This question is inspired by various talks I’ve heard the past few days at the Atheist Alliance of America conference.
We all know that theists are constantly touting the good things that religion does: inspires charity, gives people comfort in time of need, and so on. They have no problem imputing these things to religion. But that brings up a question, one that I’ve probably raised before:
Why are religionists so eager to give religion credit for inspiring people to do good things, but then so loath to blame religion for inspiring people to do bad things?
I’ve long thought that the claims of people like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan—that religion cannot be and is not behind any acts of violence or malfeasance—is pure bunk. One example: Christian faith-healing that kills children, and the tendency of extremist Islamists to kill apostates, infidels, and blasphemers. Such act are inconceivable without religion. But at any rate, what kind of logic gives credit to religion for prompting good acts but denies religion blame for prompting bad ones?
Illogic? ( I don’t mean the hip-hop group)
Subscribe.
“What kind of logic gives credit to religion for prompting good acts but denies religion blame for prompting bad ones?”
It’s the same logic that gives God credit for good things that happen without blaming him for disasters.
The Hitch had a superb response to this.
Not once in his life could anybody name a virtuous act available to him that was denied a religious person. As such, religion doesn’t deserve credit for anything.
Vicious acts are equally available to religious and sane alike, of course…but the religion actually compels the viciousness.
This might superficially be a double standard, but Steven Weinberg has made clear why this isn’t so — that good people will do good and bad people will do bad, but it takes religion to make good people do bad.
Religion claims to be the ultimate source of all that is good, but we can plainly see that it is not; religion isn’t the ultimate source of anything that’s good, as The Hitch made plain.
Religion claims to never be the source of anything that is bad, but it’s also plain that it is; divine writ orders horrific acts of genocide, dictates laws most brutal and retributive, sings the praises of the most depraved. So the religion does, actually, get the blame for such stuff.
The origin of the double standard is the religious claims themselves, and a fair application of that double standard to itself demonstrates that the claims are themselves vicious lies and destructive propaganda.
Cheers,
b&
Urp! Yes, sorry; thinko. Apologies!
b&
While I agree that religion is responsible for much evil, I would argue that religion can also be responsible for virtuous behaviour. It is true that many religious texts promote evils such as but not limited to inequality and murder, but in many cases, those same religious texts promote virtues such as but not limited to kindness towards others and courage to uphold one’s ideals against a corrupt society. Just because non-believers perform virtuous behavior does not mean that a religion does not promote virtuous behavior and therefore cannot be responsible for virtuous behavior among its followers.
Religion inspires people to do both good and bad actions. It is simply a matter of what parts of the religious texts you take from.
To me that argues against religion. Why would you want to follow a system which is morally arbitrary in that way. Humanism is an attempt to do away with dogma and promote wellbeing without bias.
Humanism is a good example for why Hitch’s argument doesn’t work, because you could say exactly the same thing about it as you say about religions (i.e., there is no virtuous act that humanism promotes which cannot be done/promoted by a non-humanist). Hitch’s argument makes a mistake; the influence of an ideology isn’t just about what it uniquely considers good or evil, but also how it supports ‘standard’ good behavior and denies support to ‘standard’ bad behavior. Any ideology that, for example, says theft is wrong may support good behavior. Just because ‘theft is wrong’ is not unique to humanism or Christianity doesn’t mean that those ideologies have no impact on the unacceptability of thievery.
So if you think it makes sense to say that humanism can have a positive effect, I think we have to be willing to say that religion can have a positive effect too. Whether a specific ideology does in fact have a positive effect is a different question, but in principle, they all have the capability to encourage good and discourage bad (as well as the potential for vice versa).
I’m sure all religions do some good and some bad. I’m making the point that these levels of morality are set in stone, so to speak. They can never improve. Humanism, materialism, atheism, democratic socialism, or what ever your favorite secular alternative is, in principle, has the flexibility to remove bad and add good as time goes on.
But they have improved! Read Pinker’s Better Angels…. Per capita rates of violent actions have dropped by something like a factor of 100x over the past several hundred years. He even discusses the reasons why he thinks they have improved. Spoiler: religion is not one of them. 🙂
That is my point. The religions possess no mechanism for improvement. Moral progress comes from secular influences. I think we agree. Pinker’s argument, I think, is correct and comes from the numbers. Here’s an interesting discussion of WWII numbers (this may have been presented here before).
The later part of this presentation discusses to period of relative non-violence we have experienced recently.
I’m not arguing for religion per se; I am simply arguing against Ben’s idea that religion deserves no credit for virtuous behavior but deserves credit for evil behavior.
Jack, you say:
“While I agree that religion is responsible for much evil, I would argue that religion can also be responsible for virtuous behaviour….
Religion inspires people to do both good and bad actions. It is simply a matter of what parts of the religious texts you take from.”
To which I say: What was your point? If following the tenets promulgated in a religious text does not result in a net improvement in behavior why act in accordance with those religious beliefs? If I flip a coin and harm someone if it comes up heads or help them if it comes up tails should I devote my life to a religion based on flipping coins just because doing so sometimes results in a good outcome?
Precisely.
Once again, I am not arguing that one should be religious; I am merely arguing against Ben’s argument that religion is responsible for nothing good but it is responsible for evil.
We know where the good comes from: the Enlightenment. You’ll not find the good in the holy texts — only out-of-context quotemined snippets retroactively reinterpreted in light of the Enlightenment.
But you will find the bad in the holy texts, in lethally toxic concentrations….
b&
That may be correct so just cut out the middle person.
One because it is based on delusion and,
two, because whatever sense can be used to determine the ‘good’ bits, can be used anyway, without the corrupting nonsense.
sub
This is already covered in the theology of tragicles by Edward Current.
Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap!
That should have been this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vhyqx_Duc
PCCE, please delete previous post!
And just like that, my prayer was answered! All praise PCCE!
Reminds me of the joke: Why don’t churches offer free wi-fi?
Because no church wants to compete with an invisible power that actually works!
+1
Ha ha, that’s a good one!
I still see the previous post. Now what? Maybe you need to sacrifice a slice of pie.
The bonehead part of the previous post is missing. You may now die of curiosity.
You’re welcome. Don’t forget to sacrifice a d*g, the burnt flesh of which is pleasing to my nostrils.
So, not steamed, then?
b&
No hurting animals!
You might want to reconsider that post about the d*g lest a religionist gets hold of it and ignores the context.
Ummm…..If this gets back to the FPP, she’ll have her BFF bite you!
(In dire straits, always appeal to a higher deity.)
Same reason people blame Obama for all the problems and give credit to Bush for all the good things… even though, in general, that should be reversed.
Of course, giving a president credit or blame for things like gas prices, DOW values, GDP growth, etc is pretty much illogical anyway.
If religion is by its nature incapable of inspiring harmful acts, then this must mean that it is incapable of affecting human behavior at all. It must be just sitting there impotently in the brain, insulated from the rest of the nervous system.
Or maybe it uniquely compels only good acts. In which case, believers have no moral claim to any virtue at all. And there can be no such thing as overcoming temptation either.
The premise is that if you took an individual and removed his/her religious belief, he/she would not be motivated to do bad things justified by religious dogma, or conversely good, self-sacrificing acts also based on religious dogma.
Unfortunately, a tough experiment to implement. The only circumstantial evidence we have is with atheists who were previously religious, and they do seem to be better behaved in a lot of ways. But is it correlation rather than causation?
My question then is whether religion is truly a bad, or good, influence, or whether it is irrelevant to how a person’s character guides one’s behavior. Isn’t this related to the free will question?
I can see that the issue gets more complicated due to peer influence and group dynamics within religious organizations. Individuals who on their own are less inclined to do something outside of their nature might be influenced by their religious community into taking that action.
Hey, that’s me!
I think I’m a more morally decent person now than I was when I was a Christian, if only because I have empathy for a wider range of people.
I’m not sure my old Christian friends would agree on my good morals, though, since I no longer frown on fornication, or homosexuality, I’m not too worried about whether I cuss or not, and I drink a fair bit of alcohol. All of these are grave sins in my fundamentalist upbringing. So my fundamentalist friends, looking at my life now, would see obvious signs of the moral degradation that my atheism has promoted. Given the arbitrary moral values of religion the “does religion promote morality” question is rigged, because the religious consider immoral many ridiculous things you will naturally abandon when you leave religion. So unless you maintain their reason-defying restrictions, and why would you?, you’re fairly likely to confirm their suspicion that atheism promotes immorality.
Yes, they love to find that river in Egypt and live in denile of anything negative. It starts with ignoring or covering up many parts of the book they claim g*d edited, especially the old testament. Who can think of a nastier lead character than this? He even wiped out the entire population of the earth, save one family, and that tops Hitler and Stalin. And that first Crusade was just catholics going for a little march.
The New Testament is far worse than the Old. The Old just has YHWH flooding the planet and leading his armies to atrocity after atrocity. The New has his Son utterly destroying the planet in the ultimate battle, after which he’ll commit infinite atrocities upon the 99 44/100% of humanity whom he defeats.
b&
It’s funny that the Old Testament gets the bad rap for all the plagues, deaths, and pointless tortures in it, and yet the New Testament stories revolve around the approaching Apocalypse, oblivion, and Hell, and how to join the right, perfect, and most virtuous, self-sacrificing, and loving cult in order to survive the End of the World while everyone else gets the worst thing possible.
I wonder how the “loving caring Jesus” of modern times fits into that cosmic horror story.
Blinders.
I had a nice pair of “taboo topic” colored blinders that all the adults in my life gave me as a child. Worked for two score years.
Two words: confirmation bias.
There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see.
I was thinking recently about occasions when I will say, “How are you?” to someone, and they say, “I’m blessed.” Either than person is saying that we are all blessed (which never seems to be the implication), or that they are saying that they are specially blessed. That seems rude. And what does it say it they are blessed, and someone else isn’t? I think I will start saying, “Aren’t we all?”
It is one of the many quirks of casual conversation, and these norms vary from place to place. I hear that people from other countries think the very question ‘how are you?’ is very odd.
It’s reminiscent of times when I hear people “thanking G*d” after recovering from a deadly disease or accident. People don’t see how ridiculous it is to praise G*d for the healing, but never place blame on getting sick in the first place. And they never seem to “thank” science for the real reason they got cured.
people are desperately afraid to admit that religion makes people do awful things because that means that there is no reason to believe that their god is all-good (or exists), and by reflection, there is no reason to find them to be the special snowflakes they claim to be.
This is indeed a problem. I would like Armstrong or Aslan to answer a simple question:
You claim that belief in religion cannot in itself make people to do acts of evil in the name of religion. That you claim this must mean that you have in mind a model of what a religiously inspired evil action would be. Tell me, what would this religiously inspired act of evil look like?
A recent example of religiously caused evil occurred at the Word of Life Christian Church in New Hartford, NY. A teenage boy purportedly wanted to leave the church. In a “counseling session” that lasted 14 hours, this boy and his brother were savagely beaten, The older brother died of blunt force trauma. The other boy remains in the hospital. If the boys were “bad” enough, these people should have followed the instructions of Paul and made them leave the church.
I think that death was due to colonialism.
sub
In Islam, murdering apostates and gays and adulterers is noble. Christianity and other religions, though not as bad, have similar quirks.
So let me paraphrase your question:
I’m all ears.
Indeed.
One reason is that in the Abrahamic religions the deity is perfect, loving, and incapable of doing bad (by definition for all these three attributes) although his actions and commandments are sometimes beyond the ability of mere mortals to understand. Therefore, while individual people can do bad things, citing religion as the reason, these actions cannot be blamed on the religion in whose name they supposedly act. Believers argue that people who do bad things in the name of the faith simply misunderstand what the religion “really” teaches. In short, the faithful can and do rationalize anything away that contradicts their religious beliefs. Life would be intolerable if they did otherwise
“…what kind of logic gives credit to religion for prompting good acts but denies religion blame for prompting bad ones?”
Mental compartmentalization. As someone who more-or-less says that humans do not have free will, why would you think that the human mind has, or is capable of having, a unitary nature?
This goes deeper than mere hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance. To have those, one must be aware of – and perhaps feel uncomfortable having – conflicting thoughts, opinions, beliefs, actions, ethics. But when one part of the brain produces “X” behavior and another produces “Y” behavior, why would we assume that the one is even aware of the other? Or, if forced to become aware of multiple and contrary behaviors, why would either part a) care, b) remember, or c) have the “free will” to anything about it?
Up to a point Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong will blame these evils specifically on fundmentalist religion, but they are not at all consistent on this point.- they still need their whitewash.
What’s logic got to do with it?
(Can you hear Tina Turner singing in your head now? I thought so).
I’m against ALL Religion, it is the cause of the vast majority of the Human inspired Horrors of this World.
First of all, as a point of fact I think that actual religious beliefs are responsible for many good things and many bad things that people do.
But there is still a “kind of logic” that supports the reasoning you find so unsupportable. If I say, “Go and be kind to people!” and some people go and be kind, and others go and kill people, I may be responsible for some kindness. I will not be responsible for any killing.
Except that religious scripture, dogma, and much preaching doesn’t SAY “God and be kind to people.” Sometimes it says, “Go and be kind to people unless they’re gays or women.” Or “God and be kind to people unless they’re apostates, heretics, or have a different religion, in which case you should kill them.” In fact, the Old Testament has a whole list of things for which you should be killed, including cursing your parents or gathering sticks on the sabbath.
If, like ISIS, your scripture tells you to go and kill people, or, for Christians, they think their scripture tells them to go kill abortion doctors, or oppose assisted suicide for people in horrible pain, is religion responsible then?
You’ll notice that in my first paragraph I said explicitly that religious beliefs are in fact responsible for both good and bad things. That is basically for the reason you are giving here.
The point of the logic is that someone who thinks that a religion is true does not think that his religion recommends doing bad things. According to him, this is a misinterpretation of his religion.
However, you are mistaken in supposing that “such acts are inconceivable without religion.” Sam Harris stated that some beliefs are so bad that it may be ethical to kill people for holding them. Hopefully he did not act on it but it certainly is not inconceivable.