Tuesday, 29 September 2009

• Why do we criticize religion?

  
  So often we, the vocal and critical atheists, 'waste our time' scrutinizing faith.  Presumably, nobody will change their minds.  Plus, faith makes people happy and gives peoples' lives meaning - why would we want to take that away?  By opening our mouths to express that faith is a bad idea, and an intellectually inferior one to many alternatives, we are often called extremist, intolerant, or a slew of other negative things.
  
  Well, there are several reasons we criticize religion, some of which make vocal skepticism about faith a moral necessity in my eyes. 
  
  Reason #1:  Self defense
  
  

  "Only fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”  They are corrupt, and their actions are evil; not one of them does good!"  ~ Psalm 14:1
  

  
  It is often asserted in public forum that atheists are morally and cognitively deficient.  In this case, we must criticize faith in order to defend ourselves. 
  
  This is hardly the most important reason, but it arises frequently.
  
  Reason #2:  Truth claims cannot be resolved through faith
  
  

  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding."  ~ Proverbs 3:5
  
  

  All over the world, but particularly in the United States, we are balkanized by conflicting moral ideas - gay rights, abortion, etc.  These moral concepts are at the heart of how we should govern.
  
  For instance, both sides of the abortion debate believe that murder is wrong.  The disagreement lies in whether or not a fetus is something that can be murdered.  For largely religious reasons, such as the existence of a soul, the faithful people on the anti-abortion side (I would challenge you to find a single anti-choice agnostic) believe that a fetus is an entity that can possibly be murdered.  Their side of discourse is saturated with religious language and scripture. 
  
  

  "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations." ~ Jeremiah 1:5
  

  
  How is it possible to disagree with the faithful on this subject if we do not present the evidence that souls do not exist?  Moreover, think of all the other subjects for which agreement cannot be reached without first agreeing about the nature of god, along with all the other facts?  Gay rights, abortion, global warming (our discourse on this subject is painted with religious rhetoric), and often whether or not we should go to war and other cases in which we decide who gets to live and who dies.
  
  But what about the people who do not let faith influence their lives?  Shouldn't we just let them go?  Well, no.  Again, there are several reasons for this.
  
  Reason #3:  Beliefs govern actions
  
  

  "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."  ~ Steve Weinber, Nobel Laureate in Physics
  
  

  I need not wax lengthy about the endless instances in both human history and present of faithful people abandoning compassion because they believed it to be god's will.  But shouldn't we only criticize the faith of people who do bad things?  No.
  
  Every couple of months at the most, you can read a story about some parents who prayed their children to death rather than taking them to a doctor.  These were not bad people in the sense that they had malicious feelings toward their offspring.  Like any loving parents, these people want their kids to recover.  The problem is that if their assessment of reality is true, that prayer heals the sick, then prayer is what one morally should do to save them.  Of course, there is no good reason to believe that prayer does heal the sick, which makes praying over a sick child rather than taking them to a doctor evil, even if the intentions are pure.
  
  PZ Myers has said it best:
  
  

  I don't think religion makes people do wicked things, and that's not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that's just nuts, but you just can't rely on them doing what is reasonable.

  
  On a more societal level, if god is commanding you to stop gays from marrying with threats of crumbling the entire nation if you don't, then stopping them from marrying is what you morally should do (although, one can only imagine why religious people elect to do this by legislation and not by laying out the facts that lead, unavoidably, to the same conclusions about god's will).  The people opposing the rights of gays are not bad people (not by way of motivation, anyway); if they are right about what god wants, then they are the good guys.  However, all available evidence indicates that there is no god commanding such things.  Yet how much good does it do us to point out to the anti-gay rights side that homosexuality is harmless and produces happiness for people with no perceivable downside?  God works in mysterious ways, and as long as the belief persists that god has ordered them to oppose it, it makes moral sense from that perspective to do so.
  
  In short, what is morally true depends on what is actually true about the nature of reality.  Because we all must live together here on the Earth, we have a responsibility to have good reasons for what we believe about the nature of reality to allow us to reconcile our moral, and therefore political, differences.  Faith disdains the discussion about what is actually true no matter whose hands it resides in, yet it makes moral demands.  Even the religious people who do not allow faith to coerce them into foolish actions fail in their responsibility to have good reasons for what they believe, and by insisting that faith is laudable, even necessary, they are providing the power base for the throngs of people who demonstrate the courage of their convictions in regard to their beliefs.
  
  After all, the person who says faith prompts them to be charitable is operating under the same system as somebody who says faith prompts them to marry ten year-olds or murder in god's name.  Both are deferring to god's will as the arbiter of their actions.  So often we hear from the people of benign faith that a pious villain's faith is not their faith.  So what?  Maybe god wants us to kill certain people (if you're a Christian, you must admit that he has wanted it before), and if faith can lead us to truth then the harmlessly faithful must be aware of why their faith is more likely to be true than the extremist's faith, since acting in accordance with the will of god is the modus operandi for both of them.  The difference between the two is only what they think god wants.  The problem is that both beliefs, though admittedly differ in how much suffering or happiness they produce, are equally likely to be true.  We cannot assault faith in the case of one and not the other, and why would we anyway?
  
  

  Outro
  
  

  Leave challenges to my reasoning.  I'm sure there are several I have not thought of that will need to be added.  Upon receiving the first objection to this post, I will create an objections section where I deal with them.
  
  Ultimately, faith slows our ability to acquire reliable facts about the universe.  This keeps individual human beings ignorant, and their ignorant beliefs often produce ignorant and dangerous actions.  One a societal level, faith encourages us to believe we have knowledge we don't, and this slows our progress as a species.  This is important because our ability to survive on this slowly-changing planet is dependent upon our ability to understand the nature of the universe.  It is not prayer that reveals the paths of hurricanes, nor does the bible explain how to best tackle the problem of overpopulation.  On top of hamstringing our ability to tackle the problems facing humanity, the effects of dangerous unreason include wars, suicide bombing, and so forth.  For these reasons, opposing faith itself, not just the manifestations of it, seems to be the only moral option.
  

  
  
  

  • 10:25 AM
  • 2179 Views
  • 28 eProps
  • 21 Comments