Religious Excuses
by Joseph Rowlands

Reality exists and behaves regardless of our desires or beliefs. If you act on faulty information, your action will likely fail. If you think an old bridge should hold your weight, and you try to walk across, you may find out the hard way that believing something doesn't make it so.

For those willing to observe consequences and rethink their beliefs, this is a useful principle to recognize. When you act on information and mysteriously fail, it is a good sign that something is wrong. At least one of your beliefs was mistaken. And you can take the time to figure out where the mistake was so that it won't happen again.

We can think of this as a kind of feedback from reality. It is a way of testing our knowledge, and determining if there were any errors made. But we have to be on the lookout for these failures, and we need to identify the cause of them. If we make excuses, or shift the blame, we can't learn from our mistakes.

Now if we look at religion, we can see an obvious problem. A belief in an all powerful god, with intentions that we can't possibly understand, is a convenient excuse for any failure. In fact, any surprising and undesirable result can be blamed on God. And if the religion also happens to have an embodiment of evil, like Satan, that also works to explain away any failures.

If you make bad choices, you can shift the blame. If you invest poorly and lose your money, then God it testing you or Satan is getting in the way of you because you are a good person. If you take shortcuts while building a home, and it collapses, it isn't your fault. If you get fired from your job for incompetence, it doesn't have to be your fault. You can safely ignore all feedback from reality and not face any facts.

The same is true for successes, though. If things do go well for you, and you offer credit to God, you also don't learn from your successes. It is another kind of feedback from reality that you won't receive. Instead of being confirmation that your method was correct, you may just assign credit to divine intervention. Psychologically, it may be more common to accept credit for your own actions than assign it to God. But there are times where it may be desirable. If you are told what to do by someone, and resent being forced to do it, you may assign credit instead of acknowledging that you were wrong about the right way to deal with it.

Anytime you assign responsibility of an outcome to supernatural intervention, you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to get feedback from reality. Every time you do it, you are ignoring the real causes of a consequence and substituting an unsupported and unverifiable source to explain it. Each act of divine intervention is an act of ignoring reality.

One of the biggest problems with an unknowable God that seems to be constantly intervening in your life is that it can literally explain any outcome. There's no limit. There's no special set of results that can't be "explained" by the supernatural. So when you start making these kind of assignments, there's logically no place to stop. In the most extreme case, you might accept a form of fatalism, where you believe that nothing you do makes a difference because the results are always those intended by God either way.

If you don't go down the fatalism path, there's really no reasonable way of putting a limit on it. So when reason isn't able to do the job, emotion is usually counted on. In this case, you may only declare supernatural intervention when it makes you feel better about yourself.

That is a very dangerous policy. Whenever the facts conflict with what you want or wish to be true, you can simply dismiss them. And when confronted by the consequences of acting on false beliefs, you can reassign blame for those consequences. It's a universal excuse. Supernatural intervention means never needing to say your sorry or that you were wrong.

What's even worse is that many religious beliefs actually lead to bad results. An altruistic morality demands that you put others above yourself, constantly sacrificing for the sake of others. Obviously this is going to lead to some troubling consequences in your life. But if you can explain your lack of success and good-fortune by blaming a supernatural being, you never have to deal with the cause of the consequences.

Some religious people assume that God will watch out for them, and take actions based on flimsy evidence, poorly thought out plans, or just wishful thinking. And when these flawed approaches lead to failure, they simply shrug it off by saying that God works in mysterious ways.

Note that in the above example, the belief in supernatural intervention was not only the excuse, but was also the cause. You wouldn't have acted that way if you didn't believe that God would do something to make it all work in the end, and then when it fails, you use the idea of supernatural intervention to avoid thinking your approach was faulty.

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