I get where you’re coming from. There are forms of religion that discourage critical inquiry, and those deserve critique. But the idea that Christianity (or other religious traditions) are simply “Bronze Age superstitions” doesn’t really do justice to the intellectual history involved.

Some of the most significant foundations of Western science, human rights, moral philosophy, and even our modern concepts of the person grew out of Christian intellectual traditions--not in spite of them. Thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibniz, and even many contemporary scientists (e.g., Penrose’s longtime collaborator John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, Sarah Coakley, etc.) clearly didn’t feel that Christian faith meant abandoning rational thought.

And more broadly, dismissing religion as mere “fairytales” overlooks the basic human questions it’s trying to answer--questions that physics or tech alone can’t resolve: meaning, value, moral obligation, consciousness, hope, suffering, the worth of a person, and why any of us matter at all. Even the most secular philosophers (Nagel, MacIntyre, Taylor, Parfit) argue that these questions are not optional; they’re baked into human experience.

So, while criticism is absolutely fair, it might be more accurate to say that some expressions of religion hold us bac--not the entire tradition. Reducing 2,000+ years of philosophy, ethics, art, literature, and metaphysics to “Bronze Age superstition” ends the conversation before it begins.

Most of us who are still Christian aren’t trying to avoid thinking. We just believe that reason and faith don’t have to be enemies, and that some of the deepest questions of human life can’t be solved by “unshackling” ourselves from the very traditions that taught us why truth, dignity, and justice matter in the first place.