I'm an atheist

I was at an event with Jordan Peterson a couple years ago and one of the guests asked him, “I’m an atheist, what am I missing?”

Jordan Peterson replied, “humility and knowledge.”

That stuck with me; I’ve thought often on it. Reminds me of an account Zig Ziglar shared. He said that one of his friends owned a massive company. As part of their hiring process they’d implemented lie detector tests. One of the questions they asked was, “do you believe in God?” Over the years they’d asked this question thousands of times. He said every time someone said they didn’t believe in God, the test showed they lied.

The existence of God is part of the programming in our DNA. It’s baked into who we are. The problem is that religion comes along and takes this universal, human experience and starts packaging it into an ideological tool to manipulate behavior, while declaring all other experiences or interpretations of God to be false.

Reducing the infinite, incomprehensible nature of God into a small, dogmatic box is a profound mistake. And it is why so many people are becoming more and more disillusioned with organized religion. And it’s why atheism exists. The religious God is easy to dismiss.

The only rational way to approach the Throne of God is with openness and humility, and a lot less dogmatic certainty. For certainty is spiritual death.