Why I gave up on antitheism (despite remaining irreligious)

The main reason that I quit antitheism was that I slowly realized that religion is only an excuse rather than a cause of oppression. The Crusaders did not simply read the Bible and immediately go out on a rampage. That would almost be like saying that violent video games make innocent people become violent themselves. Underneath the façade of religion are causes far more complex than that.

In the Crusaders’ case, the European ruling classes were interested in grabbing land and other resources from Palestine and the inhabitants therein and thereabout. The situation was similar for chattel slavery and serfdom: they merely used religion as an excuse. It was not the cause (the cause in this case originating in upper‐class dominance). There were far more examples of religiously justified oppression than those, but I think that you understand what I mean: the causes go deeper than what the surface suggests.

More recently, heterosexists and cissexists can distract us from their attitudes by pointing to scripture, but careful hermeneutics and human reason (of which, I’m sure monotheists would agree, the Almighty created) suggest that scripture is not the problem. It is the neopatriarchal attitude that is the problem, and mistaking scripture for the source—as if the scripture’s own stances came ex nihilo—is a classic case of confusing cause and effect. Religions are cultural phenomena; they are subordinate to culture, and cultures mutate regularly. That is why I used to liken religions to clay.

Even if our oppressors never had religion, they still could have appealed to pseudoscience, and most already do. Quite a few irreligious men are misogynists who’ll justify their oppression by claiming that women were genetically programmed to be caretakers or whatever. In fact, one could argue that the pseudoscientific excuse is more dangerous than the religious one because respect for science is almost universal whereas religions and spiritualities are very culturally specific.

Lastly, lower‐class monotheists can and have rebelled against their oppressors before. I believe that quite a few poor peasants during the Protestant Reformation were monotheists and yet they rebelled against their masters anyway. Religion is not a perfect tool for mind control; lower‐class monotheists can be just as revolutionary as lower‐class atheists, and upper‐class atheists can be just as troublesome as upper‐class monotheists.