It may seem that there’s no point criticizing other people’s theological beliefs because from the standpoint of atheists, all religious beliefs are equally unreasonable, but different theological beliefs are not equal, and they lead to different outcomes.

I define theology as beliefs about gods, spirits, and ethics: how we show up in the world as humans.

Good theology versus bad theology

Bad theology is when a theological belief leads to harmful behaviours. Here are some examples:

• Believing that the world is coming to an end soon, and therefore it’s okay to destroy the environment;
• Believing that God, or the gods, prefer heterosexuals and cisgender people, and treating 2SLGBTQIA people as “lesser” or “unnatural”;
• Believing that humans are inherently sinful, so not bothering to treat other humans and animals well (e.g. James Dobson was an evil person who harmed innumerable people and animals with his hateful ideology);
• Believing that “humans are parasites on the Earth” and assuming that she will “shake us off” leads to nihilism and eco-fascism (it’s capitalism that is the parasite);
• Believing that nothing is true, which often results in believing in all sorts of conspiracy theories;
• Believing that morality is divinely decreed instead of emergent from context and our embodied finite nature can result in imposing rigid rules on other people based on what someone thought 2000 years ago.

If your theological perspective on the world makes you unhappy, fearful, insecure, and causes you to treat other people, animals, and the environment badly, then it is bad theology.

Good theology is when a theological belief leads to increasing the sum of happiness in the world, for example:

• Believing that other people are inherently divine (or created in the image of the divine) leads to treating them as sacred beings with inherent rights and dignity;
• Believing that diversity is good and natural leads to treating 2SLGBTQIA people as equal and worthy of respect;
• Believing that truth is important and that we should seek it out leads to critical thinking skills and not believing a bunch of conspiracy theories;
• Believing that morality is emergent from context and our embodied finite nature can result in treating other people flexibly and understanding how their circumstances affect their actions;
• Believing that the Earth is a living, sacred, eternal being leads us to take care of her.

If your theological perspective on the world makes you happy, confident, secure, and kind to other people, animals, and the environment, then it is good theology.

Reasonable versus unreasonable

A slightly more subtle point about theology is that it should be reasonable. What I mean by that is that it should be able to be worked out from first principles by a thinking person. It should not need to be specially revealed to a small privileged group that then has to spread it to others via evangelism.

We can infer from our embodied existence as beings who can be killed and injured, and who need food, that it’s wrong to kill another sentient being, and it’s wrong to steal their food, clothes, and tools that they need to survive.

We can infer from the effects of loving-kindness that treating other people and animals kindly is a good thing (yes I believe that animals are people but I wanted to make treating them well explicit).

We can infer from our awe and wonder at Nature that the natural world is sacred and imbued with divinity.

As to what divinity is and how many divine beings there are, we can infer that from how we form relationships with them. The universe clearly has an underlying energy (we can feel that energy), but it is too big to have a relationship with. We tend to form relationships with local manifestations of the divine, mediated through our culture — hence there are many deities. Even in ostensibly monotheist religions, people tend to form relationships with saints, angels, and other magical beings like Khidr. We can also note that many cultures have arrived at polytheism and animism independently of each other, but monotheism has had to be spread by force and/or empires.

Ideas of the divine that have to be specially revealed and can’t be inferred are not reasonable (e.g. the Trinity or duotheism). The idea that the divine chose to reveal themself once through one man 2000 years ago is definitely not reasonable. The idea that you’ll only get to “heaven” by believing in the “salvation” provided by that man is not only unreasonable, it’s outrageous. What about all the faithful Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, etc?

The idea that only one religion has the truth is outrageous as well. Surely the divine reveals themself constantly and everywhere, in the beauty of Nature, in kindness and compassion.

Conclusions

So yes, we can and should discern between good theology and bad theology, between reasonable and unreasonable beliefs, because we base how we behave on our beliefs (implicit or explicit) about the world.

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(Originally published at Dowsing for Divinity).