Are You A Stooge For God?
Sam Harris, in the wake of California Democrat Pete Stark's revelation that he's an atheist, writes in the LA Times of "god's dupes" -- the "moderate" believers who give cover to religious fanatics:
The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.
...The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?
There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.
Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Self-deception is a core component of human psychology. Better find out why it's there before we try to rip it out. Emphasis on try. Paging Dr. Pinker!
Paul Hrissikopoulos at March 16, 2007 9:45 AM
> continue to divide
> our world
I love the divided world! Stay out of my fucking parking space; get your hand out of my pocket; turn off that goddamn cell phone, we're in line here, and your piles are your own beeswax.
> and subvert our
> national discourse.
What are we SUPPOSED to be talking about? I love it when people know exactly what we should be paying attention to.
This is getting a little meta. Where's Hrissikopolous?
> wherever one stands on this continuum,
> one inadvertently shelters those who
> are more fanatical than oneself from
> criticism
This is just not true, and if it is, we're fucked anyway.
> The rest is self-deception,
> set to music
As a child, I attended a church at which the organist was the dean of the largest school of music in the world. Music isn't a trivial consideration for Harris to mock. Remember the Hippie Mother? We can do great things with our minds now that have nothing to do with the natural impulses from which religious belief so naturally sprang. But you ought be true to your school.
Crid at March 16, 2007 10:10 AM
Wow. If you summon him, he appears.
Crid at March 16, 2007 10:10 AM
Maybe it's just that I'm still haunted by Nietzsche's parable of the madman in The Gay Science. What festivals of atonement, what sacred games indeed?
Paul Hrissikopoulos at March 16, 2007 1:39 PM
Crid, by "national discourse" I might guess he means questions like: Why is our national defense force depleted and broke, maintaining an occupation of a country locked in a religious civil war? And do we in the US want to live in a theocracy? And what will happen if those who don't do nothing to stop those who DO want the US to be a theocracy?
beansworth at March 16, 2007 2:07 PM
> our national defense force
> depleted and broke
Are you fucking kidding? Find a globe. Spin it hard. Drop your index finger randomly, and imagine that the nation underneath had attacked the United States directly, or her holdings meaningfully. Now imagine what the capital of that nation (usually depicted with a "star" shape) would look like within 17-53 hours.
I'll never forget how, three days before Kabul and the whole of Afghanistan had been made totally, abjectly, and irrefutably subject to US military whim, PBS (formerly CBS) news fucktard Daniel Shore announced that we'd become enmeshed in a quagmire from which no victory could be pulled. I hate that guy. He keeps getting older; I keep hating him more.
> maintaining an occupation
> of a country
Not just any country; the one with the 1st or 2nd-best pool of oil underfoot, and one with demonstrative power about how civilization might proceed in a young century.
> locked in a religious civil war?
A naive and poorly-rounded President convinced Americans that they ought to treat their vendors as they'd want to be treated, and expect from them what they expect of each other in matters critical and trivial. Even if this Texan was horribly wrong, I'll die admiring him for that faith.
> do we in the US want to
> live in a theocracy?
Mostly not. Is anyone asking us to?
> if those who don't do
> nothing to stop those
Amy's on it. Chill.
There are people who want the US to be a theocracy, others who want it to be whorehouse, and other who think the whole thing would make a sensational miniature golf course, one with a honkin' windmill behind the St. Louis arch, where Busch Stadium sits presently:
http://tinyurl.com/3cpvop
A tricky chip shot, but I'll always believe it could be done!
Are you really worried about theocracy? Where do you live?
Crid at March 16, 2007 4:54 PM
I remember distinctly the morning Richard Nixon died. daniel shore and Scott Simon were yukking it up, and Shore was in high spirits. At one point he meant to say, "...in my journalistic career". Instead he said, "...in my political career". They both stopped and laughed. I wonder if that part was edited in later transcripts.
doombuggy at March 17, 2007 6:43 AM
you suck
meowwiki at April 4, 2007 3:34 PM
Spoken like a religious nutter, unable to think in more than a few quick monosyllables.
Amy Alkon at April 5, 2007 2:00 AM
Leave a comment