Since starting to study philosophy, for a period of maybe four years, I thought that religion was pretty unimportant intellectually; of course its sociological effects are huge and far-reaching, but among my friends I didn’t worry too much about their atheism or otherwise, since I thought it was just a matter of some metaphysics which I didn’t buy, but didn’t think mattered too much. I dismissed hardcore atheism as just a replacement for religion that, again, wasn’t too interesting.

Having now met several hardcore Christians I find myself falling back into something like militant atheism because it upsets me just how much Christianity damages people. It encourages the belief that they are never good enough, and piles on the guilt. It involves grasping at some permanent and unchanging deity rather than accepting that their imperfect and everchanging (and incredibly short) selves and lives are already enough. People can’t flourish under these conditions.

I still think that the metaphysical issues are at the root of responding to the religious person. Realising that the world doesn’t care about you frees you up to get on with creating your own meaning. And realising this is the only intellectually responsible option. It still seems to me that any appeals to the moral status of the world and to personal noumenal experiences is rendered irrelevant once one accepts that we all get tempted by strange ideas, and the only responsible thing to do is to be brave enough to throw it all out. Intuitions can’t be trusted. Induction’s basically all we’ve got for fundamental questions like these.

Edit 25/iv/2013: By “moral state of the world” I mean the way people are with each other; I’m not talking about moral realism.