I am only at the introduction to The Portable Atheist, and Hitchens has me thinking about the common religious practice where survivors celebrate and praise of some given god after some terrible event where many lives were lost. What a disgusting reason to worship, so a god doesn’t come down and smite you. I find any type of disingenuous worship, such as prayer so you don’t go to hell, or so that you get something, or so that God spares you and kills someone else, to be entirely repugnant.
Hitchens shares a story from Primo Levi, in the dedication of the book. In this story, Levi recalls being at Auschwitz, as fellow prisoners are being selected to go to the gas chambers. He is disgusted by a fellow prisoner who prays and then thanks God for allowing others to be chosen, so he can live another day. I agree with Levi’s statement, “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.” I will take it one step further, any religion that promotes such prayer or subsequent praise is disgusting. The excuse that religious apologists give, that “we cannot comprehend the reasons why God does what he does, and therefore we must have faith” is vacuous and empty. It is merely a rationalization that minimizes moral and ethical accusations, by invoking some unknowable, divine motive.
It is not rational to praise someone who tortures you and kills, simply because they choose to keep you alive. The psychological term for this behavior is “Stockholm Syndrome”. No sane person would look objectively at someone who took hostages, tortured and killed. When a hostage takes sides with the hostage-taker, they have suffered a mental breakdown, and are no longer in possession of their rational faculties. However, when you slightly alter the situation and replace the criminal with “God” and claim that “anything God does is good” – we are beyond the ability to be objective or rational. The “believer” is forced to accept immoral and unethical behavior as “good” – therefore, forced to do two things. They lose integrity, by accepting the immoral act as righteous. And, they mentally wall off a portion of their brain to filter and accept things as “right” that in any other context would be considered “wrong”. In doing so, their objectivity must always be called into question, and their behavior will always be context-based.
I won’t expand on this now, although I could easily begin a rant here about how the specific practices of religion force a person to accept things that would be considered “insane” or “unethical” as normal, in that context. The religious person is forced to go through life in a schizophrenic manner, making context-based decision and excusing actions that are beyond their comprehension as divine. They are vetted, trained, primed and indoctrinated from a young age to apply different standards in different contexts, and to excuse atrocities as “divine retribution”.
I cannot live with this kind of dualism. There are few things that are absolute in this universe, but at the least, we have come to discover that the universe offers a kind of consistency. To suggest that there is some higher plane of existence that is chaotic and filled with capricious and whimsical rules is not only something I find personally disturbing, it is totally based in fantasy and in no way resembles the universe that we observe. Even quantum mechanics, which is often invoked by the mystic, has well-defined and predictable rules! This unobserved, but imagined realm of gods who operate separate of our space-time and generally accepted morality are not consistent with a “knowable universe”. This dogma belongs in the asylum, not on Main Street, if you ask me. Everything we have learned by observing the universe through the scientific lens leads me to conclude that the universe is indeed “knowable” and we can see a clear trend, year after year, as we gain a more intimate knowledge of its “mysterious” underpinnings.
When cavemen sat around campfires, sharpening sticks and telling stories, there was no framework in which to explain stars and mountains and natural disasters, other than to “invent” some explanation. Today we have the language of mathematics, the formality of science and the tools to probe the universe farther and deeper than ever before. We have the knowledge and understanding, built upon centuries of trial and error, and we see no reason that the ancient myths should not be cleared from the table so we can start fresh. If there are gods, the faithful should not have concern, because they can come back and set us straight if we were wrong. That seems like the rational approach to take, for someone like me who sees no reason to buy into the insanity of religion. But, for the religiously initiated, who have invested so much effort to creating a context and world-view in which religion works for them, they will not comprehend anything I’ve said, and my plea for a consistent, knowable, ethical universe will fall on deaf ears. (I will argue that they cannot even understand my argument, or respond rationally, because mentally they have been trained to filter, rationalize and apologize for anything that touches upon religion.)
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F. Andy Seidl
// Apr 12, 2009 at 8:24 pm
I agree, pretty much start to finish, with everything you have written here. Having grown up in a very religious family–both immediate and large extended family–I agree that deeply religious people typically do not understand the types of arguments you make. This is not because they are stupid; quite the contrary, they are every bit as intelligent as anyone else. Rather, it is because they are not equipped with the appropriate intellectual tools (i.e., education, background, mental “software”) to do so.
An analogy I often use is that of a computer running an operating system. A Windows machine *is* a Windows machine (at least at some level) not because of something fundamental about its hardware, but because of the software in control of that hardware. That very same hardware *could*, for example, be a Linux machine given the appropriate software, but lacking that software a Windows machine simply cannot make sense of a Linux executable file.
But how or when does a Windows machine “decide” to become a Linux machine? It doesn’t. This does not mean it is impossible for it to become a Linux machine (e.g., from the outside, I could choose to install Linux on the machine), but it means in practice it does not happen.
Religions are memes (i.e., mental software). Very evolutionarily fit memes to be sure, but memes nonetheless. And like all memes, religions are not altruistic; they would (and do) sacrifice individual meme carriers for the good of the meme. It is flawed logic to assert that morality or human goodness or right or wrong derives from religion. Religion cares nothing (to anthropomorphize it because it really and truly cares nothing at all) about human kind except what may be necessary to propagate the meme.
Religious memes propagate so successfully, in part, by disabling at least some rational thinking. So, in this sense, religions literally do induce a form of insanity. For the most part, it is a curable insanity, but curable from the outside. Non-religious, rational thinkers must continue to seek ways to educate religious people (i.e., “install” new software) to (re)enable rational thinking—and not for altruistic reasons, but rather for the selfish reason of creating a better world in which to live.
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