The Argument for Religion
Posted by Ted Bronson | Filed under Hip Waders Required, Religious Confusion
Religion makes people feel safe. Religion makes people feel that there is someone who loves them. Religion makes people feel like someone, somewhere has a plan for them in the cosmos. Religion makes people feel like there is someone they can count on when things get tough. Religion makes people feel that there is someone in the universe that will help them if all they do is submit their will to the greater glory. Religion makes people feel that they are special in the eyes of their Lord and that gives something to feel superior about. Religion gives people a reason to justify their hatred of others that are different than themselves.
Gee, given all that, I guess I have been wrong my whole life. I guess there really is an invisible man living in the sky who will grant my wishes and smite my enemies and protect me from hurricanes and guide my career.
Oh. No? Are you sure?
You mean that God in all his forms and faces doesn’t have room for me in His universe because I don’t believe in his omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence? This from the same Scripture that says ‘love thy enemies’? Or do you mean the old Testament God of the Jews and Christians? The one who called for the deaths of individuals as well as the slaughter of entire cultures who were not of the Chosen People? Maybe you mean the Muslim God who still calls for it? Or do you mean any of thousands other religions around the world and throughout history that have warred and destroyed in the name of their Gods and Goddesses?
Perhaps you mean I should believe in the cargo cults of the South Seas who believe that giant flying birds made of metal will drop gifts from the sky? How about I chose to believe in Kali and Shiva, the Destroyers of the Universe? Or maybe even Odin and his crows waiting for Ragnarök and hope that by dying in battle I would be escorted to Valhalla to fight on the side of order?
Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster a good enough God in which to place my Faith? After all He just got a statue put up in his honor. Perhaps you mean I should lend my Faith to the Old Ones? Or maybe some obscure Indian religion based on fertility rites and hopes for a good buffalo hunt?
Would you find me an acceptable political candidate only if I followed your idea of who God is? Or can I just put my faith into Fred, my favorite tomato plant. After all, Fred provides sustenance for my earthly flesh and if you ever ate Hazel’s tomato sauce, you could believe that Heaven itself had provided for your soul. Perhaps my dog Mal is actually God, after all, he killed a Serpent in our Garden and is universally regarded as The Best Dog Ever.
Would my lack of faith in some almighty being mean that I can’t have any morality? If that is the case, why did my own solemn oath to defend my country or to tell the truth in court be accepted either, since I said ‘I do so affirm’ instead of ‘so help me god’? If my lack of Faith is any indication, you couldn’t trust me to hold to ANY oath, regardless of the words I used, therefore meaning that my word has no value to anyone about anything. In that case, are you going to assume that everything I say is a lie and sign out a complaint or report me for perjury? Do you assume that since I have no Faith, I can’t have morals at all? That I am a murderous thief who would break all the commandments with no thought about consequences? Do you really think I’m that stupid?
If so, then you, sir, are blind. If so, then you are so godstruck that you cannot even be intellectually honest about your fellow human beings. Morality. Is. That is a complete sentence. Moral behavior doesn’t come from a book of law or a book of faith. It is simply a set of behaviors that allow society to work. Humans learn it from our mothers and fathers, then from our friends and siblings. When you strip away everything else from every religion on the planet, you are left with three things, and they are things that we learned as children:
1) Do no un-necessary harm. This basically means that harming another, or yourself, is a negative action; while at the same time acknowledging that sometimes causing harm is required.
2) Work toward perfection. This is essential to growth as a person. Even if you fail at reaching perfection, you will have improved yourself in the process.
3) Teach your children to be better people than you are. You may ask yourself ‘better’ on what scale? And you would right to do so. That is where that most slippery of religious concepts comes in: Free Will.
Within those three simple but wide guidelines can be found the core foundation of morality. “Sin” isn’t against any god, it is against yourself, or your brother, or your neighbor. “Sin” has real world implications, it is not spiritual folly. Within those three tenets are the basis for the morals of honesty, integrity, charity, kindness, ethics, education, wisdom, honor, love, joy, patience, work, and rest. Also within that trio is the understanding that sometimes harming another or yourself is required for the physical or emotional well being of another. It allows that criminals should indeed be punished for they are a blight upon society, but that the punishment should fit the crime and actually be carried out fully. Upon this triad sits the knowledge that abortion might not be right for YOU, but it might be right for someone else. Or that the death penalty is a commensurate punishment for some crimes. Or even that sometimes, you have to tell your child that his tonsils have to come out and he’ll feel better in a couple of days.
This triad doesn’t recognize a ‘soul’, but it recognizes human dignity. It does recognize that each and every single human being has a right to liberty up to the point where it interferes with the liberty of another. It recognizes that a person can have FAITH in themselves and their families and their countries and allows them to choose how best to live and function within the framework of their societies. “Sin” happens when a person fails to abide by the tenets of polite society. I don’t mean polite in a ‘good morning, ma’am, let me hold the door for you’ kind of way, although that social lubrication helps. I mean that when a person breaks with custom, and harms another, they have lowered themselves in the eyes of their neighbors; and, if they have any sense of dignity or self-worth, in their own as well.
I don’t faith, capital “F” in any religion. I do however have faith that my fellow man wants the same things I do: to be treated honorably, to be allowed to live peacefully, to be allowed the liberty that all human beings have a right to enjoy not by grant of government or god but rather by the fact that I am a rational being. If I said I worship the words of our Founders, would you allow that I have least read them, and understand what they mean and studied to find out answers? If so, then I declare that I worship the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill Of Rights.
And that should be good enough to run for President, despite what Townhall says.
Tags: religion, self-reliance
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April 9th, 2008
>Morality. Is. That is a complete sentence. Moral behavior doesn’t come from a book of law or a book of faith. It is simply a set of behaviors that allow society to work.
Even here, where you say “society to work”, you imply a larger context in which this phrase is evaluated.
In an atheistic thought mode (not my normal one by any means) I cannot find this context. What ultimate difference does it make whether I live a “moral” life, or an immoral one? Either way, my heart eventually stops beating.
Atheism == nihilism for me. Your attempt to hold forth “better people”, operating under the flag of “free will” fails to model what I call “the entropy of the human soul”. For all the potential greatness of the pure human, the tendency to use the free will to glorify the self plays out in all manner of strangeness. Has you a dollar for every self-help book at the local store, how rich would you be? And yet, the sales of mind-altering drugs increase at a steeper rate than the books. Empirically, your prescription seems suspect, sir.
Politically, faith in a greater context of some sort is the ultimate feedback loop that my leadership might not slip into full-on megalomania.
Furthermore, it can be (sometimes) a litmus test for whether the leader in question has character. For example, Joe Lieberman is a conservative Jew. He adheres to that context rather well, and I have greater confidence in him as a result. G.W.Bush and H.R. Clinton are both Methodists, so let’s not get too enthusiastic on this point.
Enjoyed your post, for all my disagreement therewith.
Cheers,
Chris
April 9th, 2008
Chris, when I say “society to work”, you have to understand that society is a man-made machine. It has no context other than that. Societies are machines that allow human beings, flawed as they may be, to live together causing the least amount of disturbance to each other. When I say “…they have lowered themselves in the eyes of their neighbors; and, if they have any sense of dignity or self-worth, in their own as well” it is because I believe that rational humans will feel the emotion of shame or regret or at the very least feel responsible to themselves and their communities to atone via accepting censure, punishment, or financial penalty. The lack of responsibility has caused more damage to our machine than any other sand in the gears. When a population starts to think that they no longer have to stand on their own and face the world and actually make good on their word, you get our current culture: housing market melt-downs, welfare state, et al. However, that feeling of responsibility isn’t cultured anymore, so people feel little when it comes to breaking their word or a contract or a vow. You equate atheism to nihilism. This is so far from the truth that I cannot believe you made the connection. The nihilist believes that since there is no god, there is no point to anything. By that definition, they are acting like a spoiled child who says ‘I’ll just take my ball and go home,’ when what he really means is ‘I like this game so much that I even bought a ball; I just don’t want to play by your rules or with your friends.’ The nihilist is really just a pissed off believer. The atheist, truly believes that there is no great and glorious plan, no heavenly reward or damnation, and that what we experience and learn and teach is the point of life. A few thousand years ago, the point of life was food, fuck, more food. I think humanity has risen at least a little bit up the ladder since then.
You reference self help books and drugs in the same equation. I think you may have a valid argument if you fill in the rest of the blackboard. I again go back to the triad of ideas: some folks are as perfect as they are ever going to be and it just isn’t perfect enough for them or for society. Instead of jumping off a bridge, they are choosing a way to try to improve themselves. The rest of the problem lies in the fact that our culture refuses to let anyone fail. Often, no matter what you do as an individual, you must first learn how to fail explosively in order to win gracefully. Millions of words have been written about how to pull yourself back together after you fail, but not enough about how to take responsibility for yourself first, in order that you won’t fail; or at least so that you know when you do, you can try again. Instead we have a culture that tells people their failures are the fault of someone else, so they keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Finally, I actually agree with you on your last point. However, it is easier to go sit in a pew for twenty years and say you never heard your reverend speak ill than it is to actually raise your voice against it. Or to claim that the spirit moved you, or that you have seen the other man’s soul. I agree totally that a person’s character can be judged by how he lives within his own self-inflicted vows or strictures. If a guy can’t be trusted not to piss off his own god, how can he be trusted to act morally at other times. But perhaps the question shouldn’t be how he lives his life according to his religion (if he has any) but how he treats others who don’t follow it.
April 9th, 2008
Moral behavior doesn’t come from a book of law or a book of faith. It is simply a set of behaviors that allow society to work. Humans learn it from our mothers and fathers, then from our friends and siblings.
Spot-on. Religion merely reinforces morality; it is not a source of morality. It seems to me the main reason this gets confused is that we can’t put a specific date or place to the origin of our moral code, so we tend to treat it as simply a set of self-evident truths that have been around since the beginning of time. Put another way, as though our moral code were something invented by God Himself. Even if that’s not quite true, for most people it still works as a “quick & dirty” explanation for why our sense of morality is the way it is.
April 10th, 2008
Good post Ted, speaks true to me.
As our favorite author once said:
Morality is merely an agreement with yourself to follow your own rules.
April 10th, 2008
This post is full of logical problems.
First, you begin with a bunch of statements about religion, mostly true, some false. The main flaw in your opening section is confusion about whether you mean the Christian faith, of which each denomination is a religion, or of religion in general. Religion is the practice of faith; we do things “religiously”.
I bring in the dictionary only to allow you to be more precise in what you are arguing. There is the notion of believing or not believing in spirits, unseen powers, gods, etc., that is, whether one is a theist or atheist. Then there is the question of religion, whether a theist is a practioner of a particular method of worship. The term is overloaded to distinguish pagans from Muslims, Jews, or Christians, but also to distinguish the Catholic religion from the from Baptist religion. To me these are better called sects or denominations, but I don’t get to decide.
But more specifically, in your post you set up the Christian as the bogeyman, since he denies your morality as you deny his God, as if to lump all religions together as the opposition.
I, however, am a Christian who does not deny your morality or ethics. Ethics are rules we adopt for ourselves. Morals are rules we (each individually) believe everyone ought to follow. Laws are those rules which the government insists everyone follow. More here.
Skipping ahead a bit, the part about whether you must share my faith to get my vote is better made this way: if you won’t vote for anyone unless he claims to be Christian, then you are saying that any atheist willing to lie about his atheism is more trustworthy than one who will not lie about it. The insistence that only Christians can have integrity is thus seen either as self-delusion or as pure bigotry, in the original sense, and runs into this obvious contradiction.
I am pleased that you accept the Christian virtues as your own, and hope you realize that there are libertarian Christians, or at least, I am one.
April 10th, 2008
Please ignore the first sentence of my previous comment. I was originally going to pick your post apart, but decided to preach instead. The “logical problems” to which I referred were primarily all the same problem, failing to take on the burden of proof and argumentum ad logicam, calling the absence of a proof disproof.
April 10th, 2008
Socrates, thank you for your comments. But you lead me to a few questions.
Which statements I made that you think are false? Are they ‘false’ because of scripture or dogma, or based on history and fact?
You say my opening is flawed because I wasn’t clear about which faith I was discussing. I apologize for your misunderstanding. I was trying to set the tone that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is no more or less a valid faith than the cargo cults or the Big Three. You make a point of talking about different sects of the Christian faith, but you fail to understand that I find all religions or sects or faiths equally silly representations of the same Invisible Man.
I did not set up the Christians as bogeymen, as you claim. I did however mention some things that referenced both history and scripture. The bogeyman, if any, is ANY religion that puts an individual’s destiny in anyone’s hands other than their own, be it Christ or Yahweh or a big shiny airplane. Those who hope in a deity without having faith in themselves are doomed to fail, regardless of the undertaking.
I applaud that you personally can accept that I am a moral and ethical man. My words and deeds are all the world has by which to asses my value or detriment to society. However, even though you get that point, you go on to define morals as rules we think EVERYONE SHOULD follow. That is patently not true. I have no more right to tell you how to live your private life than you have to tell your neighbor. I can guide my children, teach by example, and use my own judgment in the running of my household… but that stops at the property line. I would like to think that others would do the same, but realize that is just a pipe dream since our society in general is failing to teach our children to take personal responsibility for their actions. An atheist rarely if ever tries to convert the faithful to their way of thinking. If they do, it from a sense of insecurity or a longing for some form of power over another. The religious are renowned for preaching their faith and deriding the faiths or gods of others if opportunity presents.
In your almost final paragraph, I’m not sure whether you were calling me a bigot, or saying that someone who wouldn’t vote for a person of a different religion then themselves was a bigot. But to answer the other part, I would rather someone got up on the podium and said ‘I go to church at such and such a place because my wife makes me’ rather than a hypocrite who doesn’t believe in the tenets of his own chosen faith try to tell me that he is a “good christian/catholic/jew/muslim/spaghettihead, etc.” when his actions or speech give lie to the facts.
I do realize that there are ‘libertarian Christians’ as you say, and have no problem with them whatsoever, as long as they don’t insist on preaching at me in my house. Your second comment comes perilously close to that. I hope you will agree that I have been as polite to you as you have been to me. With that said, I must call to account that your final line has null semantic or logical value. It is instead an insistence that I take on faith your imaginary friend, and that brand of subtle faith-ism tells me that it is possible you are not interested in a discussion, but rather a conversion. I would rather that you, as you say, “pick apart” my post with logic and facts rather than try to use the very dogma you follow as a backstop for your argument.
April 11th, 2008
No, Ted, I have no ambition of recruiting you to my side, because we are basically on the same side already, that of the patriot. We can disagree without taking our eyes off the enemy, I think. The enemy is the one who would claim that the infallibility of his belief system gives his believers the authority to dictate such.
As far as morality goes, yours appears to include Tolerance as a trump of sorts. Your morality, and there is no other word for it, includes the belief that individuals ought to be able to do whatever they want. That is a different thing than setting standards of conduct, as some call morality, but it is no less a belief that everyone should act a certain way, in leaving everyone else alone.
Just because you don’t try to force your entire moral system on everyone else doesn’t mean you don’t think everyone should believe as you do. You may even see the value in having alternate versions of morality in the world, but that is part and parcel of wanting to see tolerance applied to everyone. I don’t find anything wrong with any of that.
But one egregious error in your OP is saying that “religion makes people feel” this way or that way. It may seem like a nit for me to pick it out, but it’s really overgeneralizing, and will ring true only to those who agree with you. Not all religions make people feel a given way.
I understand that you see, e.g., ancestor worship and Christianity as psychological equivalents, but by lumping all religions together you tar them all with the brush of the most objectionable.
[The Christian] Religion makes people feel that they are special in the eyes of their Lord and that gives something to feel superior about.
“Superior” to what? If you mean superior to bacteria or polar bears, then I would agree. If you mean being “special in the eyes of their Lord” makes them feel superior to you, then I would disagree. Christianity teaches, and its adherents are heretics if they don’t believe, that you, too, are special to God. Feeling superior to those who don’t believe is a sin of Pride.
Religion gives people a reason to justify their hatred of others that are different than themselves.
That may be true of specific people, but they are in error. Christianity teaches that we are all the same in the eyes of God, so see the foregoing.
All of those statements taken together show that you are using the intolerance of some as a club to beat the others about the head and shoulders. The logical error is using “some” to mean “all”.
I think I’ve covered my objections to your post.
April 12th, 2008
Damn, I hate being misquoted…
April 13th, 2008
This is the thing that bugs me about any faith. You get a sub-group that is “not following” the true faith, or whatever, yet I never see other members of the faith calling these mistaken people out and publicly denoucing them.
Except for the very extreme cases (Westboro Baptist, Warren Jeffs, etc.).
I don’t even really care about John Q. Parishoner, but somewhere there is likely a religous leader who is promoting such faith based intolerance and superiority, and no one is telling him or her to stop. I have a similar problem with police agencies where good officers tolerate bad ones in order to maintain solidarity or some such crap.
Yes, every group has bad apples, bound to happen, human nature, whatever, but for the love of pete, at least let everyone else know such bad apples are the fringe and if you can do something to diminish them, do it!