can’t get a security clearance.”

Scientists can be useful, though, and I came across an opportunity to pursue happiness and a professional career in a place where people spoke a language that I could not understand; not one word! I took it because I had no other options on the table at the time.

My first few weeks there were interesting. I was excited at the prospect of starting a new life from scratch and reinventing myself as I pleased. But I couldn’t speak the language and didn’t know many people so I spent a lot of time alone browsing the internet.

One evening, a cousin of mine sent me a link to the Zeitgeist documentary, by Peter Joseph. Whether or not his claims in the film are true is beyond the scope of this story but after watching the first part something changed.

I had spent my entire life proudly defending my beliefs, religious and otherwise, with what I’d been told were the rightful reasons behind them. One of the most difficult parts of my critical thought development was recognizing that many of the premises which had supported my beliefs for most of my life had no bearing in reality and made little to no logical sense.

To this day, I still find it shocking that it took me so long to ask myself the simple question ‘does this make any sense?’. But I never did and that just is what it is. I guess watching Peter Joseph’s documentary, at a stage when I had a lot of alone time to wonder, got me thinking about my own opinions more than I ever had before.

I thought and wondered about what it was that I truly believed in and why. I replayed in my head the conversations that I had had with different people throughout my life. For the first time, instead of dismissing their questions with prefabricated answers learned at home, at school, and in church, I tried to actually listen to them as an impartial evolved human being, capable of true critical thought and analysis.

That evening, my life initiated a paradigm shift that took years to consolidate but one that would change everything. It was as if my God, along with everything that surrounded it, including my altruism, had been diagnosed with an incurable terminal disease.

I mourned the downfall of my moral structure’s fundamental pillars and it took some time for reason to overcome the shame and guilt of having been so wrong for so long. Long story short, reason finished off my God eventually, marking the beginning of what I call the chapter of thinking for myself.

With time, I came to realize that there is no virtue in believing without seeing; none whatsoever!

Our remarkable species has come as far as it has precisely because we believe what we see and if we can’t observe something, either with our eyes or with devices that observe what our eyes cannot, then it simply does not exist. Believing what we can’t see not only has no virtue, but it also makes no sense. It doesn’t make us better humans, it makes us worse ones.

Electric devices, mechanical machines, buildings, roads, bridges, the internet, and every other human invention was only possible because we observe nature and learn how small parts of it work from our observations. And then we use this knowledge to invent new useful things. I have yet to encounter an exception to this natural process.

Humans’ secret sauce, which puts us at the very top of the food chain, far above all the much larger, stronger, faster, and mechanically superior species with whom we share planet earth, is our ability to think and challenge what we are taught against our own observations. Blind faith, by definition, is the opposite of that.

Asking a human to believe without seeing, as most gods demand of their believers, is asking them to surrender their most powerful weapon. It is tantamount to asking a tiger to wear a mouth guard, blunt gloves, a fluorescent fuchsia outfit, a blindfold, a nose clip, and a pair of earmuffs before going out into the jungle.

I am not proud to recognize that I did it for some 25 years but what matters now is that I stopped; talk about better late than never!

I could not illustrate to you, in a few thousand words, the freedom that taking responsibility for each of my beliefs and opinions has given me. I used to often find myself arguing principles which I learned from top to bottom but never really constructed on my own.

Interrupting a heated discussion to say ‘I’m sorry, you are right and I am wrong because my premises are flawed’ is as difficult as it sounds but it is also just as liberating. And the more I do it, the more robust my beliefs and their premises become and, as is the case with everything else, it gets easier with practice.

My entire moral code was built around a story more far-fetched than some of the craziest fairy tales I know. With omnipotent big brothers keeping tabs on my life, virgins bearing children, prophets with superpowers, superheroes that return from the dead, life after death in the clouds or in a fire pit, and all the other bits that you are probably familiar with already.

Rebuilding that moral code as an adult with conflicts and insecurities, on top of a solid foundation made of real-life characters and their stories, is one of the most humbling journeys that I have embarked on.

It taught me that for me to be wrong doesn’t require that everyone else do everything perfectly right. It taught me to apologize without conditions and take responsibility for my part in problems without needing to point out the faults committed by other parties. It taught me that pride always works against me because no person is better than another and that scoring more points than my opponents in any given game does not yield long-lasting satisfaction.

I became more selfish than I had ever been before. Selfish in the sense that, like a tiger, I live in the jungle and fend for myself and myself only.

That is to say that, like the tiger, I only believe what I see and only agree with what I can make sense of. It means that there are things that I cannot agree with because I don’t understand them yet. It means that it’s ok that I don’t understand some things now and that it’s also ok that I will not understand some other things in the time that I have left. It means that I do NOT accept ludicrous explanations, pulled out of the hat of any given wizard, never mind how ancient nor how many others believe them blindly.

Unlike the tiger, however, I need friends to be happy.

Now that I always think of myself first, I know that being good to the people I love is instrumental to my pursuit of happiness. I wholeheartedly agree on that putting myself in my neighbor’s shoes is an excellent practice but my former religion taught me to do it for all the wrong reasons. I now do it because appreciating others’ stories and contexts helps me give them what they need for them to love me. And if I win their love, well… I win.

My God’s death was like a storm that yields fertile green fields for new life to grow in. Fields of tolerance ruled by the laws of nature as opposed to sets of rules from arbitrary stories, written in ancient books or stones, devoid of any logical sense.

With my God and my altruism, my shame for being the selfish man that I am also died and I learned to take full responsibility for the things I say and do because I know the consequences that my words and actions have.

And while I remain a thoroughly imperfect person who makes mistakes on a regular basis, I now realize that owning up to my mistakes is the quickest path to correcting them.