Interfaith Dialogue, 2: You're Doin' It Wrong, Cont.
Irradiated by LabRat
To kick off the second half of this beast, here’s one that can apply equally well to either side if you change some words around, and then for bonus kicks even has an equally double-sided conceptual cousin.
(Religious/atheistic) mass movements and governments have committed horrible atrocities!
Well, yes. And? They were composed of humans, what else did you expect? The irony of this one is that one thing both most religious people and atheists agree on is that human nature includes a pretty major nasty streak. Christianity calls it original sin and I call it Angry Monkey (okay, that’s what I’m calling it THIS week), but aside from disagreement on the origin of the nasty streak, everybody is in agreement that it’s there. What’s yet more ironic is that the structures that atheists tend to loathe most passionately- theocracies- and the structures that the religious loathe most passionately- communist/socialist totalitarian behemoths- have vastly more in common than they do distinguishing them from one another. What should warn us about the purpose and likely outcome isn’t whether an overreaching state believes in God and says you should too or else, or says there is no God and you should agree or else, is that they’re both trying to stamp out individual conscience and will probably have no compunctions whatsoever about anything else done to individuals.
It doesn’t just apply to states; give me just about any bit of historical “excitement” and I can probably find churches of various flavors, as well as various representatives of “reason” (difficult to do with a concept that has changed so much over human history), on heavily the right side and heavily the wrong side of the issue.
The flip side is this: (Religion/reason) is responsible for this moral evolution in society and there would be no morality without it.
Mkay. The problem here is that once you claim your favored ism is an unmitigated force for good rather than claiming the other guys are an unmitigated force for evil, you then have to explain all of its failures. If you’re going to claim, to use an example from a series of arguments I’ve had elsewhere, that Protestant Christianity gifts a civilization with industry, honesty, and clarity in a way that’s impossible without it, you then need to explain every example of a culture that has achieved these things, either before or after its conception, and then explain every society in which it didn’t “take”. Every “yeah but” you use to explain how an example somehow doesn’t count weakens both your argument and your credibility- and here’s the really important and- your religion’s credibility. Remember, we’re arguing about a philosophical and cosmological standard of right and wrong- if you use weak arguments, appear arrogant, or use intellectual double standards, you’re doing so in its name and by its standards.
Not fair? You were the one claiming to have the superior moral standard that elevates all exposed, what were you expecting but to be judged by it?
The above applies just as much to atheists attempting to demonstrating that freeing people from the “shackles” of religious belief makes them smarter, more rational, and more humane. Every time you claim that you become responsible for every dumbshit atheist or “skeptic” in existence that chases conspiracy theories, denies all inconvenient history of religion’s history of scholarship, and worse yet, every cute little bright spark who had a “rational” justification for something morally horrific. HEY EVERYONE, YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE AWESOME? EUGENICS! STERILIZE THAT POOR IDIOT BEFORE HIS KIDS ROB US! This is perhaps best encapsulated by Richard Dawkins, poster boy for vicious, ignorant, attacks on religion, putting forth the blue-ribbon idea that atheists should start referring to themselves as “Brights”. Thanks, Dick, I really fucking wanted that can tied to my tail.
Too long, didn’t read: if you put a book of spiritual text or reasoned philosophical argument before someone, what you get back out of them tells you more about them than it does about the book. The same book
“produced” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Phelps- or rather, provided the structure to one man’s crusade for justice and humanity and another’s overwhelming hatred of his fellow man.
Arguing on the internet, religious-flavored version: You stupid, miserable heathen, what you need is to embrace my faith of peace, tolerance, and honesty.
Your standards. I’m lookin’ at ‘em. You’re violatin’ ‘em in the exact same breath of telling me they produce superior people. Fuck off and see if you can find some honesty, patience, and compassion before you go telling me you’ve got what I need for that. I’m no better? Doesn’t matter, you were just in the process of telling me you were. You’re not perfect, you’re just forgiven? Oh, so that means you’re harassing me for your own selfish self-satisfaction and not out of any desire to be a good person or improve my life. Way to witness. Now die in a fire.
Arguing on the internet, atheist-flavored version: You stupid sheeple need to take off your fucking blinders and wake up to the truth instead of the numbing pap the church feeds you.
Yes, it’s not as though there weren’t hundreds of fucking years, thousands if you count any religion at all instead of just Christianity, in which the educated clergy were, y’know, the overwhelming bulk of humanity’s intellectual effort. Of course it can’t be that they’re STILL major forces in education and literacy if only so people can read the damn texts. Only the entire philosophical foundations of Western civilization, including the philosophies that led to the Enlightenment that let us atheists speak up in the first place, were founded in scholarship by the religious or explicitly intended to understand the world in a religious framework. Just because you met some stupid people who believed in someone apparently called JAYsus does not mean you can therefore discard everything religion ever touched as obviously retarded that you needn’t spend any effort on understanding.
Because smart, scholarly people believed something doesn’t make it right- Newton didn’t validate alchemy- but neither does it mean that because some explicitly anti-intellectual people believe something, there can be nothing there of intellectual worth.
Oh, and also thanks a whole bunch for holding up that “atheists are assholes” stereotype. Especially if you actually come right out and say nobody’s daddy in the sky is making you be nice. YES. THIS WILL PROVE YOUR SIDE IS THE FORCE OF MATURITY AND REASON.
Here’s one from the religious side: See, this is what happens, if people don’t fill the void in their lives with God, they’ll just find something else to worship and fill it that way.
There’s no “void”, okay? I’ll grant you some people seem desperate to fill themselves up with somebody else telling them what to do, but they don’t actually tend to produce healthy practicioners of faith, either, since they’re looking for somebody to give them an excuse to STOP thinking and taking responsibility. Most atheists are rational adults who either discarded something they no longer (if ever) felt to be true and fruitful in their lives, or never felt a need or desire for it in the first place.
The more pernicious variant of this is any statement that contains the assumption faith is something people are deliberately trying to run away from, either because they fear the responsibility or because they actively favor the other side. Look, I understand God and faith may be hugely important one person’s life, but in mine it’s just not relevant. I don’t go around yattering about evolution and arguing for gay rights to defeat the Bible’s teachings, it’s just not even on my radar screen.
Short version: telling someone they’re an atheist because they fear God or favor sin/Satan is like me telling you you don’t believe in Odin because you’re a Loki partisan and secretly crave the day Fenris will eat the moon and begin Ragnarok*.
Atheist inversion: accusing religious people of being religious because they NEED someone to tell them what to do to live rather than taking responsibility, i.e.the “crutch” school of argument. I can mostly invert what I said above to apply, but it also has one more extension: if you go up to someone and kick something you think they’re leaning on out from under them, two results are possible. One, it’s not actually a crutch, and he’s going to beat your skull in with it. Two, it is, and you’re a huge asshole.
I think I’m starting to ramble and rant a bit much, so I’ll close out on one thing that annoys me intensely coming from either side: sex obsession.
Religious people are not miserable, stunted, dour people who’d throw off their shackles and revel in perversion if they ever but gave themselves permission. Atheists are not screaming perverts who run from God because it means they’d have to give up fucking everything that moves and twice on Tuesday for good measure. NOT EVERYBODY ORGANIZES THEIR ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLDVIEW OVER WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING OR NOT DOING WITH THEIR GENITALS. STOP IT!
*Stingray, in fact, favors this.
May 25th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Bastid wolf damwell better NOT eat the moon. Do I have to go out in the back yard and beat on a pan lid with a wooden spoon every darn eclipse to convince it? So. Unfair.
May 25th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
NOT EVERYBODY ORGANIZES THEIR ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLDVIEW OVER WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING OR NOT DOING WITH THEIR GENITALS. STOP IT!
Five minutes on Fark.com may change your mind on that one.
Otherwise, I’m glad I didn’t transgress any of these in my last comment on your previous post. There was a time…
May 25th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Bravo! I really, honestly appreciate your point of view on this. I’ve been discussing with some like-minded friends (full disclosure, I am Christian) the odd situation with evangelical atheists (Richard Dawkins). Your last two posts have really given a window into the other side and I personally appreciate it.
Don’t worry, I won’t make an effort to convert you. I believe it’s a personal thing. Sure, it would be dishonest of me to say I don’t care, but really, it has nothing to do with me.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
NOT EVERYBODY ORGANIZES THEIR ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLDVIEW OVER WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING OR NOT DOING WITH THEIR GENITALS. STOP IT!
Oh, damn! And just when I’d managed to change the definition of celibacy to “Sell a bit here, sell a bit there” . . .
May 25th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
I gotta reiterate from the last post … isn’t it a little too awfully convenient to tie together cosmology and morality?
People are naturally fearful of what they don’t understand (“where do we go when we die?”, “why are there eclipses”, “why are there locusts eating our land?” etc…), so of course someone is going to get clever and pronounce “if you do as I say and obey my laws, the crops are going to grow bountiful and you won’t go to Hell.”
Organized religion was originally designed as a tool of control. Hell, they called it the “divine right of kings” for the longest time.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Jake:
The yoking of the two together is an Issue of mine, and if I go way back in the archives under this particular tag, I spent some four posts burning words on it- though I never came to the satisfying conclusion I intended to. Turns out there are no easy answers, huge surprise.
Organized religion was originally designed as a tool of control. Hell, they called it the “divine right of kings” for the longest time.
True, but way before that, Christianity was the religion of radicals and anti-authoritarians who were claiming a different right, and the religion was the liberation of the individual. Organized power structures do tend to ossify toward power and control over time… which speaks volumes about human nature and not necessarily that much about their original ideas.
More in the next post, if I actually manage to make it work. Which I’m terrifyingly unsure of.
May 25th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
I wonder if we’d be having this discussion if the various People of the Book hadn’t appeared; most of the previous major faiths don’t seem (based on my poor memory…) to have spent anywhere near as much time on personal behaviour.
Really, a great chunk of what came before seems to have been a direct evolution of the shaman model: a priest is, much like an IT tech, someone who makes the world work. He might be involved in the power structure to some extent, but, overall, keeping the sun in the sky is more important.
Deciding, for lack of a better word, “morals” policy is a king/council/chieftain sort of thing, and even then, most kings seemed to not really care overmuch.
Of course, you get weird cross-pollination between the civil and godly: Egypt, for one; even there, though, there doesn’t seem to be a sense (except, perhaps, for that whole Aten sun-god thing) of the Religious caring what the Secular got up to; if someone was engaging in Pervocracy-worthy behaviour, who cares? Not to say the priesthood weren’t as corruptible, power-hungry, and ossified as any other power structure ever created by humans, but there was a distinct lack of moral meddling, on a national/faith-wide policy level.
Somehow, though, keeping the sun in the sky wasn’t enough: now we’ve got to start mucking about in what was previously the king’s field of influence (wielding the delegated authority of a deity-approved ruler, but still…) and start making a big deal about things other than the seasons, giving craftsmen someone to bribe in hopes of capable hands, and the rest of the usual pagan deity’s Terms of Reference.
And to top all this off, these new faiths are all creations of, um, financially disadvantaged cultures in water and fertility-challenged areas. Drylanders and desert dwellers with their brains lightly baked, a taste for legalisms, and a need for fairly tight and stringently enforced societal rules, thanks to the crummy nature of their homelands.
And… my brain’s running out of steam.
May 25th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
And… that was way longer than I thought.
Cheers!
May 26th, 2010 at 5:07 am
*slow clap*
May 26th, 2010 at 5:45 am
Labrat, once again you hit it out of the park.
Jake, ack! Labrat beat me to the most salient point there. Both Christianity and Judaism are underground ‘radical’ movements for during points of critical formation.
The phrase ‘divine right of kings’ doesn’t pop up until the 1500’s. In a simplistic sense it was a direct result of the wars of the Reformation, which briefly resulted in about the closest Europe has come to a theocratic system, especially in the former Holy Roman Empire where religion was based on the ruler’s preference at the time of the treaty.
Prior to that kingship in Europe involved a great deal more negotiation, cooperation and compromise with other nobles, church officials and city councils, with the church routinely excommunicating (which had serious legal ramifications) nobles and kings, and kings routinely confiscating church property. I can’t think of a single time when I have run across (admittedly, my study is confined to Scotland from 1100-1450, with England, France and Norway) any document that suggested a king demanded that he be obeyed by divine right, with the exception of one possible chapter of a book written c.1440 (Scotichronicon) where the author was trying to decide if he should or should not justify a recent regicide. That kings ruled by the ‘grace of God’ was taken for granted, but that is a rather different concept in the medieval world. Grace being potentially subject to loss, which would be revealed by the king’s failings, which could then in turn be justly punished by the secular world.
May 26th, 2010 at 6:06 am
I’ll grant you some people seem desperate to fill themselves up with somebody else telling them what to do, but they don’t actually tend to produce healthy practicioners of faith, either, since they’re looking for somebody to give them an excuse to STOP thinking and taking responsibility.
Happens all the time in DS, too. The folks who HAVE A GNAWING HOLE IN THEIR SOULS AND AREN’T COMPLETE UNTIL THEY’RE AT THE FEET OF A DOM tend not to be the most functional types. Healthy, well adjusted people who find _additional_ fulfillment and meaning when they’re in DS relationships are usually the ones you can hang out with without wondering whether they should be getting their medical roleplay on with an actual therapist.
I assume this is the case in most subcultures.
May 26th, 2010 at 7:29 am
Thanks for this sane continuing dialog. As a person formed by a fairly sophisticated Catholic education plus an academic one in evolutionary biology, with a mind naturally skeptical of dogma ( a bit of religious tone deafness there, unfortunately or fortunately) and an abiding interest in Buddhist practice, I take serious thinkers on both (all?) sides seriously. (And as you know I have a son — well- read in evolutionary theory and a big Dawkins fan before RD went off the deep end and became an evangelist rather than a zoologist- who is a long- time convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, which doesn’t seem to have deprived him of science or made him a Puritan).
I suspect a lot of “new atheists” have never KNOWN a sophisticated, scientifically literate religious person. The ones I know without exception not only believe in evolution- they utterly reject “ID”.
Odious of O & P blog and I used to call “Brights” “Smugs”. He later recanted this as unkind but he is more Christian than I am.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:22 am
Shaman as “IT guy” - never thought of it that way. Some mysticism certainly is needed in IT, especially if one has Windows boxes to maintain!
As for the divine right of kings being a recent idea: several Roman emperors named themselves gods, and I believe so did certain Egyptian pharaohs.
And, indeed, being founded in rebellion does not make an institution impervious to overgrowth and corruption. See also: US government.
May 26th, 2010 at 9:11 am
Jake, you are quite right on the Roman Emperors and the Pharaohs. The ‘I am the ruler therefore I am a god’ or vice versa, is a very old concept.
However, the twist given by early modern political theorists (depending on the country circa 1540-1760 is the EM period) is not that the king is a god, but his authority is derived directly from God and is therefore infallible and additionally that treason against the king is, by extension, treason against God. In a sense it is a form of predestination, a concept that was also popping up in the theological theory of the period. It goes along with a greater emphasis on primogeniture, which had been steadily becoming more accepted throughout the medieval period. It is also a direct reaction to a remarkable number of regicides, coup d’etats and other fun incidents. It is a brilliant example of how religion (or any widely accepted moral system/world view) can be used as a highly effective tool.
May 26th, 2010 at 11:16 am
You are all going to burn on X-Day.
Serves you right for not sending your $30 to Bob. Eternal salvation, or triple your money back!
May 26th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Thank you for this very thoughtful and insightful post on religion. By way of full disclosure, I am Christian, however, I would never push my religious beliefs on anyone else. Why? Because whoever I try to dump my beliefs upon probably doesn’t want them. Also, it’s just plain rude. The ‘I don’t know you, get out of my face’ school of thought.
However, in terms of religion and why I believe in Him. Faith and having an escape value. I’ve got so much crap going on in my life right now (yeah, I know, so does everybody else) that if I didn’t have someone to hand it all to and say ‘Here, I can’t do this myself’, I’d be fucking nuts by now. Really, I would.
May 26th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
LR- Great part two! The only problem is reasoned discussion very seldom is part of any words exchanged over isms and ilities… For some unknown reason, people seem to be hard over on their respective causes and NOT willing to have a significant discussion, because they might have to actually concede a point or two.
May 26th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Were up there with you, nodding, right until your “kicking their crutch - you’re asshole” argument.
It’s only true if someone comes over to a cripple (who understand himself to be a cripple) and kicks that crutch. If, on the contrary, a cripple accuses non-cripples of being damaged, deficient, damned and otherwise Satanesque because they don’t need a crutch to walk - than that cripple needs a life lesson.
I have no problem every once in a while give him one good whack.
May 26th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
It’s only true if someone comes over to a cripple (who understand himself to be a cripple) and kicks that crutch. If, on the contrary, a cripple accuses non-cripples of being damaged, deficient, damned and otherwise Satanesque because they don’t need a crutch to walk – than that cripple needs a life lesson.
Fair point. I suppose it depends on who, in the imaginary scenario, you’re imagining to be the initiator of the confrontation. The one I had in my head is that brand of atheist that works pretty much like his asshole religious counterparts and goes out of his way to prove to people minding their own business that their worldview is wrong and stupid.
May 26th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Oh, I am not imagining.
And their worldview IS wrong ! (let’s put aside “stupid” for a moment, since Mr. Bodio whom I deeply respect, reminded us of the existence of religious scientists)
These two views are not equally viable. Either the cripple on crutches think himself and other cripples the norm, or the able-bodied people who are perfectly capable of walking on their own are the norm. These two categories do not have equal claim to normalcy.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Sidelight on the connection between Religious claims about the Unknown and Moral Teaching:
The two have not always been connected, though the tremendous power of religious belief to alter private action made it much easier to use religion as a tool or morality…
Or did quests for better understanding of the source of morality run into the numinous sense of wonder that is essential to religion?
Anyway, the religions that were successful (culturally speaking) either had a moral code at their root, or syncretized their way into being both Connection with Ultimate Reality and Source of Moral Guidance.
I suspect that the cultural history of religious development would be an interesting subject; it may be far from the point of this thread.
Or maybe not…the cultures on both sides of the modern Atheist/Theist debate have long memories. The telling and re-telling of the cultural stories of Us vs. Them is the process which has produced the lack-of-debate described by Labrat.