when you leave Christianity, you aren’t just leaving some of the more obvious beliefs: god, Jesus, the necessity of repentance,the Bible, etc. One of the other beliefs is that of The Inherent Fairness of Life.
According to Christians (and some other religions), everything in life is either fair or will be made fair. Any wrongdoing will be eventually punished (even if it has to wait until the final judgement), goodness will be rewarded, suffering will be forgotten because of the joy that will replace it. Whether it is a natural disaster that is “unfair” or human action (wrongdoing), Christianity holds that everything is a part of god’s plan and it is unfolding as he wants it to. Everything actually happens for some sort of higher purpose, and humans sometimes are too consumed with what’s in front of them to see the big picture.
When you leave Christianity, sometimes you might abandon part of a belief but keep another part. That can happen with this concept of The Inherent Fairness of Life. You might start seeing things about the world not influenced by humans as being unfair: natural disasters, disease, the ease with which people can be hurt, even poverty and being born into hard circumstances. These things can be easier to accept than another part of life being unfair: human nature and behavior.
It’s one thing to acknowledge earthquakes but another to acknowledge selfishness. Another part of life’s inherent unfairness is that humans have the ability to help each other but choose not to. We have enough resources in the world for poverty and hunger not to exist, but it still does because humans first and foremost look out for their own self-interest.
I think that people who choose to believe that extreme self-interest is actually the ideal way to behave are actually just trying to cope with an unpleasant truth. They somehow see that, wait, extreme selfishness causes huge wealth disparity, ruthlessness, etc. Instead of that leading to thinking, “Wow, humans are so flawed! We may have more faculties of thought than other animals, but we are still prone to bias and prejudice, and it is the exception to the rule when people go out of their way to help others,” it goes on another track: “This must be the way we OUGHT to behave.” It’s a strange switcheroo, where you take a negative truth and then remove the negative label and say it is actually the ideal! Ideologies that do this are things like free-market capitalism (and the invisible hand) and Objectivism.
Anyway, people who leave behind the idea of the Inherent Fairness of Life sometimes are actually only leaving behind the idea of The Inherent Fairness of the Natural World (weather, sickness, etc.). There is still a part of them that believes that humans are a certain level of good and giving. Humans are born good. Maybe they think that humans are only later corrupted by extreme circumstances or forces.
I think the truth is that humans behave selfishly in most cases, even in circumstances where they really don’t have to—where their survival doesn’t depend on it at all, not remotely. There were two all-gender bathrooms at a restaurant, and I approached one and found the door was locked. I turned around to try the other right across from it, and someone walked in front of me to try it and went in without hesitation. The Noble Thing would have been to see that I had been there first and just happened to try a door that was locked and to let me have a turn first. It didn’t really affect me. I just had to wait a few extra minutes, and I wasn’t really inconvenienced (I might have spoken up if it had been an emergency). But it also wouldn’t have cost that person much to not cut in line.
Cutting in line is actually a great symbol of human selfishness. It is usually incredibly unnecessary to cut. This isn’t a line of people displaced by a hurricane who lost their homes and are on the brink of death, and they are waiting in line to get drinking water, so someone with three kids in his harms muscles his way to the front past people who already have water in their hands. It is usually to get some sort of unnecessary thing. People who cut in line disregard the fact that people could work together to be fair: people who got there first are first in line. They only focus on the fact that they want the thing as quickly as possible. How long other people have been waiting and what effort they made to get there first is irrelevant.
Sometimes it is like a second loss of religion to realize that humans don’t actually live up to an assumed standard of decency. There are a lot of beliefs like this that people may not leave behind even when they leave religion because they disentangle it from the rhetoric and jargon of religion.
With this specific set of beliefs (natural world vs. human unfairness), I would compare it to opinions on climate change. Some people can accept climate change as a natural process of the earth that has gone on for billions of years, but they don’t accept that humans influence (i.e. worsen) climate change. They can believe that the sea levels are rising and different climates are becoming more extreme, but they can’t accept that humans could have anything to do with it.
It hurts in a more specific way to realize that humans are more flawed than you thought. There is a definite chance you could be treated very unfairly, and that can be disheartening. It is also just disheartening in general to abandon a belief which brought you some level of comfort before.
(Then of course, there’s the other issue of thinking of how you too are part of this group of humans, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
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