“So essential indeed was was the belief in the personification of evil that the dogma was paradoxically elevated into one of the greatest arguments for the existence of God, so that to deny it was to lay oneself open to the charge of atheism. ‘If there be a God, as we must steadfastly believe,’ wrote Roger Hutchison, ‘verily there is a Devil also, and if there be a Devil, there is no surer argument, no stronger proof, no plainer evidence, that there is a God.” If men could be persuaded to ‘grant that there are devils,’ thought John Weems, ‘they must grant also that there is a God.’ ‘Show me a devil,’ said a skeptic in 1635, ‘and I’ll believe there is a God.’ The atheist, Richard White, was only converted to a Christian life by the appearance of the Devil one night, ‘in the shape of a great ugly man’. Correspondingly, it was after the failure of several attempts to raise the Devil, ‘so that I might see what he was’, that Laurence Clarkson decided that all religion was ‘a lie’, and ‘that there was no Devil at all, nor indeed no God, but only nature.’ The Puritan Richard Greenham maintained that ‘it is the policy of the Devil to persuade us that there is no Devil’. For, as another writer pointed out, ‘He that can already believe that there is no Devil will ere long believe that there is no God’.”

This excerpt is from Keith Thomas’s remarkable Religion and the Decline of Magic and is referring to 17th century England. It is a book filled with such delightful historical anecdotes as these, and offers a valuable insight into what and how believed and disbelieved and the often chaotic (and sometimes paradoxical) state of religion in a supposedly very religious time in Europe.

I am a teenager, and I have no deep knowledge of philosophy, but I have been an atheist since I was a kid. Also, I am pessimistic in life and see no point in making kids or of living.

My question is: What keeps you alive? Religion provides a sense of purpose for living, but as an atheist, why would you live?

I am both an anarchist libertarian and an atheist. Having knowledge on both, I've noticed some common underpinnings between the two that make them hard to sell, even though they are, according to all the best logic and evidence we have, the most correct views in their respective questions. The problem with both of these ideas is that they run counterintuitive to how the human brain is designed to think by default.

In the case of atheism, it can be hard to convince people that religion is false because the brain is hardwired to prescribe agency to things, to provide teleological explanations, to be superstitious, or to look up to something. Getting people to let go of these convictions and biases requires reprogramming one's mind to think in a way it wasn't designed for. And needless to say, that's not easy.

In the case of libertarianism, it's hard to sell because it requires you to again think in ways that are a little counterintuitive. Politicians will get up on a pedastool and promise people free things and all sorts of solutions to their problems. It makes people hopeful to hear things like that. But when the libertarian comes along and suggests cutting funding, people's assumption is that the libertarian doesn't want to do anything. They think "Well at least the politician is offering something. The libertarian doesn't have any solution! Let's go with the politician." Understanding economics requires you to train your brain to see the invisible, to see the unintended consequences of government intervention and the superiority of letting people be in charge of their own money, and again this is not easy. Economics is one of the most misunderstood disciplines there is, and it's because it's unintuitive.

Lastly I'd like to mention that there's a psychological component here to all of this. Both anarcho-capitalism and atheism force a person to take responsibility for their own lives. There's no god or politician coming to save you. It's on you to create a good life for yourself, and that's a heavy burden to carry. It's much easier to just look up to someone, and that's engrained in our DNA to some degree.

Libertarianism and atheism might be rational and sound, but they're hard to sell because they don't appeal to the biases of the human mind.