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When I was a kid my best friend’s father took me home after a play in which I was Abraham Lincoln. He said he certainly wouldn’t have let his kid play Abe, not with him freeing the niggers and all. I wasn’t really shocked or appalled. I was ten. He’d been at my birthday parties. We’d had cake. I took it for granted that this must be a reasoned point of view.

Thankfully, his view was not shared by my parents, and thus not one that was relentlessly forced on me in my formative years. Racism was not so difficult to see through once the world got bigger than my backyard.

Religion was harder to part with.

Objectively there’s no reason it should have been. Both are anachronistic and exclusionary explanations for why the word is the way it is, and both demand an ignorance of countless facts and an unwillingness to question. In the case of religion this outright rejection of evidence and inquiry is called faith.

On the one hand, religion doesn’t really seem that big a deal. Allah, Jesus, tomato, tom-a-to. I have lots of lip service Christian and Jewish friends who hit church on the weekends and probably pray on occasion before holiday meals and a few who think the world is only thousands of years old. We get along. Can’t reasonable people believe what they want about spirituality and still engage with others who disagree?

Not if they want to go by the book, whichever book they happen to have chosen. If, say, the Bible is your book of choice, you probably can’t even imagine how many people you should have killed today. You might have come across someone who hurled some blasphemy at the copier, some insubordinate children, or some folks who worked over the weekend. But since the news hasn’t reported an outbreak of stonings, we can assume that these parts of the Bible were ignored. As no doubt were countless other portions that no longer seem congruous with our modern and civil way of life and thus have been ignored by most (with some notable exceptions by the Catholic Church and more that a few Puritans) since say, the 14th century. Sadly, portions of other holy books are still taken very literally today. Just attend a soccer match in Afghanistan (this is ‘free’ post Taliban Afghanistan) where the halftime show includes the murder of accused adulterers, or witness the honor killings of women who had the audacity to get themselves raped if you doubt that someone is still taking these ancient texts very seriously.

The point is not that one religion is any more credible than another (at all), it’s that the people we consider moral and civil members of society are those who have to a great degree, lost their religion whether they admit it or not. No matter what they call themselves, it’s hard to find a Christian today who feels blasphemers should be stoned or women treated like the property of their husbands (though Pat Robertson still supports the latter sentiment. In his words, “sorry ladies.”) Instead, most of the ‘moderate’ or ‘evolved’ religious folk we know today have treated their holy books like buffets and taken the tasty parts while rejecting the portions that seem vile to an evolved palette. But doesn’t accepting that some of these infallible works seem a little out of whack open the whole of their story up to further inquiry? Indeed it does, and I would argue that it demands it.

But faith doesn’t work that way. Where the statement “the universe is made of ping pong balls” would require a tremendous amount of evidence to support, the statement “Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin, and resurrected after his death,” appears to require none at all. And where science would demand that we put this claim regarding ping pong balls to the test, religion demands that we do just the opposite regarding its claims. Faith, it’s said, requires no evidence.  And those who question – technically you’re supposed to kill them.  Oops.

That doesn’t mean that faithful people don’t like evidence. Were we to somehow discover that we’d simply been misreading Darwin all these years or to find Noah’s Ark (it shouldn’t be that hard to locate given the necessary size; there are 200 thousand species of beetles alone) you can be certain that religious folks would embrace this evidence. It’s only when the evidence tends to directly contradict the words in holy books that religious apologists tend to do things like put the word ‘evidence’ in quotes or ask why we should believe in things like evidence anyway.

That others are to varying degrees religious wouldn’t bother me any more than the fact that people to varying degrees seemed to enjoy Will and Grace. Both seem somewhat illogical to me (religion more than W&G). The difference is that W&G fans are not committing actions ranging from making stem cell policy to piloting jets into buildings in the name of their favorite show.

I wouldn’t begin to ask anyone to take my word for anything.  All I would ask of any person is that they investigate their beliefs regarding religion in much the same way they would investigate anything else.  If your car keys were missing, what kind of evidence would you demand before you believed that they had been stolen by Paris Hilton, or that a unicorn had flown away with them?  Would it be enough if it was simply written in a book that I told you was never wrong.  Probably not.  But if at the end of your investigation you were duly impressed by the evidence so as to either arrest a celebutard or chase after a unicorn, well, I’d probably want to discuss your evidence, but certainly you’d feel more secure having come to this conclusion through reasoned investigation than just accepting it on faith.  And if the loss of your keys demands such an inquiry, surely your quest to know how and why we came to be deserves and equal one.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is a great place to start your investigation.  The End of Faith by Sam Harris is good if you have any doubt that presence of mutually incompatible faith based visions of the world are an immediate danger to us all.  Perhaps you will be utterly unconvinced by either.  Perhaps you will be convinced but decide that it’s all the work of Satan trying to bend your mind.  And perhaps, for the first time since someone else started to tell you what to believe about everything from Abe Lincoln to Abraham, you will finally figure it out for yourself.