Quitting Has Never Been Easier

The cost-benefit ratio of religion is changing rapidly.

Quitting religion isn’t as hard as it used to be and the benefits have never been better. Just as pills and patches helped free nicotine’s slaves, recent advances may help free minds from faith. The perceived need for religion, as for nicotine, evaporates after rationality succeeds in motivating a period of cessation.

Reason, even when being suppressed in action by addiction or fear, tells us that belief in ancient supernatural claims or chronic use of an expensive and fatal poison is absurd. Accepting unvalidated and questionably motivated claims on faith, if sustained, would quickly lead to one’s own demise. What if a street corner fentanyl dealer told you that a lethal dose of the drug was a safe amount to combat dental pain?

So why has religion been so popular and widespread? Religion has played an important stopgap role historically, granting early access to ethics and its benefits. Even today religion remains widespread and offers the most accepted solution to our ultimate and seemingly insurmountable problem of mortality, yet scientific objectivity has yielded us better alternatives, reducing or eliminating the need for religion. Meanwhile, the costs of faith include hatred, wars, and self-sacrifice.

The atheist American philosopher Ayn Rand frequently identified religion as “a primitive form of philosophy,” which, while once a justification, is now a reason for deprecation¹. In ancient times, the most philosophically enlightened leaders might’ve established that murder and robbery are wrong, but lacked the ability to argue it rationally with their tribes. Saying that it was the will of god and is being demanded by that god under threat of eternal damnation probably served as a quick path to civility. Given the smaller size of human brains at the time, a lack of scientific knowledge, and widespread superstitious beliefs, the seminal authors of the religions may have literally thought that they were in some kind of divine communication when feeling inspired.

Although this helps to explain religion as well as to appreciate its role in history, it also means that the development of ethical thought remains frozen for many at essentially the beginning. Since faith means acceptance of beliefs without proof, and those beliefs were set in stone (literally, in some cases) millennia ago, the religion’s dogma can never be updated to include the enlightenment of mankind from our entire history of scientific and philosophical thought.

We shouldn’t pretend that the reasons aren’t clear. As with all living beings, human beings have a survival instinct to serve as their most fundamental and vital form of selfishness—a desire to preserve one’s own life. The intellectual development of our species clashes devastatingly with that instinct, because we have foreknowledge of the inevitability and irreversibility of our deaths. The worst possible outcome, the greatest fear of any mentally healthy adult, is inevitable and by definition involving the destruction of the mind, essentially invalidates any purpose or accomplishments as futile and ultimately meaningless.

Religion promises us a sorely needed solution, but without evidence and at great cost. By offering faith, however, individuals give up control of their minds. The immediate intellectual price is clear, given that the only working epistemological methods of understanding reality must be given up systematically in order for faith to fulfill its purpose as an anesthetic. The true price of religion is much higher because those who simply seek to control and manipulate others are able to take advantage of the believer’s irrationality.

Socialism demands mindless acceptance and obedience as well, but calls theirs “indoctrination” or “doctrine” rather than “faith” or “dogma”. The surprising number of similarities between religion and socialism is largely due to their mutual underlying collectivism. Collectivism views groups as having rights superior to those of individuals—and even supposed rights of groups to individuals. The resulting ‘values’ stemming from such a worldview typically involve self-sacrifice and subservience to an unquestioned authority.

In religion, a god or gods are presented as the ultimate source of authority—an all-knowing, powerful, infallible creator who stands ready to hand out negative reinforcement to any heretics. Proponents of the religion are quick to point out that god, as an authority, is no longer directly accessible; thus control flows to god’s alleged Earthly representatives in the church or whoever in the larger society most effectively claims association with the spiritual realm.

For centuries, sultans, kings, warlords, messiahs, and priests have all laid their claim to that role, extracting obedience and esteem when successful. How many have died because their geopolitical leader told them god needed them to invade a neighboring state and take its land?

“Opportunity cost” is an economic term that refers to the value of the best alternative. The opportunity costs of religion are quite high. Throughout history, everyone who’s ever deluded or distracted themself to avoid thinking about death objectively could’ve contributed to finding a way to prevent or better delay it. Consider the following hypothetical exchange between a believer (B) and skeptic (S):

B: Even if faith isn’t based on logic, that’s OK because it’s not harmful.
S: Doesn’t giving up reason make life harder? How can we work to avoid death if we’re accepting it as a great ascension into an unknowable paradise of heaven or another afterlife?
B: I’m not abandoning reason because I have faith. I don’t worry that this is distracting people like me from finding scientific solutions to the problem of mortality because we have a thriving healthcare sector.
S: Do you believe that your consciousness can somehow exist beyond death?
B: Yes, I believe that if you open your heart to (Jesus / Allah / G-d), that your name is written in the Book of Life, which means you’ll live forever in a paradise after your so-called death.
S: When you think about death, does this belief give you any comfort?
B: Of course, but I still have health insurance and I own stock in biotech companies because my religion says that’s also important.
S: Are you a member of a human cryonics institution?
B: No, I want to have a religious funeral with an open casket and I’ll be in heaven when the hospital pronounces me dead.

The point is, of course, that the believer really does give up opportunities to work against a real-world problem by finding a real-world solution because of the effects of faith on rationality. The example is also quite timely, as in February 2024, researchers at Fudan University published their experiments with a new human cryonics (cryostasis) procedure called MEDY, wherein they successfully froze part of a human brain and later reanimated it without tissue damage.

If the vast wealth spent on religion and religiously-influenced activities worldwide annually had been devoted to this sort of research, we might’ve had this technology 50 years earlier and developed it to the point of widespread, reliable use, with patients being revived regularly as new life-extending treatments they need are developed.

Opportunity costs are only the ‘glass is half empty’ perspective, though. The “half full” perspective is that more and more opportunities to advance our struggle against death are emerging. As AI continues to rapidly fuel new drug discovery and cryonics has had its breakthrough, philosophy and science are yielding more and more hope.

Contemplations of virtual reality and AI have led mainstream philosophers studying philosophy of mind, like Chalmers and Clarke, to believe that we may exist inside of (or as) AI in a virtual world—a trending idea in recent years among intellectuals.

A popular peer-reviewed study claimed mathematical evidence of a “third law of Infodynamics” by identifying rounding errors in astronomical phenomena. Hardware advances and improvements to neural networks meanwhile, make it sound more and more plausible that our consciousnesses could extend beyond, and perhaps one day entirely even leave, our physical bodies.

It’s an exciting time to be alive, but far less so than it would be if more attention were diverted from religion and the worldwide massacres and wars it creates to furthering these advances. Fortunately, because of technological and philosophical advances, it’s never been easier to have the intellectual and emotional maturity to accept reality.

1. Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975), 20; Ayn Rand, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975), 25.