Category: osculating the rump of faith

Disbelief about belief: why secular academics have trouble believing that jihadis are motivated by religion

May 3, 2019 • 1:00 pm

My friend and colleague Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher (my only philosophy paper was coauthored with him) has a new, short piece published in the New English Review about why academics like Robert Pape and similar apologists have such trouble understanding that religious terrorists really can be motivated by religion (click on screenshot).  (Our earlier paper was on a related topic: why religious people don’t see their faith statements as mere fictional imaginings—as the author we were criticizing had maintained—but often do think that their reality statements do correspond to reality.)

For some reason,  many academics, as I noted recently when writing about Sam Harris’s reissued podcast, aren’t willing to accept religious ideology or belief as a motivation for bad actions. Not only Pape, but also Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan come to mind. My own view was simply that religion is uniquely off limits as something to criticize. Even atheists who have what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief” (the idea that religion, while not credible for the writer, is still useful for society), try to exculpate religion from doing bad stuff.  I realized this when I faced pushback for having written Faith Versus Fact, which I saw as trenchant but not over-the-top criticism of religion. Some of the criticism dealt not with my claims, but could be seen only as stemming from anger that I had taken a few steaks from the sacred cow of faith.

But Maarten goes beyond that in his piece (quotes below).

I’m not going to reprise all the ideas and people Maarten cites for promoting the idea that terrorism has no religious roots, nor his arguments against their claims. Suffice it to say that I think he makes an intriguing case. What I want to highlight is why Maarten thinks that this has to go beyond mere “political correctness” about Islam, or the special treatment of Muslims as a form of “soft bigotry.”  Here’s his view:

Why do some academics have so much trouble taking religious motivations seriously? Many people, Jason Walters included, would point to political correctness about Islam. Most academics, especially in the humanities, have a progressive, leftist orientation. For them, Islam is the religion of an oppressed non-white minority, and criticism of the latter is suspect. Blaming Islam for violence and hatred is something to be avoided at all costs. Many academics in the humanities regard it as their duty to counterbalance the shift to the right in politics and public opinion. If minorities are being stigmatized, academics must push back. If certain politicians start talking about “Islamic terrorism”, academics should act as a counterweight. Moreover, academic specialization has led to the formation of ideological enclaves, in which researchers have laid down their own rules and end up talking mostly to like-minded colleagues.

However, I do not think that this explanation is sufficient, as many political leaders themselves—such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—have had a hard time taking the religious motivations of terrorists seriously (indeed, this may even have contributed to Donald Trump’s unlikely victory). I would therefore like to propose another hypothesis. Most academics have grown up in a thoroughly secularized environment, in which religion played either no role at all, or only a very insignificant one. If they were acquainted with God at all, it was a touchy-feely version that had gone through the “washing machine of the Enlightenment”—as the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn called it—in which God was nothing more than an impersonal abstraction, or a metaphor for the goodness of human beings. Religious faith was primarily an intimate and personal affair, completely divorced from politics. Because of their indifference to religious faith, these godless Westerners have great difficulty imagining what it means to believe in a concrete personal God, the kind of deity who revealed himself in an infallible Holy Book, and who demands concrete actions and commitment from its believers, on pain of eternal hellfire. Not only do they themselves not believe in such a God, but they cannot imagine that others really believe in one either, let alone that their lives could revolve around that faith. This phenomenon, which I have previously called “disbelief about belief,” is especially strong in relation to Islamic fundamentalism, with its bizarre delusions about the impending End Times and the pleasure garden with 72 virgins. For these ‘disbelievers about belief’, it is tempting to look for other motives behind religious violence that make more sense from a secular perspective, such as frustrations about exclusion and discrimination, or the struggle to dislodge a foreign occupier. I admit that I felt a certain trepidation myself when I sat down to write a critical commentary for Behavioral and Brain Sciences about Harvey Whitehouse’s theory. It feels strange to be writing about the “blood of martyrs” and the “gates of paradise” in a serious academic journal. It all sounds so ludicrous and bizarre that you wonder: Does anyone really believe this stuff? In fact, Harvey Whitehouse has made his disbelief about belief quite explicit inrecent interview. For him, the thesis about extreme self-sacrifice is part and parcel of his broader take on religion. Religion is not about a “set of propositions” or a “rational understanding of nature” at all, but about “building cohesion” in a social group. For all these reasons, Whitehouse dislikes “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins who “offend people by attacking their identities.”

I think there is something to this, although I don’t see why political leaders, especially those on the Left like Clinton and Obama, are immune from “political correctness” towards Islam. Yes, blaming terrorism on Islam has been done more often by Right-wing politicians like Trump, but excusing of religion for terrorism by politicians on “pc” grounds is indeed common.

In other words, I think Maarten’s explanation is correct to some extent, for without personal experience of really believing deeply in the invidious truth claims of religion, it’s hard to fathom that other people might really believe them. (This is what my paper with Maarten was about). But I think the “political correctness” view also plays a huge role in denying religion a place among causes of terrorism. You be the judge.

Even if you don’t agree fully with Maarten’s new hypothesis, the piece is still very useful in reviewing how pervasive is the denial of any malfeasance promoted by religion.

Easter Special: Nicholas Kristof interviews a Christian who doesn’t accept the tenets of Christianity

April 21, 2019 • 9:15 am

For a long time, New York Times op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof has been interviewing religious people, struggling to somehow buttress his Christianity.  He’s written a number of columns in which he asks religionists and church leaders if he, Kristof, is really a Christian (see here, here, and here), for, like any sensible person, he has doubts about the miracles that underlie Christianity, and about concepts like the efficacy of prayer, heaven, and hell. He wants to be a Christian but is having problems. I think he’d be better off as a secular humanist (he holds a number of appealing liberal views), and that would also save us from the spate of tedious columns about religion flowing from his pen.

And indeed, the people Kristof interviews, like former President Jimmy Carter, usually disavow any literal belief in the foundational tenets of Christianity, like the Resurrection, but still consider themselves as Christians because somehow the whole fictional story resonates with them. But doesn’t there has to be some acceptance of Christian truths to call yourself a Christian rather than, say, a Muslim or Hindu? In this week’s column, Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, somehow manages to find her Christianity between the Scylla of the Resurrection and the Charybdis of the virgin birth, both of which she rejects.

Here’s what Jones doesn’t accept: the resurrection, the virgin birth, the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient god, heaven, hell (which has a “symbolic reality”, whatever that is). Here’s what she does accept: the crucifixion and the power of faith to tell her that there is a god and that that god is “vulnerable” (whatever that means).

Jones appears to reject things like the Resurrection because there’s no evidence for it, or it doesn’t make sense, but yet accepts other tenets of Christianity because her “faith” tells her what’s true. In the end, she calls for a reformation of Christianity—i.e., the religious underpinnings of Christianity—to effect social justice. (You can read the article to see that bit.)

Here’s where she accept the crucifixion (for which there’s no extra-Biblical evidence) but rejects the resurrection.

KRISTOF Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that.

JONES When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.

For me it’s impossible to tell the story of Easter without also telling the story of the cross. The crucifixion is a first-century lynching. It couldn’t be more pertinent to our world today.

What is it, Dr. Jones? Did the crucifixion really occur, but not the resurrection? If so, how do you know? And if you claim to know that the crucifixion took place, and the person nailed up was anything more than a non-divine apocalyptic Jewish preacher, are you kidding yourself, too? What, truly, was the nature of Jesus? And what is Easter about Is it all just a story? If so, why do you follow that story and run a big Christian seminary?

Sometimes I think that this mushy, cherry-picking theology is worse than Biblical literalism, because it’s infuriating the way that people like Jones twist and turn their words to buttress truth claims that don’t seem to be true. For example:

KRISTOF But without a physical resurrection, isn’t there a risk that we are left with just the crucifixion?

JONES Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts. For me, the cross is an enactment of our human hatred. But what happens on Easter is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering. Isn’t that reason for hope?

Yes, that story is nuts, and I wonder if Jones tells her faculty and her flock (she’s a minister, too) that this foundational story of Christianity is “nuts” as well.  But then if somebody just got nailed up and was not resurrected, what is the vaunted “triumph of love”? The execution of a preacher isn’t a triumph of love, but hate. And if that’s the case, then what does she mean by saying “what happens on Easter”? Does she mean the celebration of a Resurrection that didn’t happen?

And since Jones doesn’t believe in the afterlife, what “hope” is she looking for? The improvement of humanity? If that’s the case, then secular humanism, particularly as discussed in Steve Pinker’s latest two books, gives us even more reason for hope: the historical progress of humanity that has depended not on religious superstition, but on humanism, science, and secular morality, traits that seem to be spreading.

Here’s where Jones avers that she knows the nature of God, though she doesn’t tell us how she knows, nor how she knows that there even is a God:

KRISTOF: You alluded to child abuse. So how do we reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient God with evil and suffering?

JONES At the heart of faith is mystery. God is beyond our knowing, not a being or an essence or an object. But I don’t worship an all-powerful, all-controlling omnipotent, omniscient being. That is a fabrication of Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology. That’s not the God of Easter. The God of Easter is vulnerable and is connected to the world in profound ways that don’t involve manipulating the world but constantly inviting us into love, justice, mercy.

If God is beyond our knowing, then how does she know that God is vulnerable and “connected to the world in profound ways that don’t involve manipulating the world but constantly inviting us into love, justice, mercy”? Truly, if God really is beyond our knowing, then how does Jones know there is a God at all?

In this bit below, Jones says that her faith is stronger than truth, because she’d maintain it (and has maintained it) even if its truth claims were found to be false (my emphasis):

KRISTOF Isn’t a Christianity without a physical resurrection less powerful and awesome? When the message is about love, that’s less religion, more philosophy.

JONES For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.

Here is deepity piled upon deepity. What does it mean to say that love is stronger than life or death? I have no idea. Note the last two sentences where Jones tacitly admits that faith is belief that is independent of the evidence. And this prompts my question to Dr. Jones: “What, then, would convince you that Christianity was a lie?”

Truly, this modernist theology sickens me, for while it pretends to rest on empirical evidence, it rests on it only so far, and beyond that things are believed for which there is no evidence—indeed, counterevidence if you accept Victor Stenger’s claim that “absence of evidence is evidence for absence, if there should have been evidence.”

I’m getting ill trying to dissect this piece, so I’ll proffer just one more specimen of Sophisticated Theology®:

KRISTOF What happens when we die?

JONES don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife. People who behave well in this life only to achieve an afterlife, that’s a faith driven by a selfish motive: “I’m going to be good so God would reward me with a stick of candy called heaven?” For me, living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true. And I’m absolutely certain that when we die, there is not a group of designated bad people sent to burn in hell. That does not exist. But hell has a symbolic reality: When we reject love, we create hell, and hell is what we see around us in this world today in so many forms.

I’m not sure what she means by saying that “Love is true”, which seems to be another deepity. If love is true because it’s there and powerful, then so is hate. But besides that, note that Dr. Jones is “absolutely certain” that there is not a hell. How does she know? Well, maybe hell is just a “symbolic reality,” but you don’t need the symbol of hell to realize that treating people badly makes for a bad society. To call suffering “hell” in the Christian sense is to play with words and mislead people. In this sense—and in fact in every aspect of the watery Christianity that Jones espouses—her faith is unnecessary. In the end, it’s merely secular humanism tricked out with religious symbols to sell it to the Little People.

Happy Easter!

Serene Jones, professed Christian

New York Times touts tired old Christian theology

April 19, 2019 • 10:02 am

Well, this Sunday is Easter, and so it’s time to hear about how and why Jesus died for our sins, and why. Here we have an answer in The New York Times, penned Peter Wehner, a man identified this way:

Peter Wehner (@Peter Wehner) a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer, as well as the author of the forthcoming book, “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”

 

The crucifixion and Resurrection, as the central myth of Christianity, have always been a mystery to me, for it seems bizarre that God would have used such a tortuous scenario to convince us of his presence and his love. And I am not all that convinced that there was even a real person on whom the Jesus myth was modeled. But I am as certain as can be that any such person was not divine, was not the son of God/incarnation of God, and was not resurrected.

Yes, the crucifixion and resurrection could be a metaphor for eternal life: something that reassures Christians that this brief span on Earth is not all we have, for Jesus himself, who was part human, did come back to life. But Wehner says that it’s more than this.  It actually happened, and the fact that it happened brings Wehner enduring peace as an “interpretive prism.”

But there’s the rub, for if it’s more than a symbol, and actually happened, then for Wehner there must be evidence for it. He considers himself a skeptical person riddled with doubts, and yet he accepts the whole megillah without doubt.

Yet even if it happened, there are still questions.  Why, if God wanted us to believe and be saved, hasn’t he sent Jesus back to us? After all, he said (in Matthew 16:28): Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.  Did the Son of man come into his kingdom when we weren’t looking?

I won’t belabor this article, which is nothing more than one fervent Christian saying how inspired and moved he is by the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also recounting the same old reasons why it happened. So Wehner trots out the same old explanations. These quotes come directly from his article:

  • “Perhaps the aspect of the crucifixion that is easiest to understand is that according to Christian theology, atonement is the means through which human beings — broken, fallen, sinful — are reconciled to God. The ideal needed to be sacrificed for the non-ideal, the worthy for the unworthy.”
  • “’I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross,’ John Stott, one of the most important Christian evangelists of the last century, wrote in The Cross of Christ. ‘The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?’ From the perspective of Christianity, one can question why God allows suffering, but one cannot say God doesn’t understand it. He is not remote, indifferent, untouched or unscarred.”
  • “Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., and a lifelong friend, pointed out to me that on the cross God was reconciling the world to himself — but God was also, perhaps, reconciling himself to the world. The cross is not only God’s way of saying we are not alone in our suffering, but also that God has entered into our suffering through his own suffering. . .What God offers instead is the promise that he is with us in our suffering; that he can bring good out of it (life out of death, forgiveness out of sin); and that one day he will put a stop to it and redeem it. God, Revelation tells us, will make ‘all things new.’ For now, though, we are part of a drama unfolding in a broken world, one in which God chose to become a protagonist.”

But all this blurs the distinction between the cross as a symbol of God as a savior and the cross as something on which a divine Jesus person (aka God) was really crucified. Is it really important that the story actually happened, or is its use as a symbol sufficient? The purpose of Wehner’s article—which, I admit, isn’t really clear to me except as a way to tout his beliefs all over the editorial pages—appears to be that it really happened, and that despite his admitted doubts, he has a “settled belief” that the crucifixion and resurrection were real.

But perhaps I don’t get it, as I’m not a Christian. I can’t get past the question, “If God is loving and powerful, why didn’t he just cut out the middleman and dispense with Jesus, saving people directly? Why go to all the trouble of making himself human and getting himself nailed to a cross?”

Please read the following and tell me what the sweating writer is trying to say. Emphasis below is mine:

Wehner:

Worshiping a God of wounds is a little strange, as my friend said. For some, it is grotesque and contemptible, a bizarre myth, an offense. But for others of us, what happened to Jesus on the cross is profoundly moving and life-altering — not just a historical inflection point, but something that won and keeps winning our hearts. As individuals with wounds, flawed and fallen, we cannot help but return to the foot of the cross.

The most important moment in my faith pilgrimage was when the cross became my interpretive prism. What I mean by this is that I was and remain a person with a skeptical mind and countless questions. There are parts of the Bible I still find puzzling, difficult and troubling. (That is true of many more Christians than you might imagine, and of many more Christians than are willing to admit.)

But I did arrive at a settled belief that whatever the answer to those questions were — answers I’m unlikely to ever discover — I would understand them in the context of the cross, where God showed his enduring love for people in every circumstance and in every season of life. I came to treasure a line from an 18th-century hymn by Isaac Watts that I have replayed in my mind more often than I can count: “Did e’re such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?”

In response to his fictional P.R. person’s claim that using the cross as a symbol for faith would be mad, Malcolm Muggeridge replied: “But it wasn’t mad. It worked for centuries and centuries, bringing out all the creativity in people, all the love and disinterestedness in people, this symbol of suffering. And I think that’s the heart of the thing.”

It is the heart of the thing. Where some see the cross as superstitious foolery or a stumbling block, others see grace and sublime love. For us, the glory and joy of Easter Sunday is only made possible by the anguish of Good Friday.

But it’s still a symbol!

This to me seems close to the populist but naive theology of C. S. Lewis. I always scratch my head when I read this famous passage from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, perhaps the most popular work of Christian theology ever:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

I’m going for one of the non-divine explanations: that Jesus, if he did exist (and I’m not at all convinced of that) was an apocalyptic, itinerant, and deluded preacher, i.e., a poached egg. It’s not at all obvious that Jesus wasn’t a lunatic.

In his book Lewis demonstrated, as does Wehner, that it’s only religion that can turn a thoughtful and intellectual person into a babbling, superstition-soaked idiot. And why the New York Times would publish a guy doing garden-variety witnessing for Jesus? What’s new here?

 

A flawed Christianity 101: can you spot the mistakes?

December 8, 2018 • 10:45 am

Reader Michael sent this National Geographic video, which, in line with their new and irritating touting of religion (and lack of criticism of its tenets), presents Jesus as as a real being. Reader Michael spotted some errors and distortions in this short clip. As he said:

Some major assumptions, inaccuracies & cock-ups – how many can WEIT readers spot?

I’ll put Michael’s spots below the fold

Read below to see the mistakes and misstatements caught by our reader:

Continue reading “A flawed Christianity 101: can you spot the mistakes?” →

Einstein’s letter impugning religion, scripture, and the idea of God goes up for sale again

October 5, 2018 • 11:15 am

UPDATE: I wrote about this letter six years ago when it was up for sale, but forgot (my post is here). At that time commenter Wolfgang, a German speaker, said that most translations of this letter, including this one are somewhat inaccurate, in particular that the phrase “childish superstition” is simply not in the letter, even in German. Wolfgang suspects this is a meme that has gotten perpetuated, probably because it appeals to some people’s preconceptions.  (The gist of the letter besides that, however, seems pretty much the same.) Nevertheless, please see Wolfgang’s comment if you want his criticism of this and other translations.

__________________

 

Why is everybody so concerned about whether Albert Einstein was religious or an atheist? I suspect that it’s because he’s regarded as The Smartest Man of Our Time, and so his opinion on any issue is taken as authoritative. And if Einstein was religious, well, then accommodationists can claim that science and religion are compatible.

But there are two errors in that train of logic. Someone who’s a great scientist need not necessarily offer the most authoritative word on other topics. Further, just because a scientist might be religious does not—at least to me—show that science and religion are compatible. Readers should be familiar with my argument for incompatibility, so I won’t reprise it here.

Nevertheless, the debate continues, although there’s ample evidence that Einstein was not a theist, but at best a species of pantheist who derived personal awe from the regularity of the laws of nature. He surely wasn’t religious in the sense that religious Americans are religious, as he abjured belief in a personal god, the Scriptures, and so on.

The latest revival of the “Was Einstein religious?” issue is the reappearance of a letter that he wrote in 1954 in response to having read (at the instigation of a friend) a book promoting God and religion.  Einstein’s letter was directed to the book’s author, Erik Gutkind (see below). The letter is up for auction again, and at a fancy price: it was bought in 2008 for $404,000 (Richard Dawkins was an unsuccessful bidder), appeared on eBay six years ago with an asking price of $3 million that wasn’t met, and is now up for auction by Christie’s, with an estimated selling price of between $1 million and $1.5 million. The high price is without doubt due to the letter’s content.

You can see the reports at CNN, LiveScience, and the Washington Post.

It turns out the letter is pretty damning about religion and God, explicitly rejecting both; the former is a “childish superstition” and God “nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness.” The Bible, too, is merely a “collection of primitive legends.” After reading the letter (see below), it would be hard to maintain that Einstein was religious in any sense!

Here’s a photo of the letter (in German) and a translation from Letters of Note:

The translation, with my emphases:

Princeton, 3. 1. 1954

Dear Mr Gutkind,

Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an “unAmerican attitude.”

Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual “props” and “rationalization” in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

Yours,
A. Einstein

Since this was written a year before Einstein’s death, I think it can stand as the culmination of his thinking, regardless of how deistic, theistic, or agnostic he was earlier. Einstein was certainly not mentally incapacitated or demented when he wrote this, and so those who say Einstein was religious will have to somehow rationalize the letter away. I look forward to the religion-osculators at Brainpickings and Krista Tippett’s unctuous show “On Being” coming to grips with Einstein’s words. Tippett, I suspect, would somehow try to claim that Einstein still had a quasi-religious faith.

Who cares if religion is true if it makes us feel good?

September 29, 2018 • 1:53 pm

Here we go again: a Sophisticated Thinker decides that it doesn’t matter whether the truth claims of religion are really true, and argues that most believers don’t think that they are. Instead, religion is important because it makes us feel good.  The three problems with this are, of course, that it does matter to most people (if there’s no God, is there any sense in religion?), that in fact most believers do accept some supernatural truth claims, and that it’s hard to see how people can be religious, or go to church, unless they believe at least some claims about the universe—especially the claim that a god exists.

Further, the author, Stephen T. Asma, doesn’t worry about the downside of religion: how it controls people in a way that makes them feel bad (the guilt of Catholic children and the brainwashing of Muslim children come to mind), how it leads to a warped morality, and how it inspires bad and immoral acts. Finally, Asma doesn’t worry about whether the increasing secularization of the West (and the near-atheism of northern Europe) has proceeded in the face of increasing despondency of the secularized inhabitants. Are Swedes and Danes really that gloomy and bereft?

Do I need to go any further? Perhaps just for a bit. Read the article below (click on screenshot), whose author is identified this way:

Stephen T Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of 10 books, including The Evolution of Imagination (2017) and his latest, Why We Need Religion (2018).

 

Asma’s argument:

1.) Religion doesn’t make important truth claims that motivate believers. Some quotes (indented; emphasis is mine):

Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre-scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

. . . Religion is real consolation in the same way that music is real consolation. No one thinks that the pleasure of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is ‘false pleasure’ because singing flutes don’t really exist. It doesn’t need to correspond to reality. It’s true that some religious devotees, unlike music devotees, pin their consolation to additional metaphysical claims, but why should we trust them to know how religion works? Such believers do not recognise that their unthinking religious rituals and social activities are the true sources of their therapeutic healing. Meanwhile, Hitchens and other critics confuse the factual disappointments of religion with the value of religion generally, and thereby miss the heart of it.

Ahh, he’s channeling Stephen J. Gould’s NOMA idea. You can see that taken apart in my book Faith versus Fact, but I’ll give a very abridged version in this post.  But do most people think that religion’s truth claims are bogus, or irrelevant? Here’s what a random poll of all Americans (not just believers) think is true; this was taken by the Harris organization five years ago. These are all metaphysical claims, of course:

A personal God concerned with you  68%
Absolutely certain there is a God  54%
Jesus was the son of God   68%
Jesus was born of a virgin   57%
Jesus was resurrected   65%
Miracles   72%
Heaven   68%
Hell and Satan   58%
Angels   68%
Survival of soul after death   64%

Further, many well known religionists have recognized that religious belief depends on truth claims. Here are three quotes I often use as well:

“I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection  of stories which motivate an attitude toward life. It must have its anchorage in the way things actually are, and the way they happen.”  —John Polkinghorne

“A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.” —Ian Barbour

“Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than  just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.”—Karl Giberson & Francis Collins

Asma needs to get out more.

2.) Religion is really about morality, consolation, and emotional connection. 

Maybe, then, the heart of religion is not its ability to explain nature, but its moral power?

If that’s the case, then give me secularism any day. For religious “morality” is often twisted and warped, more about people’s sex lives than their character. It tells them who to copulate with, what to wear, what to eat, whom to hate, and how often you should pray, and in which direction. How is that good?  And of course here are some results of Catholic “moral power,” a list I often give in talks:

Opposition to birth control (leading to an increase in STDs, including AIDS)
Opposition to abortion
Opposition to divorce
Opposition to homosexuality
Control of people’s sex lives
Oppression of women
Sexual abuse of children
Instillation of fear and guilt in children

If that’s the heart of Catholicism, please do an Aztec-style cardiectomy! But wait, Asma has more! (Emphases are mine.)

Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Asma makes a big deal about how religion can console people facing death, or those whose loved ones have died, implicitly arguing that atheists lack such consolation:

Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures).

He goes on and on. But I want to point out just one thing. We all know, of course, that much of that consolation does indeed come from religious beliefs that are taken to be true, namely the existence of God and of an afterlife. And Asma even obliquely admits this (my emphases):

Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.

What? But what about those “bloodless theological beliefs”? Clearly God isn’t one of them!

God’s existence is in fact a genuine metaphysical claim, and without that then not even Asma is consoled. And has he considered that we nonbelivers who don’t accept gods on the grounds of no evidence cannot force ourselves to believe, even if we think it would help us? God may make Asma feel better, but I can’t make myself believe in God. I am not so constituted.

All I can say is that Asma seems clueless here, oblivious—in his eagerness to argue that religious makes no truth claims—to how the world really works. And yet he requires God to be consoled! The man is not only clueless, but can’t make a coherent argument. And Aeon doesn’t require that he make one. All they want is endless and sloppy osculation of faith.

To close, I’ll point out that the countries that are the happiest ones in the world are on average less religious (see chart below). Just sayin’. This is a correlation and not necessarily a causal relationship, but it’s the exact opposite of what Asma predicts. So it goes.

What is going on with the online magazine Aeon, anyway? Are they taking Templeton money on the sly?

Stephen T. Asma:

h/t: Ant

C. J. W*rl*m*n goes fully over to the dark side, supported by organizations soft on Islamist terrorism

September 20, 2018 • 8:30 am

By my own rules I’m not allowed to write the full name of disgraced plagiarist and Islam-osculator C. J. W*rl*m*n, so I’ve disemvoweled his name. I note that his Wikipedia entry, which described his plagiarism and other bizarre deeds as well as his osculation of Islam, has now been deleted (I have no idea why). I refer you, reluctantly, to his Twitter feed. You can find his plagiarism amply described on this website; much of the cribbing was found by Stephen Knight, creator of the Godless Spellchecker website.

The Man Who Cannot be Named was once a strong critic of Islam, but then something happened: an atheist, he began ripping into New Atheism à la Glenn Greenwald and, also like Greenwald, became an Islamophile, working for Islamic outlets and constantly decrying “Islamophobia”. The conversion was, I think, intensified when he was found guilty of plagiarism and could no longer write for mainstream outlets. And of course when you become hugely sympathetic to Islam, you gain a big new audience that isn’t so scrupulous about your journalism.

You can see an account of W*rl*m*n’s bizarre conversion at the site Atheism and the City, as well as in an acerbic Twitter exchange with Ali Rizvi on Daily O.

Now, it seems, W*rl*m*n is issuing encomiums for Muslim terrorist-supporting organizations (he’s always blamed their existence on the West). They even seem to be supporting him. 

I tender this Twitter thread, which gives documentation for the claims. It was found by Grania. Note the bizarre touting of a bogus Qur’an. Stephen Knight is a main participant in the thread.

There’s more documentation of W*rl*m*n’s activities on the thread, but I’ll leave you to look at them.

In view of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if W*rl*m*n actually converted to Islam. There he will find a congenial group of friends who share his values.

My apologies for tendering a Tweet-based post, but I think this is informative, and I’m short on time today.