There are laws that make up our universe – some of which we still don't understand or know even exist. As best we know, we're part of a great expansion. From the Big Bang, we are the consequences and the results of time and matter. Everything exists because of a natural structure to things.

If we are all on a continuum of some kind of great expansion, are we simply a reaction to a stimulus? Is our existence, our thoughts, our actions, simply nature playing out its natural, violent rhythm? I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, in that everything we are and do is a result (a reaction) of the structured, lawful existence of everything. No, in that the future is unknown and unlived.

There is a dichotomy between our existence and our behavior being predictable in hindsight, and the unknown chaotic future powered by our choices. A future that is most certainly predestined by the structured chaos of our universe and its mysterious properties.

For me, it reinforces the meaning of life. That is, to fulfill the purpose of our existence – to live vigorously to the end.

Religion masks our primal need to be safe, comforted, and to live forever, with the promise of the supernatural. However, when you strip away human nature, and the mind's capacity for imaginative thought and limitless denial, all that is left is the reality that what you're worshiping only exists inside your mind. Such is the case for prayer.

Prayer, like the belief in a god or gods, is a cultural and mental phenomenon. Part of my self-deprogramming from my Christian upbringing was to see what would happen if I stopped praying. While it wasn't scientific, because it was so subjective, it did show me that nothing changes significantly in your life when you do or don't pray. In fact, the only thing I experienced was a feeling of peace and freedom from the tyranny of having to worship and talk to an imaginary friend.

There have been several studies about prayer, most of which have been all over the place. Unsurprisingly, most studies were flawed or unduly influenced in some way. Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist, and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute conducted a meta-study on prayer, which concluded that there was no statistical difference between people who prayed and those that didn't. In some cases, prayer seemed to cause more harm than good.

A 1997 study at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worse.

The other interesting thing about prayer is how it affects your decisions. I was reminded of the insidious nature of prayer by a recent post, The Deceit of Prayer. Not only does prayer deliver nothing, it also promotes inaction.

it traps a person into non action, into a pattern of passive waiting, of believing they are not able to control their lives, of waiting on someone/thing else to solve problems. To the extent that some people are unable to make any decisions without first waiting on god. How many people are trapped in destructive marriages waiting for god to heal their partners, to change their personalities, to make things better. How many wait for years, praying for god to get them the right job, and not taking control and going and doing whatever it takes? How many times have we read about children dying for lack of medical intervention - while parents pray and believe god instead?

While prayer may seem like the healthiest and best thing for a person to do, it may actually be a deterrent towards living a full life – similar to the mental and emotional shackles that religion imposes on its followers.

Until we understand how anything could exist – the beginning and cause of matter as we know it – there is no reasonable explanation for how or why we exist.

Theology presents an imaginative fabrication of our existence, quenching our mind's desire to never die. Our inherent superstitious tendencies attempt to accept a metaphysical meaning that has no grounding in reality. Yet, for all human cultures, there is a clinging to folklore, and a suspension of rational and logical thought for explanations that serve three prevalent desires.

1. We desire to know why we exist
2. We desire to know the purpose and meaning of events in our life
3. We desire the ability to live forever.

The latter is experienced by all living animals, in the form of conscious and unconscious survivalism. However, when higher reasoning is introduced – present in all fully-functioning human beings – all three desires become what a psychologist might call unresolved conflict.

Religions provide the most cohesive and tangible answer to these desires. For the superstitious, answers provided by religions are logical and reasonable. This is true, but only when considered in ignorance of facts and history, and void of true critical thought.

Science has shown us attributes of our observable universe and has exposed religious explanations for what they are, complete bullshit. The interesting thing about science is that it doesn't quench our desires, it only strives to answer them. Science says that we can physically observe a universe that appears to have evolved, and was most likely started by something called The Big Bang.

Science doesn't explain or offer any factual explanations as to why we exist. It's not that science doesn't want to know these answers, because it most certainly does. The reason it takes this position is that based on our current knowledge, to provide an answer would be greater than or equal to bullshit.

One of the most challenging things about leaving the faith of your parents is raising their grandchildren as freethinkers.

Freethinkers who have come from evangelical homes, like me, know the intense social pressure that comes from their extended family. This is especially true when the grandparent believes you're leading their grandchildren straight to hell!

There's a song by David Bazan – someone who has also gone through a major faith transition – that fully understands the position that freethinking parents find themselves in. His song, Bearing Witness, captures exactly how I feel as a parent, but also repurposes religious vernacular to offer encouragement to those who have chosen a rational and logical belief system, and parenting style.

I clung to miracles I have not seen
From ancient autographs I cannot read
And though I've repented
I'm still tempted, I admit
But it's not what bearing witness is

Too full of prophecy and fear to see
The revelation right in front of me
So sick and tired of trying to make the pieces fit
Because it's not what bearing witness is

When the gap between
What I hoped would be
And what is makes me weep for my kids
I take a cleansing breath
And make a positive confession
But is that what bearing witness is

Though it may alienate your family
And blur the lines of your identity
Let go of what you know
And honor what exists
Son, that's what bearing witness is
Daughter, that's what bearing witness is

Lyrics from the song Bearing Witness on the album Curse Your Branches by David Bazan

The last paragraph is the most powerful statement for me. Every parent that has experienced a transition from make-believe to freethinking, has felt the alienation from their family, and initial blurring of their identity. For me, it includes a loss of intimacy. I no longer have the ability to talk deeply or philosophically with my parents, because the foundation of our belief system and world views are so deeply opposing.

I feel fortunate and hopeful though because I'm in the unique position to help stop the superstitious beliefs that have accompanied my family lineage for as long as anyone can remember. Bazan put that reality into a more concise statement, by naming his album Curse Your Branches.

When I first started seriously questioning the validity and truth of my now past faith, I created a list of hard questions. These were questions that I didn’t have the answer to, and most, if not all of them, held the potential to dislodge my worldview. One of those questions was:

“What’s the difference between Jesus and an imaginary friend?”

The question at first seemed absurd, but I knew it had to be answered. When I initially researched it, I found out that the official psychological term for it was “imaginary companion.” I thought companion was a fitting word for how I and most Christians view their relationship with Jesus.

The more I pondered my own belief in Jesus, and what it meant to have an imaginary companion, the more it looked exactly the same. I would constantly ask myself how this could be. How could so many people have the same imaginary friend? Not only that, how could rational adults believe in an imaginary friend, let alone, the same one?

Imaginary friends, which are usually experienced by children to combat loneliness or an emotional deficit in their lives, have names, unique characteristics, and most of all, provide companionship. Even though imaginary friends can’t be seen by the person who is imagining them (except in some rare hallucinatory cases), the person fully believes in their existence. They talk to them, depend on them, and often love them. The alternative to life without them is loneliness, and in some cases, despair.

In Christianity, if you bring together groupthink, a tendency to be superstitious (which includes every human being), religious doctrine, and the desperate need for hope and meaning in your life, then congratulations, you’ll be getting a new imaginary friend named Jesus.

The idea that everyone perceives Jesus, in the same way, is a fallacy. Jesus is experienced differently by everyone, even for those who are indoctrinated in the most homogeneous of religious sects. While the experience of Jesus may appear identical, that illusion comes from a religious group’s structured archetype of Jesus. The who and what of Jesus is a well-defined social construct. The rest is completely up to your mind’s imagination. That’s why Jesus talks to people in different ways, and why they ultimately experience their relationship with him in very unique ways.

During my journey into becoming a rational, logical freethinker, I had the opportunity to meet with a very popular Christian author. This person is very intelligent, has a background in psychology, and is someone who I continue to have great respect for. We met privately, and I presented him with my list of questions. As with most of the questions I presented to him, he didn’t have a reasonable answer for it. When I asked him what the difference was between an imaginary friend and the belief in a relationship with Jesus, he quickly conceded that there wasn’t a difference.

When I first came to Sitening, the company that built Raven, I had a lot of ideas — none of which included the creation of a Web-based SaaS. Instead, I focused on providing client services, like Web Design, Software Development, Information Architecture, and Online Marketing.

But soon I wanted to build an automated tool that would help me with sales. My idea was to create a parser that would analyze any Web page, and then provide a score between zero and 100, along with a results report card. For me, it was the original Website Grader, and we called it the SEO Analyzer. It’s now a minor tool that we included in Raven, and it’s called the Design Analyzer (a much more accurate name).

The SEO Analyzer was incredibly popular worldwide. Scott Holdren, the developer who coded the tool, also created small score badges that users could post on their websites. Thousands of people did just that, sharing their pride with visitors. It was a neat concept and one that ended up being repeated and enhanced by several other SEO tool providers in the industry.

The Creation of Raven

The popularity of the SEO Analyzer, and the subsequent skyrocketing SERPs, traffic, and business, encouraged us to make more tools. We created simple ones, like a PageRank Checker, and more complex offerings, like our SERP Tracker. We also made the tools free–for the sake of marketing–until the day two things dawned on us:

1. It was getting too expensive to give the tools away.
2. We could provide a much better set of tools if people were paying for it.

My vision for the new toolset wasn’t to just build something better. It was also to solve some of the problems inherent in online marketing tools—problems that persist even now. They include:

1. The inability to communicate with each other. Instead, those tools were (and still are) disparate and incapable of having useful data relationships.
2. Lack of support for multiple users. There was no easy way to allow team members to conduct and share their work.
3. No clouded, shared data storage. They could run basic reports, but the reports weren’t saved, and the only way to use the data was to export it to a spreadsheet. (This is still common in some of today’s most popular SEO tools.)
4. Absence of branded, professional reports for clients. Online marketers were forced to export data from different tools, collect data from their team, and then spend anywhere from a day to a week piecing together client reports.

When we first started building what is now known as Raven, we knew that assuming we were successful, a toolset like this would ultimately be used by our competitors. We would most likely be in a position of arbitrage, giving our competitors tools to compete with our own services. And while arbitrage was a financial challenge, there was also an ethical one: The data we were storing from other companies could technically be used by Sitening to unfairly compete.

The Ethical Dilemma

The problem of providing both tools and online marketing services has been on my mind since the beginning of Raven. Even though I knew we would never use that data for our own gain, there are people and companies who would if put in our shoes. As Raven grew, we started to lock down the information even more, and also separate it as much as possible from employees who worked on Sitening services. Later, we decided to split up employees within the company, so that they either worked on Raven or on Sitening services, but not both. This removed any temptation someone might get from the pressure to perform.

From time to time, I’d get email messages from prospective Raven users looking for assurance that we wouldn’t use their data for our own gain. While I could promise that we took the privacy of their data seriously and that we were a highly ethical company, the elephant in the room was always Sitening’s online marketing services.

The End of Services

We've always known that for a company like Sitening–one committed to running and supporting a major online marketing software platform–the most ethical course of action is not to provide services that compete with our customers. Unfortunately, this has been no easy task. Sitening, and more specifically Raven, is funded mostly by the income earned from these services. Everything that has made Raven possible has come from our own bootstrapping.

Unlike most of our main competitors, we are not VC-funded. It has been a struggle both financially and emotionally, but we have been fortunate enough to have a core team of partners and employees who have helped make the vision of Raven become a reality. We’ve also been incredibly lucky to have professional agencies from around the world take a chance with us. They are the early adopters of our software, whose patience and guidance have helped make Raven what it is today.

Thanks to Raven’s explosive growth over the past few months, I’m proud to announce that Sitening is now in a financial position to end all of Sitening’s services. That means we will no longer be offering any more online marketing services and will have our entire staff focused 100 percent on growing and making Raven even better. We hope this move will instill more trust in us from agencies that may have been on the fence about storing their data on Raven. We also hope it will show that we are, as we have always been, committed to privacy, data integrity, and ethical business practices.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a study on the religiosity of states. It measured three things; worship attendance, frequency of prayer, and belief in God. Unsurprisingly, the Southern states—also known as the Bible Belt—were found to be the most religious.

I thought it would be interesting to look at the five most and least religious states and compare statistics related to education, poverty, health, and death by firearms.

Five Most Religious States

1. Mississippi
2. Alabama
3. Arkansas
4. Louisiana
5. Tennessee

Five Least Religious States

1. New Hampshire
2. Vermont
3. Alaska
4. Massachusetts
5. Maine

When I compared the top five religious states with the top five lowest religious states, the results were dramatic. The most religious states were, on average, the least educated¹, poorest², and unhealthiest³. People in those states were also twice as likely to be killed by a firearm⁴. The differences were even more staggering when you removed Alaska from the least religious list. For example, you are almost three times as likely to be killed by a firearm.

Based on these correlations, one could conclude that there is a relationship between being religious and being less educated, having less money, being less healthy and owning, or at the very least, being killed by a gun. All four of which, even without including religion into the mix, usually have a direct relationship with each other.

Religion & Education

Education and access to knowledge have always been the enemy of religion. When critical thought, logic, and historical reference are applied to theology, it tears holes into its very foundation. It is no wonder that a culture that is better educated, especially philosophically, would be less religious.

Religion & Poverty

Desperation and fear create the greatest need for hope. Religion provides a pseudo-hope that people can easily cling to. Religion can be used both as a coping mechanism and an explanation for their current state of affairs. Poverty is often related to poor education, and both of those are often related to poor health.

Religion & Health

While education and poverty can have a direct influence on health, attitudes — specifically religious attitudes towards life — can influence health too. For example, if life after death will be angelic and perfect, there's really no need to concern yourself with living a healthy lifestyle. Especially if that means you'll get to heaven quicker ;)

However, I tend to think (from personal experience), that most people in the South comfort eat in order to get relief from the neurosis caused by following and believing in illogical superstitions.

Religion & Guns

At the core of most people's religious beliefs is fear. Fear of damnation and fear of death. It's that fear that makes it easy to believe in make-believe and it's that same fear that gets people to unnecessarily arm themselves.

Conclusion

While this article is intermingled with correlations (which aren't all that scientific), speculation, and personal opinion, I do think there are significant patterns within cultures that can be attributed to — both as a source and symptom — superstitious beliefs.

References

• ¹ "This fourth Smartest State designation is awarded based on 21 factors chosen from Morgan Quitno’s annual reference book, Education State Rankings, 2005-2006. Morgan Quitno Press, 2005
• ² Percent of People Below Poverty Level in the Past 12 Months (For Whom Poverty Status is Determined). American Community Survey 2004
• ³ Health Index by state. "The Healthiest State designation is awarded based on 21 factors chosen from the year 2005 edition of our annual reference book, Health Care State Rankings. Morgan Quitno Press, 2005
• ⁴ Number of Deaths Due to Firearms per 100,000 Population, 2002. statehealthfacts.org

Related Articles

• Does More Education Lead to Less Religion?