Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
It
Ain't Necessarily So
(Letter to a Christian Nation, 12/04/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro
A
lot of things have happened since 9/11, but one thing you might expect
largely didn't. In the wake of the largest religiously-motivated mass
murder in US history, the tsunami of faith-based sectarian violence
in Iraq, and ongoing intimidation of free speech by Islamist zealots,
most Americans have not been driven to question the influence of organized
religion in the world.
On the contrary, the vast majority
of devout Americans report their faith has been strengthened, not reduced,
by current events. Forty-four percent of us continue to insist Jesus
will return in the next fifty years. Fifty-three percent are proud to
call ourselves creationists. According to a Newsweek poll, a
whopping 63% of us would not vote for an atheist for President under
any circumstances.
The problem always seems to be somebody
else's religion, not our own. As Sam Harris, America's atheist laureate,
observes in his latest broadside, Letter to a Christian Nation
(Knopf, $16.95), "The truth is, you [Christians] know exactly what
it is like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims.
Isn't it obvious that Muslims are fooling themselves? . . . Understand
that the way you view Islam is precisely the way devout Muslims view
Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions."
In the course of this slim dagger
of a book, Harris lays into what he regards as the self-evident foolishness
of religious belief with a fairly Gibsonesque disregard for subtlety.
"'Atheism' is a term that should not even exist," he declares.
"No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or
a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis
is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest
ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable
people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."
That people still kill each other
in the 21st century over ancient doctrinal disputes is a source of deep
puzzlement to Harris. "Despite a full century of scientific insights
attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the
earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos
was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand
years after the Sumerians invented glue." We may quibble over the
facts (Paleolithic people had glue-like substances long before the Sumerians),
but not the sentiment. Indeed, Harris does not even attempt to plumb
the full depth of such foolishness, such as a recent attack on a falafel
stand in Kabul because falafel didn't exist in Mohammad's time, or the
face of the Virgin Mary glimpsed in a highway overpass stain in Chicago.
The rooting of our public policy
in the alleged authority of the Bible does come in for much-needed criticism.
The Bible, after all, explicitly endorses such charming practices as
human slavery (Leviticus, 25: 44-46; Exodus 21: 7-11,
et al.), the murder of unruly children (Exodus 21: 15), and the
slaughter of non-believers (Deuteronomy 13: 8-15). To those who
argue that Harris takes these passages out of context, one might ask
why the Bible's divinely-inspired authors left room for any doubt on
such matters. Nor has there been much concern with "context"
among evangelicals who cite other, politically convenient passages.
Leviticus 18:22 is often cited against homosexuality, though
most Christians seem to have little problem ignoring similar prohibitions
against lobster and escargot (Leviticus 11).
Indeed, as in his previous book
The End of Faith, Harris maintains that religious faith is not
only irrational and practically counterproductive—it is morally
indefensible. Laying out the brief against the legacy of faith-based
charity in the developing world, he notes ". . . volunteers for
secular organizations like Doctors Without Borders do not waste any
time telling people about the virgin birth of Jesus . . . Christian
missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use
in villages where no other information on condoms [or AIDS] is available.
This kind of piety is genocidal." Indeed, Harris shows that a commonly-held
bias—that people of faith behave more morally than the non-devout—is
based on no facts at all. The influence of conservative Christians in
the so-called red states has not led to an epidemic of virtue in the
Bible Belt: "The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary
are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates
of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of
murder, seventeen are red."
Pointed as Harris' prose can be,
there's some question whether the purpose of his book is really to persuade
his putative Christian reader, or to vent. Any serious attempt to demolish
the intellectual and moral underpinnings of all religion would seem
to demand more than 96 wide-margined pages. For instance, the book is
largely innocent of historical context: early Christianity, in fact,
adapted a number of key ideas from he same body of ancient "pagan"
philosophy that nourished scientific rationalism. Islam, likewise, absorbed
and transmitted a deliberative, rationalist legacy without which the
Renaissance in the West would hardly have been possible. All the fundamentalisms—Christian,
Islamic or otherwise—cloak themselves in religion but owe more
to cultural traditions that far predate Jesus and Mohammad.
And then there is the simple question
of values. Harris notes, "I know of no society in human history
that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence
to support their core beliefs," he seems to take as given that
all people should value rationality. In fact, I know of no human society
that esteemed a clever gadfly over a blind patriot, or ever considered
its core beliefs to be anything other than beyond discussion.
Though many of us would probably
agree that it is nice to be reasonable, most prefer to have lives characterized
by other virtues, such as "community," "security,"
"authenticity." In a world with nuclear weapons and weaponized
smallpox, there are grounds to despair over such priorities. But there
they—and religion—remain.
©2006 Nicholas Nicastro
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