What’s Wrong With Equestrian Atheism

The Four Horsemen are/were good guys. I love them all (especially Dan). They’re doing a good thing; they’re just doing it wrongly.

Religion isn’t about belief; it’s about practice. Just because most people practice badly, doesn’t mean practice is a bad thing. The believing part of religion was the precursor to science. It split from religion and went its own way five hundred years ago. We believe a lot better now because we know more now.

We believed poorly then because we had less information to go on. People who continue to believe as they did then are just resistant to new information, or have not encountered it in a way that is accessible to them. People who think religion is only about believing, are judging religion by the actions of people who are only primitive "scientists" who actually practice religion poorly or maybe not at all really. Authentic religious practitioners are as invisible to “equestrians” as modern science is to the primitive believers.

The mindset that reified gods into literal personages was not even humanly possible en masse until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries when rational thought became the dominant mode. The original gods were, as they still are, metaphorical placeholders for metaphysical realities.

Religion is also not about teaching morality. Morality is in us, with or without religion. But evolution “intended” it to be used on the in-group only. Religion extends it to the out-group, and in doing so, extends the likelihood of our survival.

Equestrian Atheism is the absence of a belief in literal gods, coupled with the presence of a belief that religion is about nothing but obsolete belief. The heart of religion has always been practice, not belief.

So what is this practice? Scientifically, it is the cultural counterbalance to evolutionary mismatch and the antidote to the problems inherent in big-brainedness. It arose slowly as our brains began to grow, and it evolved to maturity during the Agricultural Revolution some ten to twelve thousand years ago. It is the thing that, the abandonment of which, will cause our extinction. Culture is a vital organ of H.sapiens that cannot be excised without catastrophic result. By their erroneous calling for the wholesale abandonment of religion, the four horsemen of the new atheism have truly earned their name.

Non-equestrian atheism has no quarrel with authentic religious practice, only with primitive belief.

Religious practice is a personal and or social discipline that retrains the mind from tribal instincts to mass cooperation skills, including relief from associated mental health issues. It does not require joining an organization. It does not require believing things that are not true.

If you live in a city (interact with more than the same 150 people on a regular basis) obey the law, contribute productively to society, and aren’t causing yourself or others substantial emotional suffering, you are practicing a set of mental disciplines that, whether recognized as such or not, are rightly described as religious practice. If you don't like that term, call it whatever you like, but you are doing it, and it has been historically organized and taught by the institutions we now call religions, even while those same institutions were becoming increasingly corrupt, inappropriately powerful, and ignorant of their own original purpose.

All adequately functioning human beings, atheists included, practice some such set of mental disciplines on a regular basis, either well or poorly, never realizing, in the case of most atheists today, that they are dependent on religious technique.

Where religious practitioners do cling to pre-scientific worldviews, they, like the Equestrians, though in much greater number, are also pushing us toward extinction. It is on this point alone that I must agree with the much lauded and reviled horsemen.

Believe science. Practice religion. Resist extinction.
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