[My long-time friend Ken Marks suggested in a comment on "A Declaration of Animal Rights" that "there is indeed a case for religion, and understanding it should precede an effort to make a case against. I'll try to state the case for it if you'll create a new blog entry for that purpose. I think the topic is too significant to be buried as the 20th comment under this entry." Anyone who can write this well and significantly can find a receptive editorial staff here any time.]
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| Opium den |
If there were some magic way to withhold religion as the existential drug of choice, should we? Well, should surgeons operate without anesthesia? Should people in the throes of hideous pain be asked to just muddle through? I don't think we'd choose to be so cruel. So, will religion keep us in its grip forever? Not necessarily. But two things will have to happen. First, much more progress will have to be made in reducing suffering. As the pain of living subsides, the joy of living will keep religious impulses at bay. Second, we will need to find more thoughtful ways endure and sublimate the suffering we cannot escape.
Ken, your interchange with Motomynd in the comments to his own subsequent "case for religion" made me realize that while your existential drug argument might apply to "people in the throes" (or might not if Motomynd is right that religion might actually make their lives more rather than less grim), America has millions of very religious middle-class folks who seem not to be in particular misery and who might be expected to remain religious even as (and if) the miserable lot of others improves.
ReplyDeleteWhat say you?
Ken, I just remembered something else that might bear on this. A number of prosperous, huge Christian congregations I've read about have interpreted scripture as saying that God means for his followers to be rich and not to want for material things. (See Time Magazine, "Does God Want You To Be Rich?" Sept. 10, 2006.)
ReplyDeleteThe religious motive here would seem to be diametrically opposite the palliation of suffering—the increase of material comfort.
I seriously doubt that these people could ever reach a point where they'd be content to acquire no more wealth.
I say that you might want to contemplate the idea of misery more deeply. It is not limited to sub-Saharan Africa, the citizens of Egypt, Syria, and Iran, and people left destitute by floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, an droughts. It includes all the world's homeless and hungry, including our own. It includes families who have lost a father or son in war or have a surviving member with a brain injury, missing limbs, or post-traumatic stress. It includes families with a child who has run off, been abducted, or committed suicide. It includes drug addicts, alcoholics, an other people whose lives have been destroyed by an addiction. It includes people with wasting diseases and the loved ones who watch. It includes people with inner torments that come from a tortured childhood or a genetic abnormality. It includes people with physical deformities. Need I go on?
ReplyDeleteMo, the "God wants you to be rich" nonsense is an American aberration. It plays well because of the exceptional level of greed and consumption in our culture. Ultimately, it's an extension of God's offer of comfort.
ReplyDeleteKen, thank you for your thoughtful and well written comments on my post on the "case for religion." I don't know that I can match them but I had to offer a couple of thoughts in regard to your listing above of the various forms of misery we might want to think about.
ReplyDeleteMuch of what you describe is horribly unfortunate, but is misery a condition in which one lives of the state of mind with which one lives?
Using sub-Saharan Africa as an example: Yes, it can at times create miserable conditions, but having spent some time there I can say it also has some stunning natural beauty and many people with wonderful, charming personalities. Is it possible that what we dwell on as misery they simply see as life?
Sub-Saharan Africa also is also a good place to consider whether religion is a helpful salve on unfortunate injury, or the root cause of much of what you see as misery. If we didn't have competing religions promoting corrupted versions of their own original core values, things might be a lot better there. Many of the horrible famines in that area, for example, aren't created by unusual disasters that cause too little food to be produced, but rather by religions encouraging too many people to be born by discouraging sex education and birth control.
As for those torments closer to home that you mention, is organized religion on the overall plus or minus side of being helpful with any of that? And again, unfortunate as many of those circumstances are, do they rise to the level of misery, or are they just very unfortunate aspects of real life?
Mo, people can certainly be religious and still live with misery, but that doesn't negate the plentiful evidence that people turn to religion for comfort and the strength to face a new day. I get the sense that you're in denial about this, evident though it is, and hellbent to attribute nothing positive to religion. (Yes, you're bent toward hell!)
ReplyDeleteI want to add that some cultures are better able than others to sublimate misery and live with less myth. For example, Buddhists point to existential pain as the central phenomenon of their philosophy. They use meditation and a code of behavior to minimize it. Perhaps sub-Saharans also have a worldview that accounts for their coping.
Ken, since none of the accepted established religions can seem to agree on what hell really is, and since the traditional concept of hell does not come from Hebrew or Greek but was a pagan myth adopted as Christian doctrine in (as I recall) the third century, why should we go through life worrying about it?
ReplyDeleteI never said there is nothing good about organized religion, I just question if the benefit is worth the cost. If it helps people find peace in time of need, that is great, but does it offset the damage done the rest of the time?
Moto, I can't do that kind of calculus. Maybe the string theorists at Princeton can handle the math. I just signed up for explaining that religion does some good, which I believe is undeniable.
ReplyDeleteKen, Yes, it is undeniable that religion does some good, my question is shouldn't it be held to some sort of good/harm cost/benefit analysis like everything else?
ReplyDeleteMillions of people find comfort in time of need by following a religion that arguably sided with the fascists in Italy and Spain, the Nazis in Germany,the communists in Central and South America, and has gone out of its way to protect child molesters. My question is why should so many pay such a cost so a select group can have the luxury of peace in time of need?
Individuals assess cost/benefit when deciding if they will buy a hybrid car or standard, a vehicle with side curtain airbags or without. Health insurers and health care providers use cost/benefit to decide who lives and who dies. The world's greatest powers assess cost/benefit when deciding which revolutions to support in which lesser countries and which to let perish.
So why can't we take at least a cursory glance at the cost/benefit of a behemoth industry like organized religion?
Motomynd and Ken, thanks for going ahead without me. I think so slowly anymore (half the time, my wife has to point out before I leave for work that my pants are unzipped), I had to go away for a night to contemplate misery, and when I came back on this morning I was delighted to see the argument advanced.
ReplyDeleteKen, I seriously doubt that a substantial portion of the many millions of religious Americans can have their religiosity explained by their various stripes of personal misery (of which you did a good job enumerating a portion). I think it is much more likely that they are religious simply because they learned it from their parents and aren't well-enough educated or imaginative enough to throw their religions over for the superstitions they are. (Yesterday, for example, I told a woman at the credit union of my moral qualms about eating animals. She said without a pause, "Oh, I'm at the other end of the spectrum from that. I come from a hunting family." She's not interested in—incapable of?—discussing the merits; her family tradition has closed that door.)
That said, I have to admit that I, too, believe that, for some thoughtful people, religion does do some good. If that's the core point that you're mainly interested to establish, then you don't need to argue further, and Motomynd seems to agree too, with the proviso that the good has to be weighed against the bad. Not that anyone has devised a reliable calculus yet for doing that (that I know of).
I would make a different point from Motomynd, however. I think that the thoughtful people who manage to make a good thing of religion, could make the same good thing—and make it better—in an alternative way that didn't involve belief in non-existent entities. An alternative based in science would be better not only in an Ockham's razor way (relative parsimony of hypotheses), but also by way of advancing civilization generally (by tending to reduce the number of children indoctrinated in religion).
I know that I should say more about what the "alternative" is. But I need to go away again to think about how to say it (hoping that in the meantime you and Motomynd would have advanced that argument too).
Moto, you can ask your cost/benefit question in the past tense (has religion done more harm than good?), present tense, or future tense. You can focus your question on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (which seems to be your inclination), or you can ask about religion in general. Whatever you choose, you'd be taking up nothing more than an academic pursuit, and you'd never reach an objective answer. So have at it if you like.
ReplyDeleteA more productive path is trying to understand how one acquires a religion, agnosticism, or atheism. People are born into a family or some context where there is adult nurturing. For years, everything they believe is received truth. Received truth is very comfortable, and every time you act on it, you get a reinforcement. You are growing up correctly and becoming a respected person. With religion, you get a bonus. In Christian culture, it's a loving God who hears prayers and offers eternal bliss. He's always present to help us deal with pain. Even if we're not in pain at the moment, He is the Ultimate Rabbit's Foot. Who in his right mind would reject all of this? Not just abandon God but tell our loved ones that they have raised us in error. So much for the cost/benefit analysis.
Here's where we might ask, "How, then, does anyone become an atheist?" The answer, I think, is alienation. A hurt takes root inside us. It grows and becomes a wedge... but I see that I'm off on a tangent, and a big one at that. Time to call a break.
Ken, I appreciate your support for the idea that religion gets passed along through "nurturing" but am taken aback by your suggestion that I am not in my right mind.
ReplyDeleteNot sure, of course, what you were about to get onto about "alienation." I gravitated atheist by eventually realizing that "all of this" was not much and I simply had been "raised in error." Simple as that. Then I was fortunate enough to see an ad (for Sam Harris's book THE END OF FAITH) whose characterizations of Harris's thought sounded amazingly close to what I had come to think myself.
Oh, wait a minute, you're saying you aren't in your right mind either?
Mo, need I explain the difference between literal and rhetorical?
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say that religion is passed along by nurturing. The idea of doing harm to oneself and one's loved ones is perceived, usually by the unconscious, and firmly rejected. It's much like the mechanism that has kept gays in the closet, but more subterranean.
I know next to nothing about your upbringing, but I'd guess that there were persons or experiences that caused more separation between you and your family than usually exists in a Christian family group. Of course, if one or more of one's rearers is an atheist, becoming an atheist oneself is a piece of cake.
Ken, if I'd made the closing comment at the end of the first paragraph (where I thought of it) rather than at the very end, you'd probably have realized more surely that of course you don't need to explain the difference between literal and rhetorical to me. I moved it to the end because I liked its rhetorical effect better there, and it sort of "enveloped" the comment.
ReplyDeleteBut I thought you did say that religion is passed along by nurturing: "People are born into a family or some context where there is adult nurturing."
Good guess about my upbringing. I think I have felt some degree of alienation from my family, certainly a good deal of ambivalence. My parents stopped schooling at about sixth grade (on average). My father took me hunting, and I did shoot a few critters. We went fishing together, he came to my baseball games, I know he loved me and was proud of me, even of my having been hired by IBM (but I was always quite ambivalent about that too, about being an IBMer). My mother thought I was the next thing to Jesus Christ, even put my baby photo next to a portrait of The Savior in one place she lived. She took me to Holy Roller churches in my childhood, I sang in the choir, studied my lessons and Bible lessons on the way to church on Sundays, attended summer Bible schools, the whole nine yards—hardly any child is more religiously indoctrinated than I was, and I contributed to my own indoctrination by the fervor and thoroughness with which I applied myself to my Sunday School lessons.
I'm not sure that my alientation weren't more a matter of my schooling's far surpassing theirs than of any substantial divide in our home life. Even in my thirties, I was sad to the point of weeping on at least one occasion that I just "couldn't connect" with my father, whom I loved and who I knew loved me. My mother was (and always was) "like a child," with simple ideas and simple feelings. I think I got my sense of social justice from her, my sense of animal rights even.
Well, I could go on.
I'm very touched by your descriptions of your mother and father, Morris. I'm sure you were an adorable child. I write that in complete sincerity.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about a nurturing family being important; they deliver the "truth" that the child receives. My focus is on why the received truth sticks. So much of what parents lay on is shed, and there may be some flack. But apostasy in a religious family is an H-bomb. And why drop it when you can be liked, grow in social standing, and even prosper, so long as your religious notions stay put. Besides, there are all those athletes, redeemed felons, politicians, and assorted wounded souls on TV telling stories about their salvation. Your byword becomes "There but for the grace of God go I."
Ken, I really like your description of God as the "Ultimate Rabbit's Foot." As for your question about who would reject such a sweet deal as bliss in this world and in the hereafter, I would say the answer to that is anyone who is intelligent and free thinking enough to realize there that you very rarely get something for nothing-- someone, somewhere, is paying for that bliss.
ReplyDeleteAbout your nurturing theory...hmmm...my brother and two sisters were raised in the same house by the same parents and we wound up with two devout Lutheran sisters, one brother who worships little except himself, and one brother who has little issue with the concept of a greater power but takes great issue with the bastardization of that concept by organized religion.
If someone's religion gives them what they need to get by and does no harm to others, great. I know people who have gotten the same result from smoking pot for 50 years. Neither approach is of interest to me yet nether bothers me, so long as no one tries to "brand" their religion and put it above others by giving active or tacit approval to killing those who don't believe in the same rabbit's foot.
Moto, it sounds as though you believe in a Zero Sum Universe: the quantity of bliss and angst in the universe add up to zero. ("Someone, somewhere, is paying for that bliss.") Have I read your comment incorrectly?
ReplyDeleteSorry Ken, yes you have jumped right past the obvious to the esoteric and read my comment incorrectly. My apologies for my clumsy writing. Please allow me to clarify.
ReplyDeleteUsing my previous 20th Century example: If you were Catholic, you and your religion prospered and you had not only the promise of eternal bliss but did quite well here on earth as well. And as I said previously, all it took was for your leadership to collaborate with the fascists in Italy and Spain, the Nazis in Germany, the communists in Central and South America, and keep it all together with a cover up of rampant child sexual abuse within the ranks. So if you were Catholic you had your bliss, but at the cost of how much pain and suffering to others and the loss of how many lives? You don't need to get into debatable esoterica to quickly identify who had bliss and who paid for it.
Let's jump to today's headlines. If you are a devout believer in modern radical Islam, you not only have power and everything else you want now (bliss?) but a promise of it for eternity as well. And all you have to do to have that is subjugate and abuse women and children and be willing to kill anyone who does not believe exactly as you do. Again, nothing theoretical about who has bliss and who pays for it.
In those two cases and many, many others over the centuries, a very few benefit greatly from their religious pursuits and a great many pay for it. And they don't pay for it in theory, they pay for it in pain and suffering and with their lives. Which brings me back to my original question: Why don't we apply some sort of realistic good/harm cost/benefit analysis to religion like we do everything else?
Gosh, Ken & Motomynd, I'm just thrilling—absolutely gushing—with excitement (and gratitude) at the intellectual pyrotechnics and eloquent common sense that you are displaying, and not only for my edification but also for that of the hundreds of Moristotle followers who are witnessing this colloquium.
ReplyDeleteIf my old mama were alive to see (and able to understand) this, she would be happy and well-pleased for me.
Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart. I hope to offer further comments myself, but at the moment I am overcome by a prevailing sense of incompetence. Plus, I'm at my place of work with a load of tasks to complete before I leave this afternoon.
Those are good examples, Moto, of blissful oppressors and exploited victims. We can look back across the sweep of Western history and the church that has dominated it and find many grisly episodes. But you made a cynical generalization, and I wanted to know whether it was a well-considered one. Thanks for clarifying.
ReplyDeleteI guess my comment about the pointlessness of a cost/benefit analysis had no traction. I tried and struck out.
Ken, Yes I fear you took a great big swing and miss on trying to sell me on the pointlessness of applying cost/benefit analysis to religion. You took a nice cut at the ball however and it would have sailed out of the stadium...if you had only connected.
ReplyDeleteTo me the only thing that is pointless is continually allowing the same thing to happen over and over just because that is the way it has always been. Was it Einstein who said insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
As you say in a brilliant line in your post "We can look back across the sweep of Western history and the church that has dominated it and find many grisly episodes." So do we continue to allow those episodes to occur just because they always have, or do we finally apply some logical restraint? If for whatever reason we truly can't tackle it with some sort of cost/benefit approach then can't we at least put on the brakes in some other fashion?
Moto, we don't have access to a control room that has a "Religion Off" button or an "Apply Logical Constraint" button. Nor do we have a computer that assigns weights to hundreds of variables and then applies an algorithm to give us the cost and benefit of religion. (And if we did, could it also give us the cost/benefit of a given religion or a hypothetical religion instead of religion in general?) We aren't living in a video game in which we can magically discover truths and apply actions that redirect history.
ReplyDeleteBut now it's your turn at bat. I'm pitching. To make contact, please say how you would undertake the cost/benefit analysis you've been urging. You are obliged to be clear about how you'd ensure an objective result and how you'd realistically apply that result to improve the human condition.
No fair using your Play Station for help.
Motomynd, I am looking forward to practical suggestions you might propose for not "allowing" episodes such as you describe to occur. As I pointed out in a letter to the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun, the U.S. Constitution seems to guarantee the right of the people to believe any damn fool thing they want, and as Sam Harris rued in The End of Faith, religion has long enjoyed a bye when it comes to criticism. If you can brand your activity "religious," you can get all kinds of passes and exemptions.
ReplyDeleteThis more or less official wink when it comes to religion does not bode well for any progress at the political level—not that progress in anything at all has been particularly successful lately.
I just noticed, with pleasure, that this post now ranks seventh in popularity (by number of page views). Of course, Ken, Motomynd, and I know (and regret) that the three of us account for a good portion of those views. Still, I think we have a fair number of other viewers as well, quite a few of them, presumably, coming over from Facebook. We appreciate their checking us out. I would remind them that they, too, are welcome to comment here. We would like to know what they think, if they have anything constructive to contribute.
ReplyDeleteKen, sorry for the delay. Took a while to get up out of the dirt after taking that fastball in the ribs. Since I don't have a budget or committee or agency to tackle the task, and even with the clout of the mighty Moristotle blog I have only a modest soapbox, I can only make suggestions and encourage everyone to take every small action they can.
ReplyDeleteTo begin reigning in the clout organized religion exerts on government and politics in America, I would first take a symbolic step. The words "under God" were added to our pledge of allegiance in 1954; let's launch a campaign to get them out of there. They were after all inserted after a push by a variety of special interest groups - notably the Knights of Columbus, at that time and perhaps still the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization - and found favor at that time in large part due to the "red scare" hysteria drummed up by then Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. I would say let's just try to get rid of the pledge entirely, since the country did just fine without one for the first 130 years or so, but that might be too much of a reach. Even if the pledge was created as part of a marketing ploy by a children's magazine, was written by a Baptist minister who was also a Christian Socialist, and was at one time supposed to be recited with a gesture that became infamous as the Nazi salute.
The next step would be more direct. By just about any logical standard organized religion meets every criteria to designate it as a business. Or an industry. So let's launch a campaign to call it what it is and tax it as such.
Yes, I know people would try to say that those who could be proven to be more devout instead of using church basically as a social or marketing club should avoid paying their fair share of tax, but no breaks here. I know of a man who lives in Vermont who does not own a car or truck because he will ride nothing but a Harley Davidson motorcycle - year round - and it would be difficult to be more devout than that. He doesn't get a charitable deduction when he makes a bike payment or buys a beer at his local social club, so why should churchgoers get a deduction for spending time with their friends?
Ken, I realize these are small steps, but if they could be taken we would at least have a start on the process. They would begin to change attitudes about our most dubious of scared cows and the momentum would force other pieces to begin to fall into places they actually belong. Rather than hovering at vaunted positions that surely can't be explained by gravity or centrifugal force, much less by any logical sense of fairness.
Leah, I think you need to visit the dictionary and look up "alienate." Atheists have their own support groups, but there is no doubt that they are treated like outsiders by the hundreds of millions of believers in our nation. Let me know when a declared atheist is elected president, and we'll explore this further.
ReplyDeleteAs for the genesis of your atheism, I won't presume to tell you that I know something about your childhood that you don't.
Moto, I see that you've changed the subject, but that's cool.
ReplyDeleteA federal appeals court ruled last year that "under God" in the pledge of allegiance is constitutional. Yeah, they screwed up — it shows how hard it is to move forward even a baby step. The idea of taxing religious institutions has been around since God was a corporal. Some day, some day. First, though, religion must lose its privileged place in our thoughts. Not yours and mine, but in the thoughts of the spiritually needy. In the meantime, don't discount the benefit of the incessant drip drip drip of atheist truth serum.
Motomynd, apropos Ken's calling you out for changing the subject, I apologize for perhaps muddying the water by interjecting my "looking forward to practical suggestions you might propose"—not that I think you mistook my comment for one of Ken's.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate Ken's final statement: "In the meantime, don't discount the benefit of the incessant drip drip drip of atheist truth serum."
I certainly hope that Moristotle's drip drip drip is beneficial.
Ken, I am fairly certain that you know no more about Leah's childhood than you did about mine before I told you a bit about it. Let me tell you a bit more.
ReplyDeleteBut first, let's make a distinction about what "alienation" means. One can either feel like an alien or be treated by others as an alien (and possibly be made to feel alienated as well).
I think Leah was saying that atheists seem not to feel like aliens in fundamental respects. Your reply didn't address that, but invoked the other sense—how atheists are outed (which might or might not make them feel like aliens in other respects).
Now, the more about myself, which I am able to tell you because your introducing alienation led to my thinking of it: I now surmise, many years after the fact, that I did feel, significantly, as a child that I was an alien. I definitely do not think that anyone (least of all my parents) treated me like an alien. No, I was inner-directed (in 1950's sociologist David Riesman's term). I felt like an alien all right—an alien from everyday pettiness. I sensed that something more important was afoot than our little daily occupations.
Ironically, I now think that I took an uncommon interest in religion as a child less because my mother dragged me to church than because I sensed that church was about something more important than the little things of everyday life.
But a few years later, at about the age of seventeen, I began to feel that church missed the mark. It too was relatively empty, emphasizing rituals that were coming to seem without reliable foundation. The significant act of this period was my refusing the communion grape juice.
Within a few years I declared my undergraduate major to be philosophy. Let the search for significance continue....
You may be overthinking this, Morris. My point about alienation is simple. Each of us is born into an environment of homogeneous (more or less) truths, values, and prejudices. In our early years, a kind of perceptual osmosis occurs. It continues until we reach a critical moment in self-awareness. At that moment — it may actually be weeks or months — we realize that "This is me" or "This is not me." If the realization is the latter, that is alienation. We'd have to open up an entirely new topic to explore the stimuli and predispositions that cause us to go one way or the other.
ReplyDeleteAlienation is an untenable state. We have to find others with whom we feel comfortable. For most people, stasis returns. However, if we have opted out of the prevailing ideas of our society, we remain alienated in the sense that we are outsiders. There is no doubt that atheists are outsiders and have no prospect of changing that condition.
Ken, thanks. That sounds cogent. However, if atheists are almost by definition alienated and outsiders—because they are atheists, it would seem—isn't it circular of you to posit alienation as the reason atheists become atheists?
ReplyDelete(On November 29, you commented: "Here's where we might ask, 'How, then, does anyone become an atheist?' The answer, I think, is alienation. A hurt takes root inside us. It grows and becomes a wedge...")
I object to your trying to have it both ways. Not nice, not gentlemanly.
No.
ReplyDeleteNo, not gentlemanly at all?
ReplyDeleteNo, not circular. Your mind is in a mode I call "hyper-vigilance." You should find the exit door before long.
ReplyDeleteKen, I think the pertinent mode here is the one commonly called "hyper-defensive." It can prevent a debater from vacating a win-at-all-costs position in order to see from someone else's vantage point, or from reading a perfectly sound statement by someone (Leah, who hasn't "felt alienated in the least") without responding in an offensive, patronizing tone. (I mean patronizing even to third parties; I don't know Leah either.)
ReplyDeleteWell, now we find each other offensive. Good place to call an end.
ReplyDeleteKen, Sorry, didn't realize I was changing the subject. To me it all relates to the original question: is there a case for religion? If the case for religion is for people to find peace in a time of need, and if the powers that be are protective of religion, as you seem to point out above, then I guess the only option for those who don't need religion as a crutch is to start a grassroots revolt. If the case for religion is for socializing and marketing, then I guess all those who don't use it for such can do is protest and refuse to participate. To quote a cliche, if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Does religion maintain its clout because of those at the top, or because those further down are afraid to speak up?
ReplyDeleteLeah, What a wonderfully lyrically worded but sharp-edged question about why someone becomes an atheist. Since you were raised in the Catholic faith and I know it only as an outsider, I would like to ask you a question: Given its track record, what do people find in the Catholic faith that keeps them faithful to it? Looking at it objectively from the outside, I am, to use your word, perplexed by that organization's questionable involvements with the leadership of the groups I mentioned previously: fascists, Nazis, communists. As an outsider I can't get beyond that and find much positive in the Catholic leadership; am I missing something? On the topic of atheism, if someone searches for answers in other places but refuses to believe in the version of god foisted upon us by modern organized religion, are they an atheist, or are they just a retro follower of the oldest of belief systems?
ReplyDelete