Does Elimination Of Religion Lead To Enlightenment Or An Amoral Society?

Do We Need God In Our Society For Man To Function Or Act Justly?

I was born and raised by two successful parents in Long Island, NY.  I was afforded the benefits of living in an affluent American suburb, going to a school district with a pipeline to the best colleges and universities in the country. Like many in my town, I was raised culturally Jewish, meaning we lit candles on Hanukkah, exchanged gifts, and had the bar/bat mitzvah as a right of passage. One thing I was told about myself as a kid was that I was a social butterfly and that people always wanted to be around me. I remember this largely being the case, as I had a lot of friends up through early middle school. 

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In about 8th grade that all started to change. I became hyper-aware of my body, as I’ve spoken of in my previous article on my body image disorder. I saw myself as extremely short, unattractive, and lacking confidence. I was starved for belonging. On top of that, I’d been dealing with a debilitating fear of dying whenever I went to sleep at night. Before I was 13 years old, I watched my Uncle and Grandmother slowly killed by aggressive forms of cancer. I struggled with understanding existence and what the point of life was, not things someone should be thinking about at a young age but I’ve been thinking about it since as young as I can remember, maybe seven years old. 

It was also around this time that I started to explore religion at a deeper level. I started to participate more and more in the Hasidic synagogue in my town, learning with a young rabbi whom I hold with high regard until this day. He’d come to teach me lessons from the Torah for about 20 minutes before we would play a game of NBA 2K on my Xbox for hours. I met my first love, the head Rabbi’s daughter who liked me back (spoiler alert, we couldn’t be together). 

Religious Judaism is a weird thing, highly ritualized. I would wake up each morning, rinse my hands from a bowl next to my bed (left, right, left, right, left right) to rinse off the dark spirits, and say the morning prayers as required before I could walk out of my bedroom. I’d wake up early to wrap the tefillin around my arm and around my head, signifying the unity of the heart and mind. A black hat adorned on top of my yarmulka, I would rock back and forth, praying forcefully, wishing and hoping for God’s countenance to fall upon me. I observed the Sabbath and all other days and forced my family to make a kosher house. For five years of my life, I was a religious man, leading prayer services and reading from the Torah in front of the congregation. I would often sleep at the synagogue, befriending the Rabbi’s son and caring for and playing with his younger children.

I found my community, but slowly I began to see things more clearly. I saw people doing good not for the good of it, but by the order’s of God. I even found myself succumbing to this mentality and it didn’t feel good. I thought that if I wanted to do good, it should be for no external force like God but for the sake of my own humanity because I was no better than the next person. 

At this point, my eyes began to open. I saw a community that drank excessively, didn’t educate its children on secular topics, and gave its women no choice but to have children and hover over a stove to serve food. I no longer saw a healthy community but rather potential squashed away. What cures or technologies might have been created had all these minds been allowed to study secular subjects? As quickly as I fell into religion, I came out of it. I remember sitting alone in my room, isolated and with nothing to do on the Sabbath. I thought to myself, my heart isn’t in this anymore, I don’t believe in this anymore. I quite literally muttered to myself, “fuck it”, turned on my computer, and re-joined the world I had known before and largely left for the bulk of five years. 

The readjustment was difficult. I didn’t really have the same friends anymore. People did not even know that I still went to the same high school as them. I finally became what I always felt I was, invisible. Not only that, but many in my class had already had a lot of experience sexually while I hadn’t even approached one. I was riddled by self-doubt, thinking I was too ugly and short to ever be loved by anyone. 

This scarring led me into bad relationships and led to the destruction of my best. I never felt good enough and religion didn’t fix it, it just covered it up temporarily. I had no identity, social awkwardness, and anxiety left from my years practicing Judaism. And now was my time to go off to college, a trial by fire where I’d have to meet new people (scary), drink (not much of a partier and never had beer), and talk to girls (might as well have asked me to build a spaceship to mars). 

Now that I’m no longer observant, I find myself now in a rare place, a libertarian-leaning agnostic Jew. I find myself looking at a society that is painted as so torn apart at the seams that there is no hope. I find that I’m asking myself if religion is the cure that is needed, but I have no clear answer because for me it’s not but for society, it might be. People used to find their communities and fulfillment in their family and in their church or synagogue. 

Now people find their fulfillment in their political causes, like arguing for child-friendly drag performances, or arguing that tearing a fetus apart limb by limb is healthcare. They find it in arguing that criminals should be allowed to loot stores with no consequences because they're oppressed.  Or that insane individuals the state failed to help should be allowed to torment subway goers, no matter if they fear for their lives as threats are made.  

They find it by cheering on performances of Sam Smith holding Satan’s trident and wearing devil horns. You don’t need to be an orthodox Rabbi, Imam, or Priest to see that Sam Smith’s identity crisis and magnetism toward satanic garb might be related to the overall societal decay and schism we’re experiencing. They want you to accept the evil in front of your eyes as goodness.  Who are you going to believe? The state or your own lying eyes? 

You don’t need to believe in a god to see that all of this is so far off the beaten path of normalcy for a free society. A free society and an amoral society cannot coexist. Social justice activists will try to make you believe otherwise or that their positions are the moral ones, but they are not. 

Atheists and agnostics like myself used to argue that the elimination of religion in the public sphere would lead to an enlightened life, but ask yourself, has it or has the god-shaped vacuum on a societal level been filled by something much more harmful?