If reality isn't fiction, then stop renewing your driver's license
Published on 2025-10-17
There's some things I really like talking about, that I have a really hard time talking about. This is especially the case for a topic like religion and spirituality. A lot of the people I surround myself with have been hurt by people trying to sell them on a vision of something greater than the natural world. And that's really unfortunate for a lot of reasons; one of them, I believe, being the fact that Western society offers basically one option for those who've been screwed over by traditional Western religious institutions: secularism.
Obviously, I don't begrudge anyone for being secular; most of the people in my life are secular—most of the people in my country are secular, too. I do, however, have an issue with people who think that secularism is the right or natural way to be, and that others are wrong, dumb or at least being tricked into thinking there's something more to the world than what we can directly observe. Often it comes from a place of hurt, which I totally get, but it's still unfortunate.
And I think this for two main reasons. First, is that I feel like secularism is a very boring way to understand the world. Second, I think a lot of the arguments I hear for why secularism is "right", unlike religion and spirituality which is "wrong," miss the point of what connects us with the each other and the world.
The one that bothers me the most is, as the article's title suggests, the notion that religion is fiction and secularism is reality. And for what it's worth, I do think that religion is fiction, at least to a certain extent, but I also think it's a useful fiction, and it's one that becomes more useful the more you earnestly believe in it. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd believe in it so much that you'd almost stop believing that it's fiction in the first place, except maybe as a thought experiment in an article on the internet
For example, when I was 16, I got this little plastic card that had my picture on it, that said I was allowed to drive a car. And so, for the next few years, I drove around in my parents' car, always making sure to take the card with me. But a few years after I moved out, the expiry date listed on the card went from being in the future to the past.
So, if I were to get in a car and drive somewhere, what would happen? Realistically, nothing. I'm told, however, there's a remote chance that if I go driving without my card or with an expired card, a man may pull me over, and if he sees that my card isn't "valid," he'll get really mad at me. So? If I ignore him, he might try to pull me out of my car, and if I resist, he might try to kill me. Now that's a pretty scary thought, so I've never tried. Though I don't even own a car, so it's kind of a moot point.
This is kind of weird if you actually stop to think about it, right? Where does this even come from? Why are guys who carry guns pulling me over on the highway? There's whole academic disciplines dedicated to understanding why these guys exist, or why they have to exist, namely: political science, economics, criminology, sociology, moral philosophy… But another, possibly more useful way of thinking about it for my purposes here is that my society has decided that driving without your plastic identity card is a sort of sin (crime), and sorts of sinners (criminals) ought to be punished in a sort of hell (the prison industrial complex).
This isn't to say I don't think we should have drivers' licenses; cars are dangerous machines and I think at a minimum, you should need to demonstrate a level of competence before using one. But it is useful to understand where the power dynamic comes from. If you believe that you'll go to secular hell for driving your car without a license, and the guy who pulls you over thinks that he's individually made responsible by a higher power to send you there, then you're more likely than not to take your card with you.
Importantly, though, on both ends, this is fundamentally a matter of belief. It's a belief they are choosing (willingly or through inaction) to believe, and if even a few people chose to stop believing, we'd discover that this whole apparatus is actually incredibly vulnerable. We're rediscovering this right now with the collapse of the United States.
But if you can choose what you believe in, then it follows that you can believe in things that are good for you, good for your community. There are people for whom secularism is good. There's people for whom Christianity is good (though Christofascism is clearly not good for their community). There are people for whom astrology, Wicca and other beliefs in the tradition of Western esotericism are good. I think that in general I'm responsible to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you when you say it's good for you. So long as you aren't hurting anyone, it's not really any of my business. If anything, it might be an opportunity to learn something new.
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