Being good stewards of the Earth is not instilled in fundie children. Love for the planet, trees, water and animals is never mentioned. We’re taught to look to Heaven with its streets of gold. Water is for wasting by drowning the whole world. Animals are for torturous sacrifice to appease an angry god.

Perhaps revering that anthropocentric god prohibits subscribers to religions of the monotheistic nature from developing a more direct appreciation of existence itself.

Scientific honesty paints a strikingly different worldview than the presumptions of the ancients writing their creation myths. Instead of a lonely god creating a planet and some people to manipulate, science proposes this incredible narrative of how complexity, consciousness, and meaning arose from the indifferent, unguided workings of nature.

This engaging, astounding account of the universe's capacity to arise and evolve, the sheer magnitude of the cosmos and geological time, the lucky accident that afforded our existence- Was this improbable? Yes! But that’s what lends the view so much beauty. 

The human desire to attribute everything to a creator has been replaced, for some of us, with what Richard Dawkins called a desire for emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator.

Carl Sagan said we are the universe's way of knowing itself. Through billions of years of cosmic history and millions of years of evolution, a species emerged that could look back at its origins and understand its place in the timeline.

This fact can be regarded as profoundly beautiful. It connects us to the past, to each other, to the Earth that sustains us. Subscribers to theology couldn’t be more wrong when they assume the scientific worldview is uninformed and ugly.

Loss of the Assumptive World

It’s not too late to learn real truths about the world, and doing so reveals the lies of the religious community. What are some taboo subjects you’ve always wanted to explore? Engage your inner child on a long-forbidden conquest. The truth will set you free!

The world we grew up in as fundie kids might have been a world we never really felt comfortable with but it was the only one we knew. The deity we were delivered wasn’t a god we could actually like but it was the only one we dared foster faith in.

In leaving that world, fear of that god is often replaced with fear of a mysterious new world.

In the study of trauma they call it loss of the assumptive world. While the assumptive world was a scary one, it offered definitive answers on the past, present and future.

Trading in the assumptive world for reality means trading in its most utopian promise- Heaven as a possibility is ripped away. In Heaven, the narrative went, we’d be reunited with loved ones, cured of sickness and disability. Hell was horrifying, but Heaven was achievable, and death wasn’t included in the narrative at all.

There’s no time to adjust to its sudden presence. To individuals who grow up outside the faith, death is scary, but it’s this normalized concept. You adjust to it. An adult grappling with death for the first time may struggle with terror.

Cognitive science has found that humans are natural dualists who distinguish between the physical body and the psychological mind or soul from a very young age. This distinction makes it easy to conceive of a bodiless soul or a soul that persists after death.

Unfortunately this perspective opens us up to insert bad ideas like eternal torment and use them to fear-monger humans into submission.

We might not know what comes after death, but we can be fairly certain that human narratives of afterlife are completely uninformed.

We can be comforted by the prevailing scientific view that consciousness is a product of brain activity and ceases when the brain dies. We can find peace perhaps, in the knowledge our physical bodies will one day be recycled into other living things through the biological process.

It’s not Heaven but it’s certainly not Hell.