Attitude Adjustment
How did 9/11 change America’s attitude toward religion? A recent post on CNN’s Belief Blog says: “Before 9/11, many atheists kept a low profile. Something changed, though, after 9/11. They got loud… Criticism of all religion, not just fanatical cults, was no longer taboo after 9/11.” Indeed. Around the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, American Atheists hit the nightly news by suing to remove a steel cross from the September 11 memorial, even as others were calling it a national monument and a symbol of hope. Still, many atheists say 9/11 is a perfect example of why religion itself is evil.Is Religion Evil?
Is Religion Evil?
Reminds me of reading Sam Harris’ The End of Faith years ago. I remember when he started to get popular by insisting that religion itself is dangerous and evil. Although he’s got a lot of fans, a Religion Dispatches article recently called him “more charismatic than credentialled” as a speaker. In the same article, Harris is quoted as saying, “I’m kind of self-taught in religion…I’ve never studied it formally with anyone.” But he’s not the only one who’s taken the spotlight.
Another popular atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens, once called religion a poison that makes people give up their reason. But after his now infamous debate on the reasons for belief in God with William Lane Craig, even an atheist reviewer called Hitchens a “rambling and incoherent” speaker, even a “loudmouthed journalist,” saying “Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child.” Indeed, some are saying this debate marked the beginning of the downfall of the so-called “new atheism” in America. Time will tell.
New Atheists: Just Say “No” to Tolerance
Still, I’m not sure why atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens think they can convince you and me that it’s unreasonable to believe in God if they’re really convinced that we won’t listen to reason. Whatever the case, people who follow the New Atheists believe that religion is intolerant–so it shouldn’t be tolerated at all in America. But over a decade after 9/11, many Americans are still asking this question: Is religion evil?
In this post, I’ll show you a quick way to explain why religion itself isn’t evil—even in a post-9/11 America. While teaching a couple of world religions courses at local universities, I often heard students say things like, “This is just like in all religion…” But lumping all religions together just tells me you haven’t done your homework. Saying religion itself is dangerous is like saying belief itself is dangerous. Of course, we don’t just believe—we believe ideas, like “Barack Obama is the President of the United States,” “Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream is delicious,” and “It is always wrong to torture babies for fun.” Ideas are powerful. And they have consequences.
Apples and Oranges
Comparing the beliefs of religious people is often like comparing apples and oranges. Or take music as an example. Imagine you’re at a CD store browsing through a new age section with a bunch of quiet stuff like Enya and Loreena McKennitt. Then you see another section with a bunch ofMegadeth, P.O.D and Korn. You wouldn’t lump all this stuff together and say “all music is noisy.” After all, they’re all basically the same. They all use instruments and vocals to produce songs, right? Why do this with religion?
Consider these two beliefs:
- It’s good to be a terrorist.
- It’s good to be a pacifist.
Obviously, a Muslim extremist’s belief that “it’s good to be a terrorist” is way different than a Quaker’s belief that “it’s good to be a pacifist.” For example, contrast the September 11 terrorist attacks with the Quakers’ influence on colonial Pennsylvania—which was basically unarmed as a matter of policy for about 75 years! So, is religion itself evil? Ask yourself: “Are these beliefs both dangerous or evil? Do they produce the same kinds of people or actions?”
What Would Jesus Do?
There’s a reason the teachings of Jesus has been a force of good in the world–for Christians and non-Christians alike: When Jesus said “love your neighbor,” he didn’t just mean our friends and family. He meant anyone who needs help. Historically, these Christian beliefs resulted in the invention of hospitals, the abolition of slavery, and the alleviation of human suffering through countless humanitarian missions around the world.
Terrorists who wrap their evil actions up in religious terms don’t represent everyone who believes in God any more than communist governments that have collectively murdered hundreds of millions represent all atheists.
Of course, anyone can say, “I’m religious” or even claim to follow Jesus—and then turn around and commit some psycho heinous act that’s totally against what Jesus taught. But the Apostle John actually said that you’re a total liar if you live like that (1 John 2:4-6).
Reminds me of how Greg Koukl likes to say, “Not everyone who claims Christ is claimed byChrist.” Biblical Christianity shows that religion itself isn’t evil. So it’s not really religion itself that’s the problem. It’s the content of certain beliefs that we need to carefully evaluate for truth. Because ideas have consequences.
The Gardener and the Brain Surgeon
J.P. Moreland once illustrated this in a class by telling the story of the Gardener and the Brain Surgeon. And it goes something like this: Imagine a gardener thinks a special bush you planted was a weed. You hired him to come out and weed your yard and he pulls up your special bush. That wouldn’t be good, but it’s not the end of the world. Just go to the store, buy yourself another special bush and tell the gardener not to pull your new special bush. No big deal, right?
But, what if you need brain surgery and you hear your brain surgeon asking one of the staff, “Now, when I operate on this guy…um…Isn’t the brain located somewhere near the heart?” Now, if that actually happened, you’d better run and find yourself another brain surgeon! Here’s the point. Sometimes being wrong about something isn’t a big deal, like the case of the gardener. Sometimes, it’s a huge deal, like in the case with the brain surgeon. As Moreland put it:
The more important the issue, the greater the harm in having a false belief. Your picture of God is more like brain surgery than gardening…How a person thinks about God has a huge impact on the way they live the rest of their lives.
Religion isn’t dangerous. Rather, it’s false beliefs about God that can have devastating consequences. In light of 9/11, William Lane Craig noted:
I think the Muslim terrorists have made a terrible mistake. And the reason is: I think they have the wrong god. The god that they think has commanded them to do this doesn’t exist. Therefore, they are terribly, and tragically mistaken.
Seems like 9/11 brought Americans together in a way no other national tragedy has—at least in my lifetime. We all stood back in horror and called it a “Day of Evil.” A decade after 9/11, even the late Christopher Hitchens wrote that this remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida: Simply Evil. I agree.
Something’s Wrong
Terrorism is evil and it’s not the way things should be. But it’s another in-your-face reminder that there’s something horribly wrong with our world. How does the Christian worldview make sense of this? Some of my friends have joined me in posting their thoughts on the issues related to evil, terrorism and religion after 9/11. I encourage you to browse through these related posts from around the apologetics blogosphere (listed in alphabetical order).*
- Are We All Moral Monsters? – Clay Jones
- Evil’s Three Faces and a Christian Response – Rob Lundberg (The Real Issue)
- Ground Zero: Why truth matters for preventing another 9/11-style attack – Wintery Knight
- Suffering and the Cross of Christ – Holly Ordway (Hieropraxis)
- The Need for Moral Choices and Consequences – Randy Everist (Possible Worlds)
- The Problem of Evil: Who’s problem is it? – Steve Wilkinson (Tilled Soil)
- Where Was God on 9/11? – Stephen Bedard (Hope’s Reason Blog)
I could be considered “new atheist.” There is nothing more disheartening than seeing someone devote their life to a mythological object. Religion has been nothing but a force for control, it is on the decline because we aren’t forced to believe in it anymore. If religion is really that good, please explain why the last pope had a solid golden throne when there is global poverty.
Of course, I may as well believe in spiderman for all the level of proof it provides.
Religion is only bad when its authority (typically its deity via its sacred text) commands something to all of its followers that is clearly morally deficient. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy that’s bad, a person doing something in the name of a deity or religion that is not generally supported by either. Interestingly, often the critic of the hypocrite is actually agreeing with the deity or religion the hypocrite falsely follows, as the critic is ultimately complaining that the hypocrite does not follow his/her deity or religion well enough!
Jason @ http://www.jasondykstrawrites.com
What’s scary is that believers have different interpretations AND are self-righteous AND are willing to use faith to justify horrible acts (like WL Craig’s justification of genocide). This is a recipe for atrocities. History is riddled with them. What scares us is not just the existence of crazy religious leaders, but the existence of faith itself because it’s such an effective vehicle for atrocious acts.
Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy that’s bad, a person doing something in the
name of a deity or religion that is not generally supported by either.
More than a third of British-born, university educated muslims think killing in defense of the faith they identify with is justified. The percentages rise in direct response to the level of fundamentalism. And all religious people adhere to some level of fundamentalism. The questionsd in the case of islam isn’t about who is hypocritical but what is being defended? What is meant by being attacked? Blasphemy? Questioning? Criticizing? Acting contrary to scriptural commandments?
No, the problem isn’t hypocrisy. That’s a core value within faith-based respect. It’s as Frank says: faith. Faith does not produce knowledge Ever. About anything. It produces explanations and endorsements that are not adjudicated by reality for their truth value. Faith stands incompatible with and contrary to justified true beliefs and becomes merely an exercise of apology in the name of piousness. That’s why respecting faith-based beliefs about anything is a guaranteed way to undermine respect for what’s true.
Sorry for the length of my comment but I feel it is needed to explain why and how your argument runs aground by what you mistakenly assume is the reason for the rise of New Atheism, and you missed the major hint of what the underlying problem is in ALL religions given to you by Harris’ seminal work in the title: The End of Faith.
Empowering faith is the cause of the problems brought into effect by the actions of believers… actions both benign and malignant. You – like all religious followers – have no independent reality-based means at your disposal to determine which faith-based belief is which. So the common problem remains with the epistemology that grants faith-based beliefs any respect at all in the public domain.
Even your vaunted WL Craig, who shares the problem of having to work with the identical broken epistemology as all believers of any religion must do, stumbles and bumbles his way into having to state that the Canaanite genocide – because it was supposedly ordered by his god – was peachy keen goodness in action that harmed the poor but pious and brave ‘Israeli’ soldiers who had to carry out these divine (and therefore ‘good’) orders from above. This is identical reasoning offered by Himmler to the SS troops in Poland, that their genocidal actions were justified by divine order of their Dear Leader and so were equivalently ‘good’. Same argument. Same epistemology. Different religion.
Harris steps forward after 9/11 and writes why empowering faith-based beliefs with confidence is just too dangerous in today’s world to go unchallenged and without loud and sustained criticism for their effects. Dawkins calls it what it is: a delusion, because reality is not allowed to arbitrate claims made about it by faith, no different than the person who believes tin foil hats offer protection from alien signals or assumes that he or she really is a reincarnated Napoleon or Jesus or Joan of Arc . It is the epistemology of faith that is a guaranteed way to fool one’s self, to be gullible, to be a good little soldier and commit acts that may or may not be ‘good’ in deed but acceptable in piousness and divine righteousness. That they are faith-based actions is not a justification in and of itself (Craig’s support of Divine Command Theory is no different in justification than those who support Dominionism, than those who support violent jihadism; they believe their faith justifies real actions that harm real people in real life to be ‘good’).
New Atheists insist that human actions be judged on their own merit without pious baggage to confuse labeling the causal effects in reality, and reasonably compared and contrasted with models of enhancing or reducing well-being and dignity of the people so affected. For this temerity, we have been vilified, misrepresented, mistrusted, called all kinds of names including the all time favourite: militant!… without even a trace amount of violence to be found. Criticizing religious faith is considered more immoral, more disgusting, more intolerant, than, say, WL Craig not just excusing a genocide but calling it ‘good’ because it is pious!
Just think about that for a moment and try to appreciate just how bent is the thinking that accepts pious genocide as okay and reasonable but criticism of it for its real world effects as intolerant!
The irony burns, doesn’t it? It should.
The religious mindset great and simple is skewered by this faulty, untrustworthy, and rotten epistemology and we find compelling examples of its use all around us everyday. Sure, religious folk – just like us non believers – also do good but attributing good to religious sensibilities is false promotion on the one hand and an attack against those who do good without it on the other. That’s why atheists are widely held in such social contempt and worthy of death in many countries: because the religious epistemology that empowers faith-based beliefs to be exempt from reality’s arbitration of them continues to produce faulty conclusions based on a faulty presumption of attribution and no way to check it for validity. All of the US, for example, is kafir and blasphemers in the religious minds of those who act for al qaeda, deserving of justifiable punishment and death for their apostasy. This is WL Craig thinking in reverse. It’s not reasonable and doesn’t become so claiming that Craig’s faith-based beliefs are correct. If they are, he has no way of finding out because has no way of finding them wrong. His faith has effectively blocked this honest inquiry and replaced it with dogma.
The same problem arises when faith is referred to scriptural authority as if this was sufficient. Because you have no independent means to justify why you accept certain biblical bits to be literal and other bits to be metaphorical, you don;t honestly know which is which. Instead, you call on ‘faith’ to guide your theological surgery of it and assume this is sufficient. It’s not because it’s not independent of you.
The same problem arises in your broken analogy. If needed, I don’t want a brain surgeon to operate in a state of ignorance informed by faith that my brain is located somewhere near my stomach and accept the argument that because he or she sometimes helped patients that this is sufficient evidence for expertise! I want a brain surgeon trained by expertise in the reality of the brain, thank you very much, and not the faith that his or her beliefs are equivalent to reality. But the epistemology of religion does not do this, does not allow reality to adjudicate claims made about it. It relies on faith to be held in higher esteem than reality. And that’s why the epistemology of theology poisons everything that it presumes and falsely attributes to its domain. And nothing – nothing! – is exempt from this claim of pseudo-expertise, pseudo-answers, pseudo-explanations offered by religion.
This religious encroachment into areas of knowledge, wisdom, morality, ethics, philosophy, science, education, public policy, law, government, and so on is identical to what we see in encroaching claims made by alternative medicine, where adjudication by reality is categorized as a bad thing, as being allied with Big Pharma and profits. The same is true for conspiracy ‘theorists’ who attribute nefarious deeds to some Secret Big Brother Government. The same epistemology is used for astrology and anti-vaccinations, where compelling evidence from reality is put aside and faith-based belief is promoted to be at least equivalent if not superior! Faith-based belief is antithetical to knowledge about reality and this shown to us over and over again. Some of us, however, have advanced our thinking from accepting the claims of others in the name of god to insisting on independent verification from reality.
We see the delusion, the poison, the false attributions sustained by misplaced trust and confidence in faith rather than reality all around us. And the biggest supporter of this methodology, this broken epistemology, is religious belief. That’s why New Atheists will not stay silent any longer. It’s too dangerous. And the next generation is heeding our message, thank goodness.
…in total solidarity… https://kusmeeks.info
One of the obvious psychological and cognitive mistakes of the New Atheists are over-generalization and black and white thinking.
The fact that several, even many religions does not mean that Religion (that is all religions) is bad.
It is not the belief in a supernatural creator in and of itself which causes people to act badly.
These are some qualities humans have attributed to Him which lead some folks to commit atrocities or act in a very detrimental way for society.
And as I present on my blog, Biblical inerrancy can be as much a problem as Coranic inerrancy at times.
Lovely greetings from continental Europe.
Lothars Sohn – Lothar’s son
http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com