This last month, I visited Israel to speak at the Israeli Atheists Associations Machar
conference in Tel Aviv. I had a fantastic time, and the people, culture, hospitality,
and everything was wonderful. But while I was there, some of my Jewish friends took
me to Jerusalem for the first time. And I thought I would share some of my thoughts
as an atheist in the Holy Land.
Our first stop in Jerusalem was the wailing wall, where Jews mourn the destruction of
their holy Temple. The men and women are segregated. I watched as religious practitioners ritualistically
rocked back and forth, praying to God while shoving small pieces of paper between the
cracks of the walls with prayers on them.
Now, I wanted to see the Dome of the Rock on the other side of the wall where Mohamad
allegedly ascended to heaven.
*call to prayer*
Although Jews aren’t allowed to pray on
the Temple Mount, sometimes non-Muslims are allowed to enter. Unfortunately, it was closed
to non-Muslims while I was there.
Everywhere I went there were soldiers, and while my time there was peaceful, it was abundantly
clear that tensions between Jews and Arabs remained high. And it served as a constant
reminder for that. There were crowds everywhere.
Pilgrims flocking by the millions to this spiritual destination. Hoping to get a little
closer to God. Now even when I was a Christian, I didn’t believe that we actually knew where
the exact location of Jesus death and burial was, but I guess I expected to find something
different than what I saw - I thought the location would at least be on a hill or something
outside the city away from the Temple, that matched the description of the Bible, or at
least looked like what the Jesus films depict it as. I thought that maybe Jesus' tomb would
be a ways away from the crucifixion site.
I didn’t expect to just find a church with icons everywhere. It was all inside of a building
very similar to what you might expect from a Greek or Russian Orthodox church. Although
it was kind of underwhelming and was way less impressive than the Hagia Sophia in Turkey
or The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
I’ve been to plenty of religious holy sites before when I was still Christian, and I’ve
experienced the thrill that I would have called a spiritual experience at the time. The cognitive
rush of excitement and feeling of awe that you feel when you’re primed to feel it.
And yet this time around, as an atheist - detached from spiritual expectations - as someone able
to objectively witness the flock of spiritually thirsty visitors descending on this venerated
site, I couldn't help but feel overwhelmingly depressed. Not for myself. In fact, I felt
relieved to be free of religious binders - relieved that I don’t need a savior because I’m
not lost. I don’t need to be fixed, because I’m not broken. And relieved that I don’t
need a religious shepherd because I’m not a sheep. No, I didn’t feel depressed to
be excluded. But I felt sad for them. Watching spiritual pilgrims flock by the millions to
a small stone building in a patch of desert land, hoping it will somehow bring them slightly
closer to God. I felt sorry for those who are told their entire life that they’re
broken, inadequate, sinful, and deserving of eternal torment - told they were born filthy
and need to spend their entire lives in pursuit of salvation.
*woman crying*
I felt pity for the desperate, searching for some straw of religious hope to grasp at - to give them
comfort against the torment and unease that same religion saddles them with. As I watched
them sob over a stone, I felt tinges from my past of times when I cried those same tears.
When I felt what they felt. Not just the feeling of inadequacy, but the follow-up of excitement
that I had found the cure to my sin. The misplaced ecstasy over the simulacrum of cure to a non-existent
disease. The religious solution to save you from a problem only the religious have.
And here they were, pouring their hearts out at “holy” sites that are so obviously fake.
Jerusalem was completely sacked by the Romans in 70 CE. 300 years later, the Roman emperor,
Constantine, decided to convert to Christianity, and sent his mom to Jerusalem on a quest to
find Jesus’ cross and nails - he didn’t assign this task to an archeologist, a historian,
a cartographer, or even a local Jew. Nope. His mom! And according to second-hand folklore,
amazingly she found the original cross of Jesus, the site of his crucifixion, and the
nails that pinned him up there.
Now even if you’re the emperor’s mom, you probably don’t want to disappoint a
Roman emperor and come back empty-handed. I should add at this point, that relics like
this would become a forgery epidemic over the course of the next thousand-plus years
with enough pilgrims returning from the holy land with shards of Jesus’ cross to create
a crucifixion forest. Totally real! And they found so many “nails of the crucifixion”
it would have made Jesus a divine pin cushion holier than swiss cheese.
The fact is, the earliest claims as to where any of this stuff went down, if it happened
at all, emerged hundreds of years after Jesus' death - after the city of Jerusalem was destroyed
by the Romans and rebuilt.
And so many holy sites and relics were simply tacked as such, hundreds of years after the
fact-based occasionally on oral tradition and more often on the imaginations of crusaders
and religious zealots. I don’t know what kind of oral traditions they had, but anecdotes
are the least reliable type of evidence, and they get exponentially less reliable the more
links you have in this generational game of telephone.
Now the rock where Jesus was allegedly crucified on is less than five minutes from the Temple,
and is conveniently placed right next to the tomb he was allegedly buried in - perfectly
placed so that spiritual tourists can be bombarded by walls of merchants selling spiritual trinkets.
Even Christians can’t agree on which sites are the real locations for this stuff. I’m
not convinced it happened at all. Sure, some guy named Jesus probably existed, but legends
and new religions pop up all the time. Sometimes loosely based on real people; sometimes not.
Take Mormonism or Scientology for example. Even if these holy locations fit the descriptions
of scripture perfectly, which oftentimes they don’t, that still wouldn’t meet the burden
of proof for the extraordinary claims put forth in these books.
For example, I don’t even live in the UK, and I’ve only visited a few times, but I
could easily form a religion that worships the divine lord of chaos, Egg-fart Man who
encouraged his followers to let it all out. I can claim that if we don’t eat eggs, his
wrath will burn against us and I can tell the tale of how he ignited his flatulence
and burned half of London to the ground while he sat atop London bridge playing a fiddle.
A cult following could spring up out of this with extensive fan fiction and lore, but if
archeologists two thousand years from now discover remnants of UK egg farms, London
Bridge, as well as evidence of the Great Fire of London, and they find a fiddle dating to
around this time, and even if discover my original manuscripts, that doesn’t make
the story of Egg-fart Man true.
And yet you have people who find locations matching descriptions from the Bible and buying
the whole story hook line and sinker. Just how low is your standard of evidence?
Now, as much as I appreciated the history of this spiritual curiosity, I couldn’t
help but be constantly reminded that religious groups have been slaughtering each other for
centuries for control of this utterly underwhelming religious sham - killing fellow humans over
something as cold and lifeless stupid as a couple of stupid rocks.
Was I the only in the crowd willing or able to see this madness? I felt like a time traveler
or alien looking in on a foreign species, except I wasn’t. These bizarre rituals,
practices, superstitions, customs, and traditions belonged to my own species - in my own time.
When you remove the religiously induced stupor - the veil of indoctrinated excitement over
the most “meh” stones of the millenia - it was utterly and completely depressing.
I didn’t feel anything but pity. Throngs of people were being totally suckered right
in front of my eyes, by three different mutually exclusive competing religions - not because
they’re stupid, but because religion is the world's oldest and most successful con.
And it made me wonder what the world would be like if rather than revering cold, hard
rocks and silent deities, if religions made pilgrimages to community coffee shops - if
they prayed at bridges instead of walls. Or better yet, if instead of revering buildings
and the dirt they rest on, if we ditched religion altogether and started treating our fellow
humans with respect and dignity.
Now my goal is not to strip a country of its spiritual tourism income or rob it of its history.
But I dream of a day where that income is replaced by flocks of history lovers and
tourists of mythology - on a quest to observe the graveyard of the gods.
Before I go, I want to give a quick shout out to my friend Ilan. He not only hosted
me while I was in Israel, but he also has an atheist YouTube channel in Hebrew (with
English subtitles), that I’ll link to in the description below. Definitely go check that out.
And finally, I want to give a heart-felt thank you to everyone who’s been supporting me
on Patreon. Recently, I asked for your help, and I have huge goals for this channel. We
just hit the amount that I need to break even and not be sweating to pay my basic bills
month to month, but I’d really love to expand this and to be able to hire additional people
to assist me to be able to put out better quality content and get a studio space, and
you guys are the ones that make it possible. So, thank you so much for your support, thank
you to everyone who’s stuck with me this far (for believing in me), and if you want
to go and help me out on Patreon, you can go and make a pledge per-video. Or, in the
spirit of the holidays, you can go make a one-time donation on Paypal. Thanks, as always.
Dare to be curious, and don’t drink the Koolaid.