What If No-one Is Coming To Save Us?

Every so often I come across a piece of writing that resonates so strongly with me I can’t keep it to myself. This morning it was a post by writer and humanist chaplain Jim Palmer.

If you haven’t come across him before, Jim spent many years inside evangelical Christianity before eventually stepping away from organised religion altogether. Much of his writing explores what it means to live ethically, courageously, and compassionately without relying on religious frameworks - qualities that lie at the very heart of Humanism. His post isn't so much a declaration as a set of uncomfortable questions - questions about religion, power, responsibility, and the ways belief systems can shape how we respond to the world around us.

Here is his post in full. Settle in, take your time and read it slowly, thoughtfully, with a cup of coffee at your elbow. You might find, like I did, that he's asking questions you've wondered about yourself without ever fully articulating them.

"What if the afterlife is the most effective scam religion ever sold because it convinces people to tolerate lives they should be revolting against?

What if calling this world “temporary” has been the single greatest obstacle to justice, urgency, and courage the human species has ever invented?

What if heaven was never about hope but about pacification?

What if promising future bliss has functioned primarily to keep people compliant in the face of present suffering, abuse, and inequality?

What if forgiveness theology has protected perpetrators far more than it has healed victims?

What if “grace” has been used as a moral escape hatch, allowing people to feel absolved without ever being accountable, repaired, or changed?

What if sin was never about ethics but about control?

What if constantly redefining what’s “wrong” with people has been the most efficient way to keep them anxious, dependent, and obedient?

What if “salvation” is just spiritualised tribalism?

What if dividing humanity into saved and unsaved, insiders and outsiders, enlightened and lost is the original violence that every other violence grows out of?

What if belief has been elevated precisely because it requires the least risk?

What if believing the right things has replaced living truthfully, loving courageously, and taking responsibility for the harm we cause?

What if prayer has become a socially acceptable substitute for action?

What if asking God to intervene has allowed us to remain morally uninvolved while convincing ourselves we’ve done something meaningful?

What if hell isn’t a future destination but a present condition we keep reproducing?

What if hell is poverty, trauma, exclusion, abuse, racism, and neglect, and religion has spent far more energy explaining it than preventing it?

What if Satan is just the story we tell to avoid looking in the mirror?

What if evil isn’t supernatural, but what happens when fear, power, and unresolved pain go unexamined and unowned?

What if church attendance has trained us to confuse proximity with intimacy?

What if sitting next to people who agree with us once a week has replaced the far more threatening work of mutual vulnerability, shared responsibility, and honest relationship?

What if sacred texts were never meant to replace consciousness?

What if outsourcing moral authority to ancient writings has atrophied our capacity for discernment, imagination, and ethical maturity?

What if conditional love is not a virtue, but a failure of courage?

What if love with prerequisites is just approval pretending to be holy?

What if prayer for peace is meaningless without a willingness to disrupt the systems that profit from violence?

What if justice, not worship, is the thing religion keeps postponing?

What if God has never been impressed by obedience?

What if rule-following has always been a poor substitute for transformation, and compliance a counterfeit for wholeness?

What if belief is the least interesting thing about a human being?

What if the only questions that matter are:

• How do you treat people when belief offers you cover?

• How do you handle power when no one is watching?

• How do you respond to suffering when it costs you something?

• How honest are you willing to be about yourself?

Religion says believe in Jesus.

But what if Jesus didn’t come to be believed in, but came to dismantle the very religious machinery now built in his name?

And what if the most heretical idea of all is this:

No one is coming to save us.

There is no cosmic cleanup crew.

There is no divine bypass around responsibility.

This life is not a test.

This world is not a waiting room.

Meaning is not assigned.

Redemption is not outsourced.

We are it.

And the future of spirituality will not be decided by those who defend religion but by those willing to outgrow it."

The Journey Behind the Questions

Ideas rarely appear out of nowhere. They grow out of lived experience. Jim Palmer's lived experience included a difficult childhood, finding evangelical Christianity in his early twenties, training for ministry, becoming a gifted preacher, and eventually leading a large non-denominational church in Nashville.

For many years he lived completely inside that world. But slowly, a troubling question emerged. The theology he preached promised transformation, peace, and healing. Yet the lives of many people around him told a different story. Marriages still broke down. Depression remained. Suffering continued.

Eventually he noticed something even more unsettling. The same contradiction existed in his own life. Despite the faith, the role, and the certainty he projected from the pulpit, he felt a deep inner dissonance. That realisation led to what he describes as a crisis of faith. Instead of ignoring the questions, he stepped away from ministry to ask what he actually believed.

The journey that followed eventually led him beyond organised religion altogether and toward a humanist understanding of life.

Humanism begins with a simple idea: the problems facing humanity are human problems, and the solutions will come from human beings. And things like meaning, ethics, compassion, and purpose don't require supernatural authority: they grow out of how we choose to live with one another.

For Jim, that shift wasn't about rejecting meaning. Far from it. It was about reclaiming responsibility for creating it.

A Very Human Journey

Jim's story is not unique. Around the world, many people are quietly re-examining the beliefs they inherited and asking new questions about what it means to live well.

Some find their way to secular humanism. Others reshape their spirituality in different ways. But the deeper movement is the same. The search for meaning has never belonged exclusively to religion. It's part of being human.

Perhaps that's the real invitation behind those questions. Not simply to dismantle belief, but to take seriously the responsibility of living thoughtfully, compassionately, and courageously in the one life we know we have.

In my work as a humanist celebrant I see this all the time. People standing at the most important moments of their lives: weddings, funerals, the marking of new beginnings and final goodbyes, discovering that meaning isn’t handed down from above but created in how we love, remember, and care for one another.

The challenge is not just about leaving behind old beliefs and old conditioning. The challenge is learning how to live well as a human being, while recognising that when it comes to saving the world we live in, the buck stops with us.

Perhaps it also means recognising that if there is to be colour in the sky, we may have to paint the rainbow ourselves.

Image by ~ The Art of Jennifer Yoswa