I wasn't going to read Sam Harris's new book, Letter to a Christian Nation because I thought I wouldn't learn anything and it wouldn't change my mind. I've got a huge stack of books to read. This wouldn't be at the top. But I picked it up idly at the bookstore this afternoon and was hooked from the first paragraph:
Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we mauy want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse. (p. vii)
I promptly walked over to the cashier and plunked down $16.95 plus tax.
Now I have a different problem, expressed concisely by a blurb on the back by someone I know, Marc Hauser, a Harvard primatologist who has written a new book of his own, Moral Minds. Here is what Hauser says about the book:
Reading Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation was like sitting ringside, cheering the champion, yelling 'Yes!' at every jab. For those of us who feel depressed by this country's ever increasing unification of church and state, this little books is a welcome hit of adrenaline.
Yes to all of this. I want to quote virtually every sentence I've read so far in this slim volume (it's less than 100 pages, but wow, does it pack a punch!), a no holds barred assault on the Religious Right. Irrelevant to you, since your religious views are moderate or liberal and tolerant? Harris addresses you indirectly while talking directly to the Religious Right:
There are Christians who consider other faiths to be equally valid paths to salvation. There are Christians who have no fear of hell and who do not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus. . . . From their point of view, you and I have both misunderstood what it means to be a person of faith. There is, we are assured, a vast and beautiful terrain between atheism and religious fundamentalism that generations of thoughtful Christians have quietly explored. According to liberals and moderates, faith is about mystery, and meaning, and community, and love. People make religion out of the full fabric of their lives, not out of mere beliefs.
[snip]
. . . we need only observe that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates geneally admit. Either the Bible isjust an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn't. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ an ordiary man, the basic doctrine of Christianity is false. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ an ordianry man, the history of Christian theology is the stofy of bookish men parsing a collective delusion. If the basic tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in store for nonbelievers like myself. You understand this. At least half of the American population understand this. So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, an the other side is really going to lose.
[snip]
The truth is, you know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims. Isn't it obvious that Muslims are fooling themselves? Isn't it obvious that anyone who thinks that the Koran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe has not read the book critically? Isn't it obvious that the doctrine of Islam represents a near-perfect barrier to honest inquiry? Yes, these things are obvious. Understand that the way you view Islam is precisely the way devout Muslims view Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions.
Addressing the moderates, he says:
. . . liberal and moderate Christians will not always reconize themselves in the "Christian" I address. They should, however, recognize one hundred and fifty million of their neighbors [based on survey results Harris cites]. I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian Right to be as troubling a I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths. Although liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they rarely question the legitimacy of raising a child t believe that she is a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. Even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. [Here, however,] I engage Christianity at its most divisive, injurious, and tretograde. In this, liberals, moderates, and nonbelievers can recognize a common cause.
Those aren't even the best parts. The best parts are too long to quote (but wonderful to read). Oh, shit. I can't stop myself. One more excerpt:
According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. Thirty-one percent believe that evolution has been "guided by God." If our worldview were put to a vote, notions of "intelligent design" would defeat the science of biology by nearly three t one. . . But the current controversy over "intelligent design" shoud not blind us to the true scope of our religious bewilderment at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of ife and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect our presidents and congressmen -- and many who themselves get elected -- believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the earth, and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a agarden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.
Among developed nations, America stands alone in these convictions. Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, belicose, dim-witted giant. Any one who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one's friends.
That's just for starters. This is a powerful book and it's selling well to the younger crowd.
Maybe there's hope, yet.
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Maybe there's hope, yet.
Not, IMHO, for this country. We left that behind last week. Striking down habeas corpus is going to come back to haunt many of those who voted for it on 09/28/2006, including not a few Republicans. Because the only thing a desperate Bush administration will have left to turn to will be Terror, when their own party begins to break ranks and their sand castle starts to crumble for real.
Now, they have the enabling law in hand with which to impose that Terror.
It was 1933.
Now it's 1934.
Next stop: Night of the Long Knives. Senators McCain and Leiberman would do well to watch their backs. Not that it will do them any good.
But about that book.
One bit of logic you quoted hit me, but not quite the way it hit you.
Everything follows for me but the part I italicized.
I have thought for some time now that all the world's religions were the work of man and not divinity.
That does not neccessarily make them delusion, except in the very narrowest sense of the word.
I will broaden my scope by going back a week and a half to the second day of my Digital Forensics class. The instructor, who has been and done in this field for more than a decade and a half, and thus speaks from experience not theory, was talking about professional ethics as it applies to people in the field of information forensics.
And it struck me, not for the first time when contemplating ethics, how almost every statement he made could have been just as easily made, with utter sincerity, by a perfectly amoral Machiavellian who made a point of thinking ahead.
You don't need to invoke the Old Man Upstairs to argue that the moral action is the right one. All you need is your brains, and history, i.e., the collected mistakes of the millenia gathered for our edification, and some time to reflect upon consequences.
I think that when earlier societies did this, the people who mulled these questions through most often decided to write up their conclusions, ascribing them to the highest authority possible in order to assure that they were read and understood.
So I would hesitate before I called them deluded.
Now our own True Believers are another matter .....
Well, in another decade or five, the children of the survivors of the Terror will have learned better.
The only way that happens to fools.
I find it hard to take Sam Harris that seriously anymore.
In the last chapter of The End of Faith, Harris nearly ruined an otherwise fine book by showing himself to be susceptible to woo, as long as it's not monotheistic Christian, Muslim, or Jewish woo, a tendency he has continued to show in a few interviews that I've heard with him. (For instance, he cites dubious sources as "credible" evidence for parapsychology and reincarnation.
I hate theocratic fascism as much as the next guy, but Manichean nonsense about "either we're wrong or they're wrong" is just silly. "Bookish men parsing a collective delusion" defines the human experience of both religious believers and scientists.
Consciousness is illusion. That applies to belief systems based on scientific models just as much as it does to systems based on mythological morality tales. "But science describes reality!" I hear you bleat. Well, I don't understand tensor fields any better than I understand the Book of Revelation. I have to take the priests' word for it in both cases.
One should not be too confindent in any constructed system of knowledge. (One should not believe what one reads in the comment section of websites, either.) "People of the Book" (whichever book) tend to lose their sense of humor as they invest the artificial security of artificial certainty. Drop the book, take a breath!
Orac: That's interesting. Didn't read the first book as it got some reviews along the lines you suggest, but I have to say what I've read of this one is extremely powerful. However, scientists are pretty sloppy when it comes to pseudoscience and the demarcation between science and pseudoscience. The demarcaton problem is a lot harder than most scientists are willing to grant (although philosophers of science have grappled with it for a long time and haven't solved it). Most practicing scientists don't distinguish between really bad or wrong science and things that are non-science. I've been meaning to pick a fight (on a friendly basis) with my SBlings about this for a while but haven't had the time.
David B.: You may be saying something sensible but it is too oracular for me. Scientists have their own spontaneous belief systems, one of which is that there is a real world out there, it exists independently of us, and that science is a valid way of knowing it in a certain way (which you can call reality, if you wish). Are there other ways of "knowing" (like art, music, religion, etc.)? Depends what you mean by "knowing." The usual way of knowing I'm using is that it is something shareable, public and explanatory and maybe predictive. That's not a sophisticated epistemology, just an expression of what I think a lot of us who are scientists think we are doing.
Thanks revere.
(Off topic, but I heard at least one MA cases of spinach-e-coli probably only went unreported because doctors didn't look at cases that didn't require hospitilization, and despite many phone calls to different places, no one was interested in testing the half-bag of spinach.)
..."the people who mulled these questions through most often decided to write up their conclusions, ascribing them to the highest authority possible in order to assure that they were read and understood"...
Sure would be nice to not live in a world where everyone lied, robbed, murdered, ect; behave, because you want those around you to behave as well.
Ethics can be taught as enlightened self-interest, rather that fighting over whose franchise has the only way of social control...or, only behaving or not based on believe or disbelief in an afterlife.
Humans make their own heavens and hells right on Earth. (Just in shorter time scales and smaller geographic ranges. Specks in the Univverse.)
Orac: Just one more point. Surely you can't be saying you don't take Harris seriously about what he says about religion because you disagree with him about hat he says about some other topic? Does that mean you don't take Newton seriously about physics because he believed in alchemy and creationism? I don't think that's what you mean (or I hope not).
There appears to be a tiresome familarity to all this. Will there ever be week in which the Koran or Islam is depicted as supertitious nonsense and it's adherants foolish bigots? The shortcomings of Islam will generally be admited if pointed out but every week it is Christianity that is the object of attack. Why is that?
Carl, I think that his choice of Islam was unfortunate. The subject really needs to be changed to "any religion sufficiently different from my own". But its much easier for us humans to substitute a concrete example rather than a generic member of a set.
No we needn't attack the more moderate forms of any of these religions, Jesus made statements about humans not being able to fully comprehend god's thought, implying we need to be humble and not force our views on others... Using the good parts of the religion to combat extremism will be far more effective than attacking religion as a whole.
carl,
I think you've missed some things. Go back and read this post again.
Regardless, why does it matter? Islam and Christianity both appear to be superstitious nonsense, and their adherents are often (but not always) foolish bigots.
carl, big tom: I think the choice of Islam was deliberate. Remember whom he is addressing in this quote: Christian Fundamentalists whose view of Islam is exactly as described. He was saying, look, you guys are mirror images of each other. Don't you see that? and the same for the rest of us.
What do people REALLY believe when they say they are one religion or another? Going to a Catholic College studying with nuns from around the world, I found that they understood (by way of their teachers and mentors) that they would go through many bouts of non belief. They had to come to grips with those moments.... even if they extended into lifetimes. I found that very curious. Also, many of the nuns I met were children of families too large to consider them important, and so their devotion to their religion gave them another family and a hope that something cared.
There is a peculiar documentary on children taught, in boot-camp methods (used to break down the 'self' ) about being a Christian soldier and such. Take it from someone who went to one of those places long ago - sometimes you do the drama so you won't be punished. I don't think of myself as anything special in this regard because in tight knit communities where one religion is dominant, fear of not 'believing' is very real. And it is especially frightening as a child in such a community. There is extreme pressure from the other children to 'believe' and to go through the motions. As a child in those camps, Christian bullies are real. And as an adult, if you move into one of those small Christian communities, if you don't find and GO to a church, you are scrutinized. I wonder how many go through the 'I believe' and do so out of fear and not out of true belief. If you went to a congregation in one of those communities where your neighbor wants to know who and what you are (large cities offer anonymity and safety in diversity) ask and see how many raise their hands, "does everyone really believe this stuff or are you doing this to please someone else (or protect yourself)?" It's hard to tell who is who.
There appears to be a tiresome familarity to all this. Will there ever be week in which the Koran or Islam is depicted as supertitious nonsense and it's adherants foolish bigots? The shortcomings of Islam will generally be admited if pointed out but every week it is Christianity that is the object of attack. Why is that?
Carl, there are many of us who consider all three of the Abrahamic religions to be built around the same core ideas: a jealous, violent, patriarchal deity; a hatred and distrust and exclusion of those outside of the Faith; and a dangerous fetishization of death.
I have copies of Fallaci and of books such as The Politically Incorrect Guide To Islam prominently featured in my own reading. By no means am I any defender of Islamic theocracy, or theocracy of any sort, or even of heavy religious involvement with politics which comes short of the mark of actual theocracy. I don't consider fundamentalist Islam (or fundamentalist Judaism*) to be any more compatible with modern civil society than is fundamentalist Christianity.
Christianity receives more criticism on my hook than do the other two, simply because I am a resident of a majority-Christian nation, and subject daily to the superstitions and foibles and prejudices of my fellow citizens who are Christians.
As for those who will say, "You should thank goodness you live in a Christian country where you are permitted the luxury of criticism, since if you were in an Islamic country you would be prosecuted for it," well, I agree with the last half of that sentiment.
It is undeniably true that in virtually all Islamic countries, inquiry and criticism are equated to blasphemy, and feel the full terrifying weight of state power. It's also undeniably true that if my fellow Americans had their way, unconstrained by the Constitution, certain parts of which they have never been fond, exactly the same situation would obtain here in the USA.
I have faithfully read the US public opinion polls over the years where ordinary American folk in the street are asked whether the government should have the power to prohibit "dangerous," "unpatriotic," or "blasphemous" speech. The percentage of respondents who endorse such prior restraint rarely goes below two-thirds of those polled. Were the individual amendments of the Bill of Rights to be subjected to a popular referendum, the First Amendment would swiftly cease to furrow our brows with care.
(* Note: as for whether I am worried about being accused of anti-Semitism for including Judaism on this list, well, in a different line, I have occasionally criticized the policies of the government of the state of Israel, using exactly the same metrics by which I criticize the policies of every other government in the world, including that of my own country. To judge by some of the responses I have received, this means that I am "objectively anti-Semitic". Can't argue with that caliber of reasoning, so I may as well wear the badge.)
--
Hi - I do appreciate those of you who took the time to respond. One wonders if there is an end (in both senses of the word) to the human condition.
Well, well, Revere has finally awakened to Sam. Nothin' like holding his words in your own hot little hands to get the drift, eh? I've been pitchin' Sam here (most recently) for some time and figured you might be like the other atheists who object to Sam because he's a bit of a mystic (He "meditates," for Christ's sake! OK, maybe not for Christ.) and has a touch of Buddhist taint. He doesn't endorse Buddhism as a religion - thinks it as "flagrantly irrational" with regard to the Dali Lama, for instance, as Christianity is with regard to Jesus.
I've been expecting to see someone fatwa his ass but maybe they're waiting to see if an X'tian fundy will burn him first. More Sam on TruthDig - you may like the The Atheist Manifesto.
Yes, it does seem that religion is a delusion and that western civilization has devoted an extraordinary amount of time, intellect, and passion as well as coercion to maintain one or another of their religions. One might argue that they are a meme that evolved and persisted because of some advantage they gave to the societies that maintain them.
But there are other potentially more serious delusions out there. We live on a planet that is a sphere. As such it has a limited surface area, a limited volume and therefore a limited amount of "stuff" in it. It receives a somewhat constant (for now) amount of sunlight. Some of the stuff and some of the sunlight combine to make food. There is a limit to the possible products of photosynthesis. It has been calculated that humans - 1 specicies - use 40% of the possible product of photosynthesis. Some of the sun's energy was trapped long term in the past in oil, coal and natural gas, and shorter term in trees, top soil, whales and other long lived mammals. As humans got good at exploiting these sources of ancient sunlight we expanded (in numbers and consumption) well beyond the sustainability of current sunlights ability to provide energy. Look at charts of oil use and charts of population growth and they zoom up in sync. Oil and natural gas have high ERoEI - energy returned for Energy Input. Thus we could pump water from deep resevoirs at will, power ships to fish out the great fisheries, wipe out forests, pull even more coal out of the ground, mine phospates in large quantities for fertilizers, create oodles of nitrogen fertilizers.
When the easy oil, gas and coal are gone, the number of humans on the planet now WILL NOT BE SUSTAINABLE. In otherwords - lots and lots of humans will die untimely deaths - starvation, wars for remaining resources etc. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS COUNTRY OR THE WORLD, THIS WILL OCCUR. No alternative energy source will ever replace what the ancient sunlight has yeilded. Sort of like getting a big inheritance - while you are spending it it looks limitless, but once it is gone you have to live on your salary again.
We can argue the timing of this for sure, but to say it ain't so is a huge delusion that most of the world is operating under.
Interestingly (since I am no longer a Christian) the best plan for a soft fall I have read is by a Christian Ecconomist, Herman Daly, with his proposal for steady state economics which includes limiting population. http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Economics/steady-state_economy.html
Curing disease if not coupled with population control, ending hunger if not coupled with population control are dead end strategies for the daily increase in the world's population of 200,000 humans. That is 1.4 million a week, over 70 million a year. To refuse to talk about this, to refuse to see that it has to end is a Delusion of grand proportions. To refuse to deal with it means that it will be dealt with by disease, war and starvation.
So much for my Sunday afternoon sermonette.
carl: "One wonders if there is an end (in both senses of the word) to the human condition."
Yes, but only in one sense.
You are a hoot!!! As Ed Abbey said, "I'm not an atheist, I'm an Earthyist."
K,
Don't worry: Steorn will save us! (http://www.steorn.com)
Just in case it is not apparent, I think Steorn is full of shit.
But I've been working on my own perpetual motion device, and if you'd like to contribute to my R&D fund, you can not only help save the world, but I'll send you a free t-shirt for donations over $10,000.
I don't want saving eternally - what a bore endless bliss must be. I don't want saving temporally - there comes a time when all humans bodies degrade enough that the inevitability of death becomes a blessing not a curse. I sure would like to see some serious population control - the unborn don't have a say but if they did I am not sure they would opt for this world at least right now. This is one I give China high marks for - oppressive and heavy handed for sure how they handle population but saves a bit of space and food for those who do get born.
I am Catholic, educated at Catholic institutions and the child of intelligent but barely educated individuals. My dad is eighty-five and although he calls himself Catholic, I am sure he believes in nothing and has not been to church, except for weddings or funerals in his adult life. My own children attended Catholic education classes but I also presented various faiths and non-faiths to them. They are in high school now and have a great distaste for religion because all are based on exclusion. I still think that there is a place between the black and the white-that gray where it is difficult to see, where God exists.
K,
Objectively speaking, a major pandemic that kills a large portion of the human population would be beneficial to the population problem you state.
I certainly can't hope for one, and instead will place my hopes that there can be some other kind of solution to make for high quality of life for a future of 10B+ humans. What that solution is, I haven't the faintest clue. But that doesn't mean there won't be one.
DeLuca,
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by black, white, and gray, but I can offer something that may be helpful in light of what I think you could mean.
Atheism is not necessarily about proclaiming god does not exist. It's unfortunate that there are not more descriptive terms in common use for non-theism. Atheism, broadly, is equivalent to non-theism. It means not believing in god. That's all. But so much more is needed.
So-called strong atheists do make assertions that god does not exist. But they are only a fraction of non-theists. Their position is quite different from the position of a weak atheist.
I am a weak atheist, meaning I make no assertions about the existence or non-existence of god(s). More specifically I am an agnostic atheist. I simply do not believe in god (the atheism part); and I do not consider there to be enough information to know if god does or does not exist (the agnostic part, more specifically weak agnosticism; strong agnosticism is the position that existence of god(s) is unknowable).
There are more descriptive terms, too, but they're not necessary for my remark.
Edmund: I'm with you, there. Christopher Hitchens describes himself as an anti-theist, not an atheist. For me, God is not part of my mental furniture, has no presence in my life and is of no interest to me . . . except that theists won't get out of my face and create a great deal of mischief in this world. So I talk about them here.
This book, Letter to a Christian Nation, is not quoting the Gallup Poll correctly. The majority of people believed "God created man in present form", NOT that the "entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago".
I find it so sad that people can believe in Gallup polls of 1000 people to base their beliefs on---but not the Bible. They won't even attempt to READ the Bible---especially the New Testament---because it may challenge their beliefs about Christians, about love, about forgiveness, and about their own importance.
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/12…
From Letter to a Christian Nation: (sigh)
"The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of ife and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue."
Revere, please quietly ask yourself if this statement is really true:
"For me, God is not part of my mental furniture, has no presence in my life and is of no interest to me . . . except that theists won't get out of my face and create a great deal of mischief in this world."
The reason theists won't get out of your face is because you, Revere, have focused your attention on them.
So in fact, God is on your mind a lot. Your weekly rage and energy vented against religion has an internal source that engages you in religious battles at every opportunity.
Whenever an issue, person, or belief pushes our buttons to engage in constant negative emotional action we must ask ourselves, "Why?". What need is being met internally?
Is it a need that can be met in a better, more positive way?
What's interesting is that Western Europe went from being mostly-religious to almost-completely-secular in a ridiculously short period of time. There are still people living who can remember when almost everybody went to church once a week. When did this happen? Sometime between 1930 and 1960, so far as I can tell.
Can the same thing happen in the USA? Has it, in fact, happened in large parts of the USA (ie the major coastal urban centers)? And how do we make sure a) it doesn't reverse itself and preferably b) it actually extends itself to the rest of the developed and developing world.
I thought this post would have some interesting and *new* accusations for progressive religionists to meditate on.
Nope--just: "It is my hope, however, that they [said moderates] will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths. "
The premise here is that religion is the root of extremism--exactly the notion that moderate/progressive religionists reject.
It isn't the religion! It is inequality of wealth, health, power, etc... Want to end islamofascism? Get out of Iraq, take the guns away from Isreal, educate women, and quit buying so damn much oil.
traumatized: As I noted, the problem I had was I wanted to include everything in this slim volume and I couldn't, so if you want to see if there is something useful for more moderate religious views, you should get the book and see. The library probably has it if you don't want to shell out for it.
I don't subscribe to the premise that religion is the root of extremism, but it is certainly one of the main enablers of it. I don't know what Harris's views are on that subject, nor do I care much. I think his arguments are independent of what you think causes extremism "in the last analysis." But we wouldn't say we won't oppose the Klan because poverty is the cause of racism and I feel the same way about what organized religion has done. Yes, the cultural history of religion has many positive aspects. It has served as motivator for some great art and music and has motivated many people to do good works. Like everything else it is a tradeoff and as I look at history and current events it is hard for me to accept that we can afford the overwhelming negative aspects of a kind of tribalism one of whose main effects -- like every kind of tribalism -- is to separate people from each other rather than bring them together.
For the vast majority of believers, their flavor of belief is purely an accident of birth, like nationality or even race. That someone should think themselves superior because of the flag that flies over their capital or the contingent belief of their parents strikes me as a folly we can no longer afford in a tightly interdependent world. We depend on each other and don't need any doctrine that interferes with that.
Edmund, noting that bad things can happen that have good results is not the same as wishing them to happen. We dislike death, yet death is what moves evolution forward and has created all the diverstity we applaud. Telling a family they can have only one child and enforcing it seems a horrible infringement of individual rights, but creating more humans than the planet can support condemns a number of them to starvation.
The Plague of the 1300's was horrible, yet it is now considered a major force in breaking up the serf system (less workers, more bargaining power).
Good/evil get hard to separate when you step back from relgious views and just look at results.
At any rate regardless of our big brains, nature is bigger than us and will restore some balance if we don't do it. Thus as I said I would support Daly's call for population control along with a halt to growth and a reduction of consumption.
As a datapoint, I grew up in a series of three small Midwestern towns, and never noticed any serious religious pressures. During the time we lived in the smallest of these towns, I recall going to church as a family only rarely, and that not in town. I never recall hearing a word about this in school, nor do I remember my mom (who was a schoolteacher) being hassled about this. (By contrast, the very rare black kids in that school had truly hellish lives. So it's not like this was some center of tolerant diversity or something.)
I'm not sure how much this is data rather than anecdote, but the picture of getting bullied into proclaiming a religion in small town America doesn't personally ring true.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Rev.
Excellent counterexample:
"But we wouldn't say we won't oppose the Klan because poverty is the cause of racism and I feel the same way about what organized religion has done."
And how do you get rid of the Klan? Assaulting racist ideology may be apropriate but ultimately fruitless. To get rid of the Klan you must address its root cause: poverty and inequality. Hateful idealogies won't persist in an environment of relative equality of wealth and health.
I disagree with your characterization of "tribalism" as something that must separate rather than unite. Unity within your tribe can be crucial for your own identity.
Here are a few other examples of "tribes":
Redsox fans
Liberals
Unions
LGBT Alliance
Mac users
Earl E:
You are not quoting the poll correctly. In September 2005, 53% of respondents chose "God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it" as being most representative of their views.
It is extrapolation to state that this same group believes the entire cosmos was created 6000 years ago, but probably a very reasonable one. It is likely that someone who believes that the human part of the Bible creation story is inerrant will also believe the remainder of the story to be inerrant.
I don't believe in god. I don't feel compelled in any way to believe. But it's interesting to me on multiple fronts to speculate about so-called higher intelligences. I wonder if we will ever build an ultra-powerful quantum computer that would be indistinguishable from omniscience to us. Would we be able to distinguish an ultra-advanced alien civilization from our idea of god? What's the threshold?
I wonder if the reinforcing mechanisms in our brains, that seem to make religion so appealing to so many, might have an evolutionary origin in our social past. Religion was probably quite beneficial to hunter-gatherer societies, and may have even helped shape our cognitive abilities. Robin Dunbar has written some interesting things along this line of thought.
I like to speculate. I just like to draw the line between speculation and evidence-based reality.
yes, edmund. you and revere like to extrapolate:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extrapolating
Main Entry: ex?trap?o?late
1 : to infer (values of a variable in an unobserved interval) from values within an already observed interval
2 a : to project, extend, or expand (known data or experience) into an area not known or experienced so as to arrive at a usually conjectural knowledge of the UNKNOWN area.
edmund: "It is extrapolation to state that this same group believes the entire cosmos was created 6000 years ago, but probably a very reasonable one."
The Bible does not say the entire cosmos was created 6000 years ago.
Many people are aware of the scientific carbon dating of the exact age of other species.
No one is forcing anyone, Christian or not, to believe word for word in a literal acceptance of the Bible. No one is forcing anyone to believe in God.
Let it be.
Let's skip the Spanish un-Inquisition of heresy or die!
traumatized: I've discussed some of this in other posts. Most of your examples are mild forms of group identification that are harmless (except for Red Sox fans; that, of course is a serious delusion of which no good can come). The major tribalisms like race, flag, religion, some kinds of political ideology are the big ones we are concerned with. But I would also say that if you only associated with other Mac users (I'm writing this on a Mac as we speak, BTW) then it wouldn't be so harmless and the same for other examples. If you killed someone because they were a Yankees fan, for example, then it's a different kind of enthusiasm, and it is just those kinds of tribal excesses we need to combat.
Earl: We all make inferences to survive. The inference that someone who says that it happened the way the Bible says it did either means it or they don't. If they mean it, then the world is 6000 years old. Using scripture any number of very bright people, some of them geniuses like Newton, have thoroughly established a chronology, which is why the Fundamentalists go nutso over evolution (among other reasons). So maybe you think that's a wild speculation, but it doesn't seem so to us. You are also extrapolating when you say the people who say they believe the Bible don't really believe that.
I'll "let it be" when the believers in this country "let it be." So far they haven't done that. Instead of "letting it be" I would think the proper response is to scream bloody hell at people who try to legislate religion, not yell at the people complaining about the excesses.
Albatross:
I am a midwesterner as well, and have the same childhood memories-- sporadic, nominal church attendance, no real pressure one way or the other. As an adult living in the same community, I think it has changed-- the mainstream "liberal" denominations are fading away while new fundamentalist churches-- open bible, vinyard, etc have come to town and set up in empty buildings with charismatic, evangelical not-necessarily-educated "pastors" and have grown exponentially. I'll be honest --I took the darwin fish off my truck because I didn't want fundy parents to pull their kids off my team.
Earl,
Did you read the poll results you linked to? Did you see the '*' next to Sept. 2005 results? Did you follow the '*' to see the italicized text below the results table?
Read it.
In September 2005, 53% of respondents chose "God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it" as being most representative of their views.
You either missed this point, or you are dodging it.
"No one is forcing anyone, Christian or not, to believe word for word in a literal acceptance of the Bible."
I don't know what forcing has to do with anything. That's not part of our discussion about this poll. But you imply that a literal acceptance of the Bible has nothing to do with the points we're discussing, and that's not true. Remember that word 'exactly'?
Please respect others' religious beliefs for one week--all I am asking for is just one week---in memory of the Amish children murdered in their schoolhouse today.
Do not encourage or feed hatred for one week.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Amish_School_Shooting.htm…
Earl: The notion that we EVER encourage or feed hatred here is offensive. Criticizing those, whether politicians, religious leaders or just plain folks who DO encourage and feed fear and hatred is what we do. If that is your idea of encouraging fear and hatred then we are far apart. As far as we know at this point, this was not a hate crime. It was the work of a psychotic. It has nothing to do with religion, unless you know something we don't.
David,
Breath of fresh air! There is a distubing similarity between doctrines founded on "truth"--whether they invest in a jealous diety or a seductive explanation. Apes or those created in the image of god, should be clever enought to be humble.
K,
You hit the nail right on the head - our planets resources are finite and humans are exploiting those resources faster than nature can cope with. Fortunately, nature makes the rules, and following its own rules will attempt to bring things back into balance. Whether or not nature can do this while simultaneously keeping our biosphere intact is to be seen. It will be hell on earth as humans go through the process.
K, I agree with you 100% that population control is needed - this is an issue that should have remained a permanent part of tribal life, whether that tribe represents a small community, a state or an entire nation. Resources are finite. Period. If you keep using and using and using, eventually someone down the road (great-great grandchildren perhaps) is going to have to do without. I recall reading that in some Native American cultures, the consequences of any decision about to be made were considered 20 generations out. Long-term results may not justify short-term benefits. But we're a selfish species: I want plenty of clean water - NOW - and who cares if clean water becomes scarce in 40 or 50 years? I won't be around anyway. This kind of thinking must stop. Do I believe it will? Do I have faith in my fellow human beings that they will sacrifice now to leave resources for their children's children? I look around me at the wastefulness and I have no faith. The only belief I can embrace is that Nature will impose her own balance and the pendulum will swing the other way, whether we like it or not. I found a bumper sticker the other day that I just had to paste to the back of my Jeep's bumper: HUMANS ARE NOT THE ONLY SPECIES ON EARTH. THEY JUST ACT LIKE THEY ARE.
Datapoint - belief in a creationist universe 6000 years old was something that belonged only to some obscure sects of Christianity when I was growing up in the 1960's. Then, this idea was derided from the pulpit of mainstream Christianity whether Catholic or Protestant. THe Age of the World Did Not Matter to God, that was just human conceit,was what I learnt in my Anglican and Presbyterian churches. I grew up a Christian - but not in the USA.
Revere and others: How is it that one should ascribe so much importance to a tome of 100 pages? There have been millions of pages written about Christianity.
One book that has meant a lot to me is "Mere Christianity", by C.S. Lewis. Even though I was raised a Catholic and thought I knew my faith, Lewis' book really enriched my faith. Try it. And if you really want to have fun read "The Screwtaper Letters" by the same author.
Love,
Library Lady