Have you heard the one about the atheist who says religious people should go to church more?

It goes like this:

Last week, a friend invited the wife and I to a seder. I’m pretty sure all three of us are atheists, but she was raised with Jewish holiday traditions and recent events caused her to want to reconnect with her heritage.

I totally get it.

And she did an amazing job. She filled her house with 16 friends and family, cooked some amazing food, and presided over an actual seder. The book. The weird plate full of symbolic thingies. The whole nine yards.

I was, and am, very impressed. And we all had a great time. At the same time, something bothered me about it, and it took me a couple days to figure out what it was.

I’ve had a weird life, and an even weirder childhood. I grew up in a dozen different places, and have bounced around quite a bit as an adult. As a result, I’ve been able to meet a ton of people that live in wildly different neighborhoods, cultures, and economic situations.

And while I’ve never been religious, I’ve known a ton of folk that are, and I’ve seen the good that religion tends to bring to their lives. There are exceptions of course, but for the most part, people who take their religion seriously tend to live happy, meaningful lives.

By my rough estimation, for every kook that becomes dogmatic and deranged by religion, there are 1,000 people that get nothing but positive benefits.

But to get those benefits, you usually have to actually go to church, or temple, or whatever the case is. You have to hear the sermons. You have to reinforce the religious teachings with, well… religious practice.

I’m a little disturbed, for example, by Catholics who only attend Mass on Christmas or Easter. Or Jews who only celebrate a couple holidays a year, but don’t go to temple.

It strikes me as a kind of “style over substance” mistake. Religion isn’t about the holidays, or the rituals. It’s about the moral teaching. If you’re not regularly going to church or reading deeply from religious texts and the like, then how are you supposed to get the important part of religion? Osmosis?

It would be like being a stoic, but only celebrating Marcus Aurelius’s birthday, never reading Zenu or Seneca, or ole Marcus himself.

Every religion that has been around a while has proved (by virtue of its survival) to confer benefits to those who adhere to it. And to get those benefits, you have to do more than just claim to be a member of the tribe and attend a party from time to time.

I’m not saying any particular religion is 100% correct (I’m an atheist, remember), or that every moral lesson is correct. What I am saying is that humans need to learn what moral behavior is and why it’s good to practice said behavior.

There are a lot of ways to get a deep and dynamic moral framework, but religion is the most common and the easiest. It’s not just a trope to say that humans evolved with a “religion-sized hole in their hearts”.

Pascal called it a “God-shaped hole” and meant it to refer to humanity’s tendency to long for the transcendent and to feel like a part of something bigger than themselves.

But the concept doesn’t need to be supernatural. Your family is bigger than yourself. And the moral structure of society that allows us all to deal with each other productively and peacefully is much, much bigger than yourself.

Moral teachings are essential. And you don’t get them from ritual alone. You’ve got to eat your vegetables, not just lick frosting off the cake. Just attending Mass once or twice a year isn’t going to cut it if you want to “be” a Catholic, for example.

And if you think church or temple isn’t where to find moral teachings, then I encourage you to read deeply about such things. Sample from a wide variety of sources. Read Aristotle. Read all the great philosophers. Study where they overlap. Ponder on where they diverge — and why.

Read the Bible. Read the Talmud. Read the Koran. Read ancillary religious texts that buttress those teachings. Read texts that poke holes in those teachings.

Read Ayn Rand. Read Michael Huemer. Read Stephan Kinsella. Read Murray Rothbard. Read things recommended to you by people you respect.

Talk to the older, wiser, happier people that you know. Put it all together yourself if you have the interest, and the time. That’s more or less what I did.

Or, just to to church every Sunday. For all the bad rep it gets in this secular world, church does give a ton of benefits for a relatively small amount of time and effort. Plus, you get community. And in the good churches, you get songs.

All good stuff.

It’s almost enough to make me want to believe in God.

Naturally,

Adam

(PS: Remember to avoid becoming the 1 in 1,000 who become a deranged, dogmatic religious zealot because of religion. That part is important.)