Certainty About God Is Not the Same as Being Right

Across belief systems — and this includes atheism, not just organized religion — the biggest source of religious conflict usually isn’t disagreement. It’s certainty. Global surveys tracking religious freedom have shown intolerance rising in recent years, and it isn’t concentrated in one faith. It shows up wherever someone decides their answer to an unanswerable question makes them superior to people who answered differently.

It looks like assuming someone is less moral because they don’t share your faith, or your lack of one. It looks like treating your holy text, or your absence of one, as self-evidently true while treating everyone else’s as obviously invented. It looks like mocking a practice you’ve never bothered to understand and calling the mockery insight.

None of this requires giving up the belief. Plenty of people hold a faith fully, live by it seriously, and still manage to say “I can’t prove this” without it costing them anything. What they don’t do is act like the inability to prove it doesn’t matter because they’re sure anyway — and that specific move, sureness standing in for evidence, is where religious arrogance actually lives.

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