I have to admit, I really did love Michael Patrick’s latest column titled “Religious belief not obsolete,” but not for any reason Patrick would likely have intended. His column serves as a reminder of how far religion has fallen and how dramatically our rational ranks are rising.

Religion has lost the battle over its sacredness. It is very hard to consider something “holy” when its holiest adherents are making the news every other day for molesting children.

Now, religious apologists are trying to win what would seem, from an outside perspective, to be the most basic, easiest possible debate to have over anything: the debate over its own usefulness! Yet even here, the religious are obviously losing that struggle, too.

First, a small digression. People: you aren’t impressing anyone by making bold statements about how much you don’t understand the thing you dislike.

“I didn’t come from no monkey!” sounds the same as “The Earth don’t look like no circle!” You aren’t just wrong, you’re double-wrong.

Seriously, go read a book. One that isn’t written by a theologian.

These same people also cannot grasp the concept of morality outside of some primal sky-god-punishes-bad-people mythology. We do teach ethics classes on campus that anyone can take if they don’t understand how atheists can be donating more to charity than Christians (look that one up).

Anyway, in Patrick’s article, he attacks Jerry Coyne for asserting that faith and science are incompatible … I think. I am not sure about this because as soon as he quotes Coyne, he glazes over the point (while half-agreeing to it), and moves onto a very different point about the evolutionary benefit of religion.

Because we evolved to believe in false things, Patrick claims, it must be the case that we still need to believe in false things! I mean, it’s not like we have any evolutionary relics that are no longer beneficial to our survival, right?

Well, besides wisdom teeth. And appendixes. And the desire to fill ourselves with fattening foods.

You get my point. We have many biological traits and tendencies that we must overcome to be successful as a species. It is probably true that we needed religion at some point when we knew very little about the world and had no better tools to maintain social order. I’m not convinced of this, but it seems plausible.

There was a time in history when we didn’t need to get oral surgery to remove extra teeth, or set aside time to exercise so we didn’t kill ourselves with the modern abundance of calorie-dense food. Times have changed. Our technology has outpaced our biology.

The key to our flourishing as a species now is not spreading our genetic material as far and wide as possible. We do that too well already. The most important thing now is building a global civilization based on reason. When you reason, you get things like honest inquiry, peaceful cooperation, empathy, science and progress.

When you “faith,” you get things like suicide bombers, death cults, honor killings, holy wars and the Jonas Brothers. No one needs religion any more than they need heroin. Being raised an addict is no excuse.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying religion never does good things. The priest who counsels the suicidal is doing a good thing, but he can do his job even better without injecting stories about zombie demi-gods and hellfire. You aren’t good because of your god, you are good in spite of it. We have outgrown our need for ancient myths, and now is the time in history where our very survival relies on the rejection of them.

Sam Arnold is a junior majoring in philosophy.