Truth and the Devil

Josh Rosenau is a fellow KU student who writes on ScienceBlogs. It has been interesting to read his arguments against the views of Sam Harris. It interests me most because they both seem to share a similar worldview and have disdain for fundamentalism and dogma, and yet Josh fervently disagrees with what much of Harris has to say. To me, Josh’s arguments are quite well thought out, but yet don’t quite cohere into a valid criticism of Harris. I do not write this as a criticism of Josh, as much as I feel that his criticism of Harris doesn’t take into account some of Harris’s own nuanced views. Ironically, I have some of my own small criticisms of Harris which I wish to share. I’ll use Josh’s post as a jumping off post from time to time.

He begins his most recent post with the following quote by Reinhold Niebur, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” I am reminded of a similar quote by Steven Weinberg, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

While similar, these quotes differ in the amount of significance placed upon religion regarding the ills of the world. I tend to agree more with the latter quote, but perhaps the language we are using is imprecise. True, religion can be a peaceful ritual for good folk who love their neighbors and live in peace, but it can also be the justification for slavery, or the murder of someone outside your own ethnic/religious group. Is religion one more than the other? I believe that depends on what religion means to you. If you view religion as a social tradition that fosters a good sense of right and wrong and a positive environment for children to grow up in, you might find the arguments of Sam Harris a dim caricature of what religion is. However, religion for many others is the firm belief that their their holy book contains a set of rules depicting what is holy and what is sinful. Anyone who violates those rules deserves (often severe) punishment.

I believe those like Sam Harris who use the word religion as the primary target of their animosity might be doing themselves and other freethinkers a disservice. It’s not that their arguments are wrong, it’s just that the words they use might end up turning off the very persons we’re trying to convert. I’m talking specifically of those who associate religion with the first, warm and fuzzy example.

It seems to me that the primary arguments that Sam puts forth are against dogma, superstition and blind faith, something I’m sure Josh can agree with. However, when Sam puts these things together under the rubric of ‘religion’ the message gets lost since it doesn’t seem to include the warm/fuzzy attributes of religion.

Josh quotes from a recent excerpt from a book by Chris Hedges describing his view of why religiosity has been on the rise in this country for quite awhile.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

I wouldn’t think of arguing against the view that economic despair can drive one towards religiosity, but that doesn’t make the religiosity itself any less dangerous, it might in fact be more dangerous. However, we shouldn’t take the simplistic view that economics itself is enough to explain the intensity of one’s religious beliefs.

Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins both proffer a worldview in which religion motivates al Qaeda’s soldiers, and I find that hypothesis less compelling than what I sketched out above. The hypothesis that religion is somehow causative of the cold culture war within the US, or the very hot conflict between cultures on the world stage leaves a lot of hanging threads. If religion – and when I say religion, I mean what Dawkins and Harris refer to in terms of faith in supernatural beings and causation – is causative of such harm, how could many of the greatest forces against such authoritarianism also have religious origins? How could Amnesty International and al Qaeda share a common cause? How could Benito Mussolini and Martin Luther King, Jr. have shared that vital causation?

From what I understand, most of the 9/11 hijackers did not come from impoverished conditions, but indeed had come from relatively well-off families, been to college and held degrees. Osama bin Laden himself is a member of the Saudi royal family, who at the beginning of his militant career had great wealth at his disposal (which he put to good use in supplying the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets). It was his religious beliefs, not his economic situation that spurned his jihadist world-view.

As far as people like Martin Luther King, Jr. are concerned, it is the adaptation of religion to secular reforms that tends to bring about moderation within religion. Questioning religious dogma, not following it allows reforms to be made. Dr. King studied Ghandi as a major influence regarding his non-violent civil disobedience. Finding verses promoting the equality of the races in the Bible is quite a challenge, and finding any propositions of civil rights is nearly impossible. Important ideas which we cherish so much in this country, promoting the rights of men, equality of women, emancipation, etc., stems much more from enlightenment philosophy (those who rejected traditional religion) than from any holy book.

Josh continues:

It is clear how the Italian public, like the public in Germany and even the United States in the 1930s, could feel great despair. There was a global depression, and Europe was still recovering from a brutal war. In that context, it’s little wonder that people turned to the promises of strong leadership, even though those leaders were rarely (never, if you do not consider Roosevelt to have fit this mold) deserving of such trust.

This is the very reason why I find religion so dangerous. One of the main premises of the ‘great’ Abrahamic religions is that rules and law come from powerful authorities who cannot be questioned, and if you dare dissent, you will be punished for heresy, treason, etc. Religion keeps these ancient ideas, which are largely antithetical to modern ideas of human freedom, at the forefront of peoples minds when they should be ripe for ridicule and disdain.

The language Sam Harris uses might seem overly broad and overly critical to some, but viewed in the way in which Sam seems to use it, it is very clear to me that what he is arguing against is dogma, superstition and blind faith, not charity, community and morality. As such, political movements such as Communism and Fascism do easily fall prey to these same arguments, but I do not believe this provides grounds to dismiss these arguments, to me it shows their powerful reach into closely related realms human activity, of which religion seems the most perverse.

I say most perverse because I do not believe political ideologies press themselves into everyday affairs, nor have the same absolutist fervent hold over people that religion does. Religion not only deals with how we behave in public or how we spend our money, but pervades deep within our consciousness. It causes deep-seated guilt in many millions of people for simply contemplating ideas. And, at least within our own contemporary society politics are much more open to debate than religion is. Which to me is why arguments against these religious ideas I’ve been discussing are of such great importance.

More from Josh:

Religious moderates do not, as Sam Harris claims, “tacitly support the religious divisions in our world.” Nor do they “refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who [’fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy’].” Indeed, they do the opposite. Their moderation is a rejection of such actions and ideas. If moderate Episcopalians – pro-science, gay marrying female bishops and all – are enabling al Qaeda simply by virtue of endorsing religion, why not claim that America was enabling Nazism by endorsing government over anarchy?

This seems a mischaracterization of Harris. His argument, which is spelled out fairly explicitly in The End of Faith, isn’t that moderate religion promotes ideas of flying planes into buildings or apocalyptic prophecy, it’s that they’ve built up around themselves this idea that religions of any kind are completely sacrosanct, and should be isolated from inquiry. That questioning someone’s religious ideas is tantamount to bigotry. This mindset prevents the kind of probing critical inquiry into other religious views which might be more pervasive and dangerous. They do indeed reject the more silly and hateful notions of some extremist religions, but they’re doing so more in line with secular moral thought, not because of their religious texts.

It may be the case that churchgoers are more susceptible to authoritarian politicians than non-churchgoers. I’m sure someone has attempted the study. I do know that fascism has tended to wrap itself in religion. But correlation does not imply causation, and I would argue that this is a case of common causation. Religion and authoritarian politics may well attract a common subset of the population, making religious venues an excellent place for authoritarians to recruit.

Both offer certainty and absolve their followers of responsibility for the ills that befall them. In times of despair, such certainty must become even more appealing, driving people simultaneously to the religious and the political authoritarian. The persistent mingling of authoritarian politics with authoritarian religions makes that combination dangerous and difficult to root out. But focusing on religion when we all agree that the political battles are where the problems manifest seems entirely pointless, to me.

I suppose my argument is that though these problems manifest themselves in political battles, their root appears to lie within religion. Isn’t Josh’s view what we’ve already been doing? Instead of bothering to question the religious motivations of those promoting creationism or intelligent design, we’ve just been dealing with it in courtroom political battles. I think religion is why this won’t go away, not politics. Politics is simply the means to enact your pre-existing beliefs into society/government. In order to have an educated political conversation, we need to be able to talk about and question beliefs, and this is what I’ve always seen as the thrust of Harris’s argument.