I put this together mostly as an exercise in discovering what I actually think, so i could understand it myself.
I’ve had some feelings.
They seemed simultaneously strange, yet urgent and obvious.
Sharing as an exercise in transparency, and an invitation to commentary or respectful dialog, if that interests you
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I. The Moral Wager
I’ve never been a religious person, and I still don’t believe in God as a literal being keeping score. But lately I’ve been thinking seriously about taking my family to church. It’s not nostalgia, rebellion, or a sudden leap of faith — it’s curiosity, and a sense that something about religious practice might orient us in a world that often feels morally frayed. I don’t claim to have stumbled onto some profound truth. Most of what I’m wrestling with isn’t new; I probably heard versions of it in my twenties and dismissed them. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I wasn’t wise enough. But now I feel these inclinations, and I’m trying to make sense of them for myself in a way that’s intellectually honest. Part of what drives this is observing the moral currents around me — including among people I once thought I was on the same team as. I see joy crushed, cruelty normalized, and the easy celebration of harm. I want my children to grow up among people who take life seriously, who recognize that goodness and evil exist, and who orient themselves toward flourishing rather than indulgence, resentment, or chaos. This essay is an attempt to articulate why that matters to me, what I’m exploring, and how I might live — and raise my children — with attention, intention, and moral coherence.
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II. The Atheist Decades
I came of age in the era of what was called “New Atheism,” the YouTube debates, the late-night panels with Dawkins and Hitchens, the thrill of dismantling weak arguments with logic. At the time, reason and skepticism felt like a moral stance as much as an intellectual one — a way to stand on the side of truth in a world that seemed riddled with superstition. I worried about Islamic extremism abroad, Christian theocracy at home, and what I saw as irrational forces shaping society.
For a long time, that framework felt airtight. Science explained the world; reason guided action. But over the years, it began to feel incomplete. The same circles that preached evidence sometimes hardened into their own dogmas. Intellectual clarity didn’t always translate into moral clarity. I could explain how the world worked, but not how to live within it. Life isn’t sustained by proofs alone — it runs on trust, habit, ritual, and shared human practices that can’t be derived from logic.
Looking back, I see that my atheism was also a kind of moral minimalism. I believed I could navigate the world with reason alone, but the social and ethical structures that give life coherence — habits, rituals, and communities that orient us toward goodness — were largely absent from my toolkit. Recognizing that gap is part of why I’m thinking seriously about church now: not as a return to belief, but as a way to explore frameworks that help people live well together, even without metaphysical certainty.
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III. Fragmentation and Humility
Over time, I began to notice that the frameworks I once trusted — reason, skepticism, and the assumptions of my peers — were incomplete. It wasn’t that I had been wrong about any particular proposition, but that these frameworks didn’t fully orient me toward living well or navigating the moral landscape.
In 2017, James Damore was fired from Google for a memo citing peer-reviewed psychology on sex differences in interests. It wasn’t a manifesto — it was a data-driven critique of hiring assumptions. Google’s response wasn’t rebuttal; it was expulsion. Internal Slack threads called it “violence.” Dissent became danger.
In 2020, “Hands up, don’t shoot” — the rallying cry of Ferguson — was quietly debunked by the Obama DOJ. Yet the slogan endured, and cities burned. FBI data shows ten to twenty-five unarmed Black Americans killed by police annually. Tragic. Real. But not genocide. Still, nuance was branded complicity.
During the COVID era, churches were padlocked while cannabis dispensaries stayed “essential.” Small businesses collapsed; Amazon’s market cap soared. Masks were mandated, then silently dropped when politically inconvenient. The vaccine was sold as stopping transmission — until it didn’t. No liability. No apologies.
Then came the bodies: Brian Thompson, gunned down outside a Hilton. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero on Discord — #FreeLuigi trended. Charlie Kirk, mid-debate at a university, shot dead. “One less fascist,” some said.
Consensus and certainty didn’t always translate into wisdom. Some of the people I assumed were on the same side as me were cheering for things that felt fundamentally destructive — not out of malice, but because the moral guidance I once assumed existed wasn’t being reinforced in practice. Life is more than reasoning about facts; it runs on habits, trust, shared norms, and attention to what matters.
That realization led me to think differently about religion. I don’t claim that any of this is new — philosophers and anthropologists have said it all before. What’s new is that ***I*** am finally in a place to understand it. Religion, in its stories, rituals, and moral architecture, encodes patterns that orient people toward cooperation, accountability, and meaning. It can do this without demanding metaphysical belief. These practices are distilled wisdom: the accumulated insights of societies learning to survive and flourish together.
Beneath that recognition lies a deeper kind of humility — epistemic humility. I don’t know what I don’t know. Physics can describe the universe with astonishing precision, but there’s always a layer beyond the layer, a horizon we can’t quite reach. Gödel incompleteness shows that even in formal logical systems, there are truths that can’t be proven from within the system itself; this is a reminder that any framework for understanding — including moral or social systems — has limits.
Whether you frame that as cosmic mystery, emergent order, or even the simulation hypothesis, the point stands: there are limits to what any one worldview can explain. Religion, at its best, acknowledges that mystery not as defeat but as orientation. It gives language and form to what reason alone can’t quite grasp, offering a way to live meaningfully amid uncertainty.
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IV. Religion as Heuristics
Looking at it this way, religion starts to feel less like a set of literal claims and more like a collection of heuristics — tools shaped by centuries of human experience to help societies and individuals navigate moral complexity. Rituals, stories, and taboos don’t have to be proof of the supernatural; they’re patterns that have survived because they work, to some degree.
They reward cooperation, discourage cruelty, and reinforce attention to what matters. Seen through that lens, religion is a kind of cultural technology: tested, refined, emergent, imperfect.
The Ten Commandments aren’t divine edicts to me — they’re stress-tested code. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t negotiable because Sky Daddy said so. It’s non-negotiable because societies that normalize political murder collapse. “Honor thy father and mother” isn’t filial piety for its own sake — it’s the transmission belt of duty, memory, and restraint.
You don’t need to believe in a deity to acknowledge or even appreciate these. You can participate, observe, and reflect, treating stories and rituals as symbolic models of human behavior.
The Bible, like other long-lived collections of stories, offers parables and illustrations that encode human insight. You don’t ***have to*** take the supernatural claims literally to learn from them. You could derive similar lessons from other stories — Lord of the Rings, for example — but the Bible carries millenia of social and moral “inertia,” meaning some of these lessons have proven remarkably sticky over time.
When a CEO is executed and half the internet celebrates, when a conservative speaker is assassinated and the other half shrugs — that’s not progress.
That’s entropy.
The rituals I once mocked now look more and more like load-bearing walls, dismantled at our peril. Nietzsche saw this coming, in the 19th century!
This is part of why I’m thinking about attending church with my family. It’s not about indoctrination, and it’s not about asserting what’s true for anyone else. It’s about practicing attentiveness, intention, and ethical engagement in a structured environment. Participation becomes a way to inhabit moral practice, to integrate reason, habit, and communal reinforcement, rather than a platform for asserting certainty.
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V. Rehabilitating God
If someone asked me, “Do you believe in God?” my honest answer is: it depends on what you mean. Even in my strictest atheist days, I would have said yes to some version of the claim that reality contains more than we currently understand. My objection has never been to mystery itself, but to specific truth claims — the ones that can be tested, debated, and often debunked.
Thinking about God in this context is less about asserting facts and more about finding useful orientation. I can treat God as a symbol, a heuristic, or a framework — not as a literal entity intervening in human affairs, but as a representation of what is good, just, and life-affirming. Using Dennett’s “intentional stance” — imagining complex systems or forces as if they have intentions — is a practical tool for modeling behavior and moral patterns, not a metaphysical claim.
There’s also an acknowledgment of limits. I don’t know the ultimate shape of the universe, whether the moral order is embedded in its fabric, or if some people’s conception of God points to something real beyond our understanding. And yet, I can engage with those ideas, test them, reflect on them, and see what guidance they might offer for how to live. In that sense, God becomes less a matter of belief and more a vector for orientation — something to follow, discuss, and engage with honestly, without claiming certainty.
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VI. Personal Integration
For me, the question of church isn’t about forcing belief or doctrine on my children. I care less about whether they accept specific metaphysical claims and much more about their holistic development — their ability to think critically, navigate complexity, and engage with the world responsibly.
I want them to grow up around people who flinch at murder — not just when it’s their team that bleeds.
That hard work matters.
That the best way to help people is by HELPING PEOPLE, rather than outsourcing that function to the state.
That you can love a person, respect them, CHERISH THEM, even if they don’t agree with you.
These are lessons expressed in both theological and secular terms. My earlier focus on factual truth alone was too narrow. There are layers of truth: metaphorical, social, practical, and ethical. I’m done pretending moral clarity is optional. I’m done watching my old tribe trade principles for power and call it justice.
I accept the tension here. Atheist friends might think it hypocritical, literalist Christians might wonder whether I belong.
I don’t need to resolve that for anyone but myself.
I choose to participate honestly, attentively, and respectfully, aware of the limits of my understanding, and ready to answer questions thoughtfully if my children ask.
The goal is integration — harmonizing reason, ethical engagement, and social practice in a way that equips us to live well together.
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VII. Living As If
In the end, this isn’t about forcing myself to accept literal claims I can’t endorse — like the idea that belief in Jesus automatically saves me. I can’t make myself believe something that strikes me as illogical, incomplete, or inaccurate.
What I can do is navigate the world with integrity, call balls and strikes as I see them, and focus on what actually matters: cultivating goodness, ethical clarity, and practical wisdom.
There are contexts where metaphorical truth matters more than literal truth, and I value that deeply. I remain humble about the limits of my knowledge, about what is knowable, and about the insights of people who have wrestled with these questions long before me. Texts like The Screwtape Letters resonate not because of metaphysical claims, but because they capture enduring patterns of human behavior and moral hazard in ways still relevant today.
Church, ritual, and community offer a way to engage with these patterns.
Participating doesn’t require suspending skepticism or abandoning reason; it’s about paying attention, practicing moral habits, and inhabiting frameworks that guide people toward flourishing. It’s a commitment to orientation, coherence, and deliberate living — an acknowledgment that goodness is worth pursuing even when certainty is impossible.
Living as if goodness matters — attending to it, modeling it, embedding it in daily practice — is the moral wager I choose. I remain an atheist in the strictest sense, yet I recognize that the symbolic, social, and moral structures of Christianity, and of religion more broadly, can be indispensable guides.
They are not truths I must take on faith; they are tools I can use wisely, markers I can use as I orient myself.
Walking toward the side of good, in ways I can grasp, is enough.
Epilogue: A Defensible Version of Pascal’s Wager
When Jordan Peterson was asked whether he believes in God, he didn’t answer directly. He said he chooses to live as if God exists. It’s a subtle difference, but a telling one — not a declaration of belief, but a declaration of orientation. You don’t have to claim certainty to act as though goodness, truth, and order matter.
I think about that alongside a line I saw online that’s been stuck in my head ever since:
“I’ve never been a religious person because I don’t know if God is real.
But I’m becoming more religious every day because I know that Evil is real, and I want to be on the other side of it.”
That’s the wager, stripped of metaphysics.
You don’t need to know whether heaven exists to recognize that hell can take root right here, in cruelty, nihilism, and moral rot.
Living as if God exists — or at least as if Goodness deserves allegiance — is a way of choosing sides in that struggle. It’s not faith as superstition; it’s faith as moral posture. It says: I will stand where meaning, mercy, and restraint still matter, even if I can’t prove why.
Maybe that’s all belief ever was — the disciplined commitment to live as though the moral law is real, even in a time that treats conviction as naïveté. The bet, then, isn’t on God’s existence; it’s on the worth of striving toward the good, even when certainty is out of reach.
That’s my version of the wager — one I can make honestly, without pretending to know more than I do.
hgde n
