Is anyone else tired of Evangelical Atheism?
Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 9:11 pm
Boy, am I fried.
Once I realized (seems so obvious in retrospect) that Joseph Smith didn't have the kinds of prophetic power/authority he claimed to have, and that there was no more reason to credit many of the wild tales found in "the scriptures" than those found in a Hans Christian Andersen anthology, I presumed (amongst many other things) that I'd never again have to think much about the bizarro acid trip found at the end of the Bible, known as "Revelations". Yet, here we are, in an intellectual world dominated by THE FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE - Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.
This must be some sort of Golden Era for intellectually respectable atheism; and while I have no particular religious beliefs (I confine myself to religious hopes these days), and find many religious beliefs very silly, and have admired Chris Hitchens since I first saw him on CNN's "Crossfire" when I was a teenager, I'm really pretty fried.
One reason I'm fried is that the Four Horseman so easily - and I think, unthinkingly - move from an explanation of why many religious beliefs couldn't possibly be true (fair enough), to a discussion about why certain religious beliefs are evil (of course), to a claim that "religion in toto is evil". And that, my friends, is an unbearably crude judgment. Perhaps "religion" is an exaggerator or magnifier of certain human propensities, good and bad; but to assert, or even hint, that "religion is the root of all evil", or that it is equivalent to it, is to my mind, very ignorant.
Chris Hitchens, for example, sub-titles his book "How Religion Poisons Everything". What kind of claim is that? This is the same guy who, in his book, recounts the story of a Sudanese Muslim cabdriver who finds a large amount of money in the back of his cab, forgotten there by Hitchens's wife while a passenger, and who then makes a huge effort to figure out just who the money belonged to, and return it all to their house. Hitchens remarks that the cabdriver refused to take 10% of the money, on grounds that he was only doing his Islamic duty. Is it really MORE likely that the cabdriver would have done this good deed, if he was not religious at all? I'm not suggesting that agnostics or atheists would have taken it; at least I certainly don't think I would, and I haven't a clue who's running the universe or whether I'll ever have to account for my actions on earth. But it cannot be imagined that what the cabdriver understood about right and wrong, as derived from his religion, did not influence his actions. How then can "religion poison EVERYTHING"? What nonsense.
There are many people on this planet who, for whatever reason, find themselves lonely, incapable of self-discipline, depressed, etc., whose lives are transformed for the better, by any measure, by their conversion to a particular religion. How many drunks have to "feel the Holy Spirit" at the evangelical tent meeting, and never touch another drop, etc., before one of the horseman can admit that while religion is capable of exacerbating our worst tendencies, under certain circumstances for certain people, it is also capable of exacerbating their best tendencies? Apparently, there is no adequate number. Neither the abolitionist movement, nor the Civil Rights movement, both inspired by certain religious understandings and motivations, nor angelic Muslim cabdrivers, nor religious beliefs which aid thousands of drug addicts in maintaining their sobriety, add perspective in some minds to religion's role in Martin Luther's anti-semitism, or its cover for Joseph Smith's serial sexual predation, or its lunatic manifestations in radical Islam. There is good, there is bad, there is white, there is black, there is grey, there are a multitude of circumstances and variables - and yet, the Four Horseman only see black, only unremitting evil, a scourge which they have a moral duty to destroy - I might say, in a veritable crusade (hmm) - for all time.
And that is not all they see; they see a Utopian vision just about as stupid and naïve as the one seen by early Mormon communists or contemporary "Left Behind" rapturistas: they see a John Lennon-esque world which, were it not for religion, would experience a dramatic decrease in war and suffering. That is, they see a massive, profound (and entirely unprecedented) transformation in human nature itself, through atheism - which, needless to say, is exactly what the theists they disdain see, just through theism.
Yet the Soviet butchers didn't need a religion to become devils incarnate - their humanity was more than adequate to that task. Neither did National Socialist leaders require a religion for their savagery. Neither did oriental despots like Mao or Pol Pot. All of these men were devils incarnate - FAR more wicked than even the Satan of Christian mythology could be, as according to that mythology, he is not permitted to take life directly. And all of them existed not in some far distant past, which might excuse the Four Horseman from not considering their cases, but just in one single contemporary lifetime.
And it is no use for the Horsemen to get around this by asserting that the cults of personality which these savages perpetuated amounted to "religions", for that is to stretch the definition of the word far beyond what they themselves mean when they use it normally. That tactic, in fact, amounts to a confession that it is not "religion" per se which is the cause of all the horror they observe at all. There is, simply, no reason provided by history to "imagine" that an atheist world would be a "kinder, gentler" place, than a theist one, as dangerous or nutty as certain religious beliefs might be at any particular time.
One final thing which I find perplexing in all this. The Horseman are united in their belief that religion has an earthly provenance; that its seat is simply the human mind. So to use the word "religion" where one really means "certain products of the human mind", is to consistently refer to a proximate cause where an ultimate cause is really meant; and one effect of this is to absolve the accusers of having to do the much harder work of exploring the depths of the human psyche itself. It is rather like announcing that one has finally identified "the root of all criminal behaviour: people who behave criminally!". Or maybe better, that the root of human aggression may be found in the weapons used in that aggression. These "one true theories" actually don't tell us anything at all. (No wonder they have zero predictive value).
"Religion" does not "poison everything"; poisonous thoughts and feelings, and the poisonous words and deeds which may emanate from them, poison things; but not even those "poison everything". Fortunately, generosity, honesty, empathy, courage, kindness, joy - everything good - posess an efficacy of their own, and are spread with great measure - by both theists, atheists, and the plain bewildered - around the world as well.
Comments welcome.
Tal
Once I realized (seems so obvious in retrospect) that Joseph Smith didn't have the kinds of prophetic power/authority he claimed to have, and that there was no more reason to credit many of the wild tales found in "the scriptures" than those found in a Hans Christian Andersen anthology, I presumed (amongst many other things) that I'd never again have to think much about the bizarro acid trip found at the end of the Bible, known as "Revelations". Yet, here we are, in an intellectual world dominated by THE FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE - Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.
This must be some sort of Golden Era for intellectually respectable atheism; and while I have no particular religious beliefs (I confine myself to religious hopes these days), and find many religious beliefs very silly, and have admired Chris Hitchens since I first saw him on CNN's "Crossfire" when I was a teenager, I'm really pretty fried.
One reason I'm fried is that the Four Horseman so easily - and I think, unthinkingly - move from an explanation of why many religious beliefs couldn't possibly be true (fair enough), to a discussion about why certain religious beliefs are evil (of course), to a claim that "religion in toto is evil". And that, my friends, is an unbearably crude judgment. Perhaps "religion" is an exaggerator or magnifier of certain human propensities, good and bad; but to assert, or even hint, that "religion is the root of all evil", or that it is equivalent to it, is to my mind, very ignorant.
Chris Hitchens, for example, sub-titles his book "How Religion Poisons Everything". What kind of claim is that? This is the same guy who, in his book, recounts the story of a Sudanese Muslim cabdriver who finds a large amount of money in the back of his cab, forgotten there by Hitchens's wife while a passenger, and who then makes a huge effort to figure out just who the money belonged to, and return it all to their house. Hitchens remarks that the cabdriver refused to take 10% of the money, on grounds that he was only doing his Islamic duty. Is it really MORE likely that the cabdriver would have done this good deed, if he was not religious at all? I'm not suggesting that agnostics or atheists would have taken it; at least I certainly don't think I would, and I haven't a clue who's running the universe or whether I'll ever have to account for my actions on earth. But it cannot be imagined that what the cabdriver understood about right and wrong, as derived from his religion, did not influence his actions. How then can "religion poison EVERYTHING"? What nonsense.
There are many people on this planet who, for whatever reason, find themselves lonely, incapable of self-discipline, depressed, etc., whose lives are transformed for the better, by any measure, by their conversion to a particular religion. How many drunks have to "feel the Holy Spirit" at the evangelical tent meeting, and never touch another drop, etc., before one of the horseman can admit that while religion is capable of exacerbating our worst tendencies, under certain circumstances for certain people, it is also capable of exacerbating their best tendencies? Apparently, there is no adequate number. Neither the abolitionist movement, nor the Civil Rights movement, both inspired by certain religious understandings and motivations, nor angelic Muslim cabdrivers, nor religious beliefs which aid thousands of drug addicts in maintaining their sobriety, add perspective in some minds to religion's role in Martin Luther's anti-semitism, or its cover for Joseph Smith's serial sexual predation, or its lunatic manifestations in radical Islam. There is good, there is bad, there is white, there is black, there is grey, there are a multitude of circumstances and variables - and yet, the Four Horseman only see black, only unremitting evil, a scourge which they have a moral duty to destroy - I might say, in a veritable crusade (hmm) - for all time.
And that is not all they see; they see a Utopian vision just about as stupid and naïve as the one seen by early Mormon communists or contemporary "Left Behind" rapturistas: they see a John Lennon-esque world which, were it not for religion, would experience a dramatic decrease in war and suffering. That is, they see a massive, profound (and entirely unprecedented) transformation in human nature itself, through atheism - which, needless to say, is exactly what the theists they disdain see, just through theism.
Yet the Soviet butchers didn't need a religion to become devils incarnate - their humanity was more than adequate to that task. Neither did National Socialist leaders require a religion for their savagery. Neither did oriental despots like Mao or Pol Pot. All of these men were devils incarnate - FAR more wicked than even the Satan of Christian mythology could be, as according to that mythology, he is not permitted to take life directly. And all of them existed not in some far distant past, which might excuse the Four Horseman from not considering their cases, but just in one single contemporary lifetime.
And it is no use for the Horsemen to get around this by asserting that the cults of personality which these savages perpetuated amounted to "religions", for that is to stretch the definition of the word far beyond what they themselves mean when they use it normally. That tactic, in fact, amounts to a confession that it is not "religion" per se which is the cause of all the horror they observe at all. There is, simply, no reason provided by history to "imagine" that an atheist world would be a "kinder, gentler" place, than a theist one, as dangerous or nutty as certain religious beliefs might be at any particular time.
One final thing which I find perplexing in all this. The Horseman are united in their belief that religion has an earthly provenance; that its seat is simply the human mind. So to use the word "religion" where one really means "certain products of the human mind", is to consistently refer to a proximate cause where an ultimate cause is really meant; and one effect of this is to absolve the accusers of having to do the much harder work of exploring the depths of the human psyche itself. It is rather like announcing that one has finally identified "the root of all criminal behaviour: people who behave criminally!". Or maybe better, that the root of human aggression may be found in the weapons used in that aggression. These "one true theories" actually don't tell us anything at all. (No wonder they have zero predictive value).
"Religion" does not "poison everything"; poisonous thoughts and feelings, and the poisonous words and deeds which may emanate from them, poison things; but not even those "poison everything". Fortunately, generosity, honesty, empathy, courage, kindness, joy - everything good - posess an efficacy of their own, and are spread with great measure - by both theists, atheists, and the plain bewildered - around the world as well.
Comments welcome.
Tal