I often get into fairly rigorous conversations with a routine Facebook post and a link. In this instance the essay was titled “Credotheism and the Comfort of Belief Without Burden,” and it lives here: https://celerykills.com/2026/04/10/credotheism-and-the-comfort-of-belief-without-burden/. The short version is this: credotheism is the habit of wearing belief like a jacket, warm, visible, and reassuring, without carrying the weight of coherence, accountability, or evidence. What followed in the comments was not chaos, but something far more revealing. 

 
I’m CeleryKills in that thread, which means I occupy the odd position of being both participant and narrator. Two commenters shaped the exchange in ways that made the underlying mechanics unusually visible. I’ll call them TS and LJ. LJ entered briefly and cleanly, writing, “Sin has been used as a tool to shame, manipulate and abuse people. This is the cause of the suffering.” That comment mattered because it named a function rather than defending a metaphysical object. It described how an idea is used, not what it is presumed to represent. 

TS arrived with a different energy. The opening question was framed as curiosity, but it carried a full theory inside it: “Do atheists reject God to help alleviate the suffering that sin begets?” The word reject did the work. It assumed belief as the default state and cast disbelief as rebellion. I responded the only way that keeps language honest. Not believing in something is not rejecting it. Rejecting implies acceptance followed by refusal. I asked whether TS rejected Thor or simply did not believe Thor was real. Humor helps when you need to pry apart an assumption without escalating the temperature. 

That didn’t slow things down. TS pivoted quickly to character assessment, suggesting that “There are some atheists who rather then suffer guilt for their imperfections, they decide they have no imperfections!” After more than sixty years of living among actual humans, I can say with some confidence that this atheist unicorn does not exist outside sermons and comment sections. The atheists I know are often painfully aware of their flaws and unusually motivated to address them. I said as much, and I introduced the term credotheism explicitly, describing it as adopting the outer trappings of belief without the inner discipline, coherence, or cost. 

What followed is where the conversation becomes instructive rather than merely familiar. Instead of responding to that claim, TS reframed the discussion around incentive. “But why live a sinless life if sin doesn’t exist? Do you believe sin exists?” The question sounds philosophical. It isn’t. It assumes that moral restraint requires an external threat and that absent theological surveillance, behavior collapses. This is a move that turns disagreement into suspicion. If you don’t accept the framework, you must be untrustworthy. 

I answered directly. Sin is a theological construct. Morality is not. Treating them as interchangeable only works if theology is assumed to be the default operating system of the human mind. It isn’t. Moral cognition is an evolved feature of social animals. It arises from the need to navigate cooperation, harm, reciprocity, and trust in groups where survival depends on mutual recognition. We punish cheating. We reward cooperation. We experience guilt when we violate shared expectations. None of that requires metaphysical enforcement. It requires functioning brains shaped by selection pressures over time (de Waal, Good Natured, 1996; Churchland, Braintrust, 2011). 

TS acknowledged part of this, then made the next predictable move: “How do you know the secular versions of morality are not just a matter of popular opinion? Slavery being just that, normalized through popular opinion in history. I ask, is slavery moral or immoral and why?” This is a common rhetorical pivot. It collapses moral reasoning into polling data and then declares it incoherent. If societies once permitted slavery, the argument goes, then morality must be arbitrary. Only divine command can rescue it. 

That move only works if you erase conflict. Slavery did not persist because people lacked moral awareness. It persisted because powerful institutions benefited from it and worked to suppress moral resistance. Abolitionists did not appear after slavery ended. They existed while it was practiced, often at great personal cost. Their presence is not an anomaly. It is the data point that matters. Slavery is immoral because it inflicts unjustified suffering, strips agency, and relies on coercion enforced by violence. Those facts were true while slavery was legal, which is precisely why it required constant justification. 

Religion played a role in that justification. The Bible regulates slavery without condemning it. It specifies ownership, punishment, inheritance, and duration. That is not moral transcendence. It is moral accommodation in service of social order and power (Exodus 21; Leviticus 25). This is what theology does when embedded in hierarchical societies. It stabilizes the structure and offers rhetorical comfort. 

At this point TS escalated to a familiar squeeze play. Either morality is absolute and grounded in God, or it is relative and therefore must concede that slavery was not immoral “in its historical context.” Anything else, I was told, made me a monster. This is the false dichotomy doing its work. Reduce the available options to two distorted extremes, then declare victory when neither is acceptable. 

This is where it matters to slow down. Moral reasoning does not reduce to popular opinion, nor does it require divine decree. There is a third position that TS repeatedly refused to acknowledge because it undermines the conclusion. Moral realism grounded in shared human capacities. Empathy. Perspective-taking. Aversion to suffering. These are not culturally arbitrary. They appear across societies and in other social animals. Chimpanzees protest unfair treatment. Dogs respond to distress. These behaviors are not ethics, but they are its roots (de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 2006). 

When TS declared that only God could ground moral absolutes, the claim asserted exactly what it needed to prove. Even if absolute moral truths existed, it would not follow that they must originate in a deity rather than in facts about conscious creatures and their capacity to suffer. Saying “God says so” does not explain why suffering matters. It relocates the question to authority. History shows where that relocation leads when divine command is used to shield power. 

Abortion entered the conversation next, not as inquiry but as a trap. “Is abortion a human right?” The framing was designed to force collapse. I refused the bait. Bodily autonomy is the right. The moral question turns on the emergence of morally relevant consciousness, the capacity for experience and suffering. Before that point, there is no subject to wrong. After that point, obligations change. This is the same reasoning already applied in end-of-life care and brain death decisions. No theology required. Just recognition of what it means to be someone rather than something (Singer, Practical Ethics, 2011; Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?, 2011). 

Throughout the exchange, the same tactics repeated. Strawmen replaced positions. Authority replaced explanation. Confidence stood in for evidence. When the argument could not advance, it shifted to motivation and threat. This is credotheism functioning exactly as described in the original essay. Belief insulated from burden, defended by mischaracterizing alternatives until they are unrecognizable. 

For readers watching from the sidelines, this distinction matters. Evidence-based reasoning invites correction. It exposes its assumptions and risks being wrong. Rhetorical evasion narrows the frame, invents binaries, and treats disagreement as moral failure. One approach reduces uncertainty. The other preserves certainty by design. 

I’ll end where I ended in the thread. If your moral framework is grounded in reality, show the grounding. Offer verifiable evidence. Make testable predictions. Cite work that does not assume its conclusion. Until then, what’s being defended isn’t moral certainty. It’s insulation. And insulation, no matter how warmly worn, is not the same thing as truth. 
 

References 

de Waal, Frans. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. 1996. 

de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers. 2006. 

Churchland, Patricia. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. 2011. 

Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes. 2013. 

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. 2011. 

Gazzaniga, Michael. Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. 2011. 

The Hebrew Bible. Exodus 21; Leviticus 25.