Anti-Religion and Unintended Consequences

This week's cover article in Time magazine and the results of a recent survey on the extent of religious faith in America got me thinking.

I

I've been critical of anti-scientific thinking for some time now. One of the books that has had the most influence on my world view was Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. And in the great debate about whether science and reason should rule the world rather than faith and religion, I am a partisan of the science camp, and not much of a reconciler. This book ought to be mandatory reading for seventh-graders.

Still, I was recently upset over an arrogant, disparaging series of statements and interviews by Sagan's successor as the hero of the scientific popularization movement, Richard Dawkins. Evolutinary biology has taken the most direct hits of any facet of scientific learning from the antiscience crowd ever since Darwin's theory of evolutionary adaptability surpassed Lamarck's spontaneous mutation theory. Dawkins is a tremendous popular ambassador of his discipline and one could hope for no finer explanations of the overwhelming scientific evidence that evolution, in its broad strokes, is as convincing a theory as that of gravity. But one could hope for a more tactful person -- or at least a more tactful approach -- to forcefully explain why religion is unnecessary and fundamentalist religion is dangerous. Maybe some level of getting in peoples' faces is necessary to achieve that goal, but I continue to question that.

II

The reason is that I see so many people around who do religion the right way. They understand the moral guidance that it offers and they try their best to enact it in their lives. They don't get in my face about my beliefs or actions; rather, they live their lives well and teach by quiet example. And their examples are powerful demonstrations of the ability of religion to do good. And it crosses sectarian lines -- I have protestant friends, Catholic friends, Jewish friends, a former client who is Muslim, and more recently, a Buddhist monk. Now, this assortment of so many good, exemplary people of such diverse backgrounds of faith suggests that being good has nothing to do with whether one believes in God and if so which way God is worshipped. What it suggests to me is that religions, as institutions of social control, necessarily must adopt and advance a constructive and positive set of moral guidelines for their followers.

It also suggests to me that most people want to be good. That is cause for hope. It is really fundamentalism and the antiscience that goes along with it -- the rejection of the role of rationality in favor of adherence to the literal truth of a collection of bronze age myths about sky gods and warrior-kings -- that gets me upset. I really don't have a problem with people who look into these old stories and glean what is valuable and relevant to today's society from them. That, it seems to me, is an entirely worthwhile and important task. Perhaps we don't need to use those particular sources, but I'm a big one for understanding the importance of history.

III

Still, I don't recall seeing that much prominence given to religious doubt and skepticism in the widespread culture until very recently. Until recently, I've seen a lot of surveys that point very much in the opposite direction, and a single survey is often not very reliable evidence. Perhaps what's going on has its roots in politics and the incautious remarks of our national leaders to promote the "Global War on Terror" ("global" meaning "mostly confined to Afghanistan and Iraq").

George W. Bush rose to power unashamedly on the votes of evangelical Christians, bringing out into the open a phenomenon that had been coming to a boil for about twenty years. He has governed as one of them. He has labored mightily to coordinate his political support to lean heavily on these voters. In our country's hour of need and despair, he used their code words and appealed to their faith as the primary means to rally the country. Since then, he has continued to go to that well to seek assurances and legitimacy for his policies.

You may recall the President's use of the word "crusade" in the days following 9/11. Following the cue of our leaders, people across the country -- largely but not exclusively political conservatives and evangelical Christians -- began a campaign of criticism against Islam. The phrase "Religion of Peace" has turned in to something of a joke, and translations of the more violent and intolerant portions of the Koran to illustrate how Islam is on a theological collision course with the Christian West are easy to find. These same people, and there are now quite a lot of them, pooh-pooh the existence of "moderate" Muslims and reject the idea that Islam can ever become reconciled with other religions to the point that peaceful co-existence is possible.

IV

I'm not going to challenge the merits of those thoughts here. But instead, perhaps the criticism being aimed at Islam from the RR corner has had an unintended side effect -- it has caused skepticism of religion, in a generalized sense, to increase. After all, if Islam is such a bad religion, what is it about Islam that makes it bad? Those bloody, terrible portions of the Koran sound not all that unlike the more unpleasant and violent parts of the Old Testament. The bizarre mysticism and prohpecies of other portions of the Koran don't seem that different from the Revelation of Saint John (which features, among other absurdities, a returned Messiah with seven swords for a tongue).

A lot of people, from whatever background, have noticed along with me that there are good folks everywhere who subscribe to any number of world views. The disconnect between good moral behavior and religiosity ought to be apparent to everyone. So it would be ironic indeed if the result of his polarizing appeals had the effect of diminishing the strength of religion generally.