What’s your opinion on religion?

Largely irrelevant to what we get into here. At some point, I became conscious of how prominent western atheism gets used as another variation of racism and imperialism. So I try to look at the religions of colonized and imperialized peoples differently than I would the religions of the colonizer, for example. In other words, I say it is largely irrelevant because I’m not going to reject an anti-imperialist struggle because of its religiosity, but neither am I going to especially support it if it’s not. Liberation comes first and the form of religion is also impacted by the rest of society and politics, so a colonial society is going to warp religious practice and beliefs toward something more sociopathic than a liberated communal society.

I arrived at atheism through growing up USian catholic and gradually coming to reject it, and that is mainly where my knowledgeable criticisms of religion are confined to (that and western christianity more generally). I have retained some of the pro-social components of the religious mindset of caring about what happens to others, but I reject the gross the limitations of its solutions and find that many of its adherents seem less than committed to its pro-social teachings. Typically, its solutions amount to charity and individual piousness, which is obviously nonsense in practice. The catholic church demonstrated how pathetic of a conception of morality that is with the sexual abuse scandals of its own priests. They have since adopted more strict measures in their organization to try to prevent a repeat, but as far as I know, they still tend to preach the same individualistic, charity-based nonsense. For all the christians in the west fantasize about being persecuted, they sure do a great job of toeing the status quo line rather than challenging it on a systemic level with their teachings.

But it was not a dissatisfaction with religion alone that led me to atheism. The whole christian conception of an “all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving” being is riddled with excuses in order to justify how a being like this simultaneously exists, yet also doesn’t step in and stop atrocities from happening. The most common of these excuses is the “free will” argument that doing so would undermine people’s “free will”. But one human being senselessly murdering another also undermines that other human being’s “free will”, doesn’t it? And human societies generally criminalize and prosecute murder. They also generally have emergency services that try to resuscitate and rescue people who are in danger, rather than leaving them to the “free will” of their choices. This conception of a god essentially makes god look less moral than even some of the most imperialist, capitalist societies; that it can intervene in an instant, effortlessly, to end enormous amounts of trauma, suffering, and neglect, and does not do so.

However, this is not how all religions view god and some of them have multiple gods, so that’s why I emphasize that it is mainly a criticism of western christianity. I do not pretend to have studied most religions and so I try not to weigh in on them in this regard. And especially if they are a religion specific to colonized/imperialized peoples, I am extra wary of weighing in because doing so critically could easily take on the character of western Chauvinism and colonial racism.