by Alan Perlman

Created on: March 22, 2007   Last Updated: March 24, 2007

I think a life without God, prayer, and obsessing over the Bible is a much better life! I should know - that's how I've lived.

Over the centuries, God has gotten excellent PR and marketing. When the times required it, the Torah God was supplemented with a nicer God. As humans evolved, so did their concept of God. I wonder if there's a connection.

But God's dark side is still on record, and a lot of people believe in it, because it panders to their darker instincts to exclude, to persecute, even to destroy the Other, the unbeliever.

Many people just walk away from this kind of and often all forms of organized religion and quietly live their lives as secular humanists. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. Religious fanatics and fundamentalists are now empowered to destroy whole societies.

Pushing back - hard

Two consistent themes in my writings have been outreach and conversion. I admire the brilliant works of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, but I can't help wondering how much of it is "us talking to us."

We must somehow muster our considerable intellectual firepower and focus it on the actual rollback of the influence and prestige of religion in public life. Otherwise we will be engulfed by orthodoxy's relentless advance.

We've got to be better marketers, better evangelicals. Specifically: We should stop arguing that God doesn't exist - assume he doesn't - and show the benefits of adopting this point of view.

What does it mean to shed the burden of God?

First, and probably most important, is the time, energy, and financial and other resources that we save (think of churches paying taxes!) and redirect to improving our lives and those of others here on Earth, as well as life for generations to follow.

Even in itself that's a lot of hard work, enough to fill a lifetime. Just think how much more effort believers could devote to it if they weren't wasting so much time praying and carrying out religious rituals.

I wish you could witness the zeal with which Orthodox Jews swab their shelves with hot water on Passover, lest a single molecule of leavened matter remain. Please don't mistake me: I do not mock these people. I feel a little sorry for them, and I marvel at the reasons they give themselves for spending their lives in this manner.

I so sincerely wish that they would disown these irrational practices and rededicate themselves to improving life on earth. But too often the opposite is true: rigorous religious practices co-occur with and even cause bad behavior on earth,

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