It is taboo to say, even in leftist circles, but if you believe in an all-powerful imaginary friend from which all goodness and authority derive, you suffer from a fundamental core error of cognition and moral judgment. You’ve the obedience-oriented mind of a child, minus the questioning and pressing of boundaries. You are an unreliable social partner, because that friend is imaginary, and it is simply other people who pull the strings and make that giant puppet move within your psyche.
So far as we know, humans are the only game in town. Probably others out there among the stars, just as there are others here on Earth that we are starting to recognize as more similar than different, but for now, everything that happens or that has happened is either down to chance or to the actions of other human beings. Everything you’ve ever heard about your imaginary friend was said by other humans, everything you’ve ever felt came from inside yourself. We made it all up.
If there is a divine will to the universe, it is unknowable. And in the unlikely event that there is some ‘plan’ it is equally unlikely that it is a moral or ethical one behind which humans should place their unquestioning support. Most gods are genocidal monsters for a reason, because they were conjured up by humans, by genocidal monsters. Gods demand absolute obedience for the same reason. God is a kind of shortcut for power through your defenses, a cop that lives in you, that they control.
You can accept someone’s rights as a living thing without internalizing their psychopathology. What we define as progress should be a project of dismissing the childish fantasies of all-powerful beings who take a specific interest in what we read or whether we touch ourselves at night. The project of human progress should be one, not of discarding ethics or morality in favor of cold reason, but of building people who posses these admirable qualities without the need for cosmic fictions.
We should be creating real angels, not worshiping pretend ones. We should be working, individually and collectively, to ensure that this life is pleasant and just, not making up stories about another one. A corpse feels no joy, no pain. It is simply the nothingness that was before you awakened to consciousness. What happens between the bookends of birth and death, and what we do in relation to other living things within that time span, is all that matters, all that should matter.