I recently heard a woman describe religion as a curse on the world, nothing more than the stifling of rules and judgments – an outdated relic that hinders freedom and happiness. I wondered, “Am I being oppressed?”
I agreed that there was, in fact, something limited and limited in my life.
But I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t so bad. As longtime Washington Post columnist George Will once put it, “I’m in favor of suppressing things. We suppress our appetites, we control our passions. You can call that Freud repression. I call it civilization.”
The human tendency toward immorality and behavior that hurts others has a long and sad history. And fortunately, religion and morality have always been a suffocating, restrictive brake on a wide range of evils, across all faiths and cultures.
However, far from being restrictive, these restrictions also create freedoms in other ways. The restraint cultivated during an Islamic Ramadan or Christian fast brings new physical health and discipline. The freedom to resist and tame our appetite. The Jewish or Christian Sabbath, which limits activities that people might otherwise enjoy, promotes spiritual development that might otherwise elude us.
Yes, there are plenty of hypocritical Christians who believe one thing and do another. But it is also true that in a world without ideals or norms there would be no hypocrites, nor saints. In my opinion, it is better to miss the target than to deny that the target exists at all. Religion tells us to be good, but we fall short. Religion tells us to be united, but we are full of wrath and envy. But without ideals we are left to our lower angels.
As the saying attributed to Christian apologist GK Chesterton goes: “The Christian ideal has been untried and found wanting. It has proven difficult and untried.”
Vice unchecked is a destructive dark force. Historically, the 18th century French nobleman, Marquis de Sade, had a disdain for moral values. The term Sadism comes from his philosophy. He went beyond ideas and tortured and humiliated the innocent for his own pleasure. Why? Because it brought him luck. Like many sex traffickers and modern nihilists, he was no longer concerned with the charade of justification. The only voice they hear from their self-made dogmas screams: I want!
Disturbingly, de Sade’s nihilistic, sadistic philosophy was not rejected as evil, but was championed by many modern thinkers, including some feminist and postmodern leaders. (Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida to name a few.) If we reject God and virtue, if we refuse to be repressed in our desires, our desires are likely to become wilder and more degenerate.
Author Andrew Klavan credits his experience reading the work of the Marquis de Sade with turning him away from atheism. He writes, “Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Unlike others, he notes, Sade followed ideology to its logical conclusion: “If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is all in all, and we must plunder, rape and murder as we please.”
“None of this pale, milquetoast atheism,” Klavan continued, “that says, ‘Let’s all do what’s good for society.’ Why should I do what is good for society? What is society to me? … If there is no God, there is no good.”
Many will say, and rightly so, that you don’t have to be religious to be good. And yet, if we reduce religion to its core idea—that something outside us is the author of morality—we must realize that throwing away this institution will yield a grim harvest. Much of the goodness of our society is actually based on a foundation of religious morality. (Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’ by historian Tom Holland provides insight into pre-Christian morality – and it’s not pretty.)
Religion plays a crucial role in suppressing these dark human impulses. We may feel secure in our belief that children are safe and that people are generally good, but we must face reality and see where a philosophy that ignores dark human tendencies can and will increasingly lead.
The darkness that human beings can fall into does not remain within the confines of a single life. There is no immoral act that does not affect others; the most vulnerable and innocent are the most likely to fall victim to it. Those of us who still live off the embers of religious morality are often naive when it comes to this kind of darkness. In that college classroom, I felt like I was being hit in the face.
In the profound portrayal of Satan in “Paradise Lost,” we see that his fall from heaven is the result of the same pride that leads us to reject judgmental, suffocating religion – “It is better to reign in hell than in heaven to serve,” he says.
It is no coincidence that Milton’s Satan has become a cult hero for many musicians and artists today. He is seen as an anti-authoritarian rebel, seeking self-government against the injustice of an arbitrary God. And yet a full reading of the epic poem reveals Satan to be the father of lies, seeking only to ensnare victims and spread misery – as he states:
“I’m miserable! Which way shall I fly?
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; I myself am a hell.”
So in reality religion suffocates me. From an early age I was taught not to drink, smoke or go to wild parties. There are many so-called pleasures that I have never experienced. I am eternally grateful for my suffocating religion. I don’t want the darkness of vice in my life. I have seen it in the lives of others and feel no envy. The ‘freedom’ of unrestrained self-indulgence is never free. The lives of those who live unfettered by morality are full of addictions, burdensome consequences, and a series of innocent victims who must pay for their good fortune.
When I “imagine” a world without religion, it is a world of darkness and unleashed sin.
Allyson Flake Matsoso has a degree in Environmental/African Studies and has published research in the field of social work. She runs the “Philosophy of motherhoodblogging and The Philosophy of Motherhood Substack
