All of us have heard by now of the poisoning of schoolgirls in Afghanistan. Ophelia has a short post on “Poisoning schoolgirls for god.” Of course, this is a heinous crime: poisoning girls for the offence of wanting to learn; but it must not be thought to be a distinct crime from the offence of poisoning the minds of the men who committed the act. Religion is an intellectual and social pathology, and should be recognised as such. Of course, the same kind of pathology is evident on occasion in the atheist movement, as the discussion over at RDF of the Women in Secularism Conference demonstrates. Some idiot calling himself “The Ghost of Mr Emmeline Pankhurst” has taken it upon himself to trash the whole discussion thread for his own amusement. It is the institutionalisation of this kind of brainless misogyny that constitutes at least part of religion’s pathology. (And RDF had better start cleaning up its house if it doesn’t want to be painted with the same brush.)
You can see the pathology neatly at work in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called. Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever. For whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ. [1 Cor 7:20-22]
Paul simply reads slavery as freedom and freedom as slavery. Because you are a freed person belonging to the Lord your outward circumstances make no difference. “You were bought,” as he says in the very next verse (23), “with a price.” Life doesn’t count. Your situation or condition now is a matter of indifference. What matters is your belonging to the Lord. You are property, so stop worrying about what you do or do not have. Don’t worry about the injustice of slavery: that would show worldly concern, and you are already set apart from the world. Your earthly life is an irrelevance, because you have been raised with Christ, and that new life is not something of this world, worldly, but it is a foretaste of heaven, of what will happen at the resurrection of the dead.
So, of course, as Paula Kirby points out in a Washington Post piece that Ophelia linked yesterday, and that I had missed when it was first published (15 February 2011 — or perhaps I just forgot, but it’s such a powerful piece that I shouldn’t have), nicely turning Paul on his head:
Religion is the ultimate slavery: it is the slavery of the mind, slavery to the fear of divine judgment and damnation. The devilish irony consists in the fact that ‘divine judgment’ and ‘damnation’ are themselves the inventions of religion: religion creates and exquisitely perfects the fear, then cynically declares itself the sole and indispensable liberator from it.
Being bought with a price means something. It means that you are a slave. ’Islam’ means submission, and it too enforces god’s possession of his earthly creation. All human beings can do is to submit, for who knows better than god how we should live, how our societies should be ordered, how our lives should go? No one, of course, but that is lost on those who purport to speak for god. And that’s a pathology. People who have hallucinations have a mental pathology. How about people who claim to speak for god? How is that not a pathology?
These religious injunctions would all be a kind of mindless fatalism, if the command wasn’t also that we should embrace our slavery, and do our utmost to fulfil the role in which we have been placed. This is not our doing, rather, in whatever state we find ourselves when we “are called,” we must make the most of what we are given in that state. If we are slaves, that means serving our masters more faithfully, and with true devotion, for that is to be truly free. Clearly, Paul went to school with the Stoics, but he turns Stoic fatalism regarding the present into a fatalism about the future. He urges us to embrace whatever future seems indicated by our present situation. I can recall my father quoting to me, at a point of crisis in my life, Paul’s words to the Philippians (4.11), in the Authorised Version (KJV): “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” (Italicised words in the KJV are interpolated by the translators.) Hence his admonition to slaves not to seek their freedom, even if they can acquire it. You must be content with what you have. Are you ignorant? Then stay that way. I did not find my father’s intervention particularly helpful.
But this illustrates quite clearly the pathology of religion. Religion is a form of submission to tyranny, and those who are unwilling to submit must be made to do so. Girls want to become educated! For allah’s sake! What could prompt them to put themselves forward, when that is not the role assigned to them by the tyrant god? They are, as the New Testament says as well, to subordinate themselves to men, just as men subordinate themselves to god. And men are to be as gods to them. If they do not take direction (in this case, if they are wives), then they can be refused sex. If they still will not submit, they may be beaten. If they are not married, and will not do as they are told, then they may be poisoned or killed outright. (The religion may not say this, but religious misogyny makes killing to preserve male honour possible.) And these are the creatures who dare to think themselves capable of learning?! Of bettering their condition?! They should recall what they were when called (born), only questionably human; there, as Richard Holloway says, to be fucked, not to seek to learn, not to contribute, not to think themselves the equal of men. There are atheists who still think like this, because they still haven’t got over their religious indoctrination, and the social pathology that results from it. Having a Women in Secularism Conference! Who heard of anything so absurd?! Women are for fucking, for bearing children, for caring for them, for keeping the home fires burning, not for philosophy, science, politics, or the expression of opinions. That’s reserved for men.
So, poisoning schoolgirls is normative behaviour for religion, for religion is a deeply pathological, primarily patriarchal system of tyranny and lies. Let’s not pretend. Just as Paul could call slavery freedom, so religion, as Paula Kirby points out, is the bearer of lies, calling it truth, and of slavery, calling it freedom, monstrous human claims masquerading as something transcendent and divine:
And yet we are invited to credit religion as the source of true freedom? It is a laughable claim, a disgraceful claim, a claim that makes a mockery of language as well as of truth and of human dignity. As such it is on a par with other religious claims, such as those that define perfect forgiveness as something dependent on the barbaric sacrifice-by-crucifixion of an innocent man, perfect justice as consisting in the innocent being tortured to death so the guilty can be let off scot-free, and perfect love as something that would damn us to hell for all eternity if we refuse to accept such grotesque monstrosities as evidence of a perfect and loving god.
It’s time — nay, far past midnight already — to take up arms and sack the city of god, as P.Z. Myers said in his speech to the Melbourne Global Atheist Convention. And if you haven’t read it yet, now’s as good a time as any! It’s eloquent and inspiring, a great affirmation of the power of ideas, and a mordant denunciation of the pathology of religion.
But it has a sting in its tail. Here it is:
Read the pronouncements of popes and archbishops, read the newspapers and web columns, look to the priests in their pulpits, and you’ll see something wonderful: they are reacting to the rise of the New Atheists in the same way the Roman establishment reacted to the Visigoths appearing on the horizon. I cannot blame them for being fearful; we are galloping towards the central ideas of their identity, and we aim to tear down their walls and replace their obsolete myths with change and something more vital.
Deep in their heart of hearts, they fear that a sequel to St Augustine’s City of God is in the works, and it’s going to be written by an atheist…and it will speak of a brand new world and new opportunities, it will create a new ecumene of people united under something other than the folly of faith.
So how do you kill an idea? How will we sack the city of faith?
By coming up with a better, more powerful idea. That’s the only way we can win. [my italics]
This is crucial. Blog posts are all very well, and they contribute, I think, to a changing of the guard. But they’re not enough. We need to big, powerful idea, one that will, like Augustine’s City of God, provide a new vision of a truly human society, one that has escaped the pathology of religion, one that calls upon people, as Wordsworth said ecstatically, contemplating the French Revolution,
… to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia[n], subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, — the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
“Religion is a form of submission to tyranny, and those who are unwilling to submit must be made to do so.”
Exactly. This is the core, and I think we need to emphasize it a lot.
I was on a panel with Paula Kirby at QED (and with Maryam; Geoff Whelan dubbed us the three horsewomen) (also with DJ Grothe). She talked about her own experience of religion and the fact that atheists who haven’t had it are naturally not good at addressing it, so we tend to talk past believers. I talked about this business of tyranny, and the absence of god which makes the whole system inherently unavoidably tyrannical, and whether she thought that aspect was a way to reach believers. She said she thought it was the only way.
It does have the advantage of not resting on the non-existence of god. It seems much harder to dispute the (obvious) fact that god isn’t available for appeals the way a judge is, and that that fact all by itself makes religious law A REALLY SHITTY IDEA.
A counter argument in favor of religion is history after the Englightenment dimished the influence of the Christian churches. Thanks to the Enlightenment, many people stopped fearing God and were driven to irrational enthusiasms: nationalism, imperialism, Darwinian racism, eugenics, and socialism. War mongers and racists like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, and their counterparts in France, Germany, Russia, Austria, and Italy gave the world the senseless carnage of World War I. Communists then took over Russia, and proceeded to murder more innocent people than the United States did in the Philippines and Germany did in German South-West Africa. The Nazis took over Germany in 1933, and were just as obsessed with improving the human race as the communists were with socialism.
I develop this theme more extensively at
http://newevangelist.me/2012/02/27/the-darkside-of-christian-history-by-helen-ellerby/
“The Age of Enlightenment also gave us Darwinism, the pseudo-scientific idea that human beings, not just their bodies, evolved from animals and that some human races were more evolved than others. Darwinism justifies scientific racism, eugenics, and genocide.”
Oh please! God is a specialist at racism, eugenics and genocide. Sheesh..
I am all for a powerful idea, or at least a unifying consensus where actual work can be done to counteract human insanity. I’ve tried to promote authentic liberalism, but I then I soon realized that people are happy to call themselves liberals, while doing everything possible to be as inauthentic and anti-liberal as possible.
Political and ethical attitudes for the majority seem to dwell in the subconscious, with no real coherence, assuming that their ‘values’ are coherent and rational. These subconscious values seem to be shaped by patriarchal (and matriarchal) emotions and attitudes (see George Lakoff).
Although my views are very much still a work in progress, I’m beginning to realize that it is the ethical argument that needs to be won, even when the intellectual argument for atheism and naturalism has long been won.
People like David Roemer, knowing the intellectual argument is lost, turn instead to a fantasy version of history and politics so as to try and win their ethical argument. All arguments of fanatics and fundamentalists base their actions and fundamentalist attitudes on their strange version of ethics.
Take for example, Anders Breivek, a Christian terrorist, who in a society dominated by Protestant Christianity, still can’t understand his ethical rationalizations for his absurd actions and yet we all seem to understand the ethics of Muslim terrorists. To me, this ethics is the ethics of tribalism, and it is tribal ethics that continues to dominate and poison human thinking, at least on the subconscious level. And in the case of fanatics like Breivek, he embraces this ethics fully consciously, and we can see just how evil tribal ethics really is.
The alternative to the continuing madness of tribal ethics is the realization of the universality of consciously suffering beings, and therefore, ethics universally applied to all such life, which does not stop with one’s tribal identity. This is the transcendental ethical view, and consciousness, that is required to overcome our savage and tribal conscious.
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Eric, I left a comment for you at WEIT on this subject, but I suppose at this point we can have the conversation here.
These days, when you (or anyone) talks about “religion,” I try to keep in mind what that person’s definition of religion is. If I don’t, I find it easy to read through a post blaming something on religion, and by the end realize that I don’t know exactly what the blame is supposed to rest on. What is “religion”?
The definition you said you would use, and continue to use, is Scott Atran’s:
Keep in mind that if you say that a community’s commitment to a nonexistent world of supernatural agents is, without qualification, pathological, then there must not be exception to this. If you say that poisoning schoolgirls is normative for a community committed to a nonexistent world of supernatural agents, then there must not be exception to this either.
And yet, there is, isn’t there? There are plenty of believers who do not poison little girls. So what are you really saying? That religion, with its focus on reward in the afterlife that always trumps any reward we could obtain in the present, will tend to override people’s better judgement? That humans who have bad ideas, and the opportunity to buttress those ideas with appeals to a supernatural source, will? It seems that your intended meaning must be something like this, but if this is what you mean, why do you not say it? Why do you make unqualified statements that are demonstrably false?
That reminds me of one of my favorite columns by John D. Morris, Ph.D. in the Acts & Facts bulletin of the Institute for Creation Research (v.18 no. 2 Feb. 1989) entitled “Where did the races come from? Dr. Morris proudly proclaims racism began with Darwin because “the whole concept of race is evolutionary, not biblical, …” Who knew? no evolution, no racism, no slave trade, no civil war in the US… wait the OofS was published in 1859 and the slave trade began in the 16th c. and the civil war was fought 1861-65. Not to mention that Darwin came from a unitarian abolitionist family.
Like Morris, history obviously is not your strongest area of expertise.
Did you know that Woodrow Wilson was a racist? That in the United States 40,000 handicapped people were sterilized against their will? That the first Jewish tenured professor at Columbia was Lionel Trilling in 1939? That the US didn’t begin its imperialist policies until the late 19th century?
These ideas came from Darwin. Just as humans are more evolved than animals, the white north European races are more evolved that the African races. In my opinion, liberals gave up their racialism when Hitler gave racism a bad name.
Well David, the US was not in a position to have any policies before the late 18th/early 19th century were they ?
And just to clarify things, are you asserting that Darwin said that “the white north European races are more evolved that the African races” or is this your assertion ?
Tim, I disagree. Of course, there are religious communities that do not poison girls for going to school, but there are no religious communities that do not in fact distort people’s minds. This is normative for religion. If you look at all the religions that there are you will find that these are normative behaviours. There is no religion that has had a history that is devoid of this sort of oppressive behaviour. It is inevitably attached to the nature of religious believing, which proposes an insight into the mind and will of the supernatural beings involved. That some religious people behave in humane ways does not remove the imminent danger of religion being used in this tryannical, controlling way. Watch the Catholic Church in action, consider the function of fundamentalist religion in the United States, stop for a moment and consider how much latitude religious believers have to think outside the box. Members of religious groups live in a kind of suspended fear of judgement. Most of the time, at least in more liberal churches (or synagogues, mosques, etc.) people don’t think about it, but just get into a discussion and it’s like walking on eggshells, and people will immediately become apprehensive or defensive, or say things like, “This is what we believe, isn’t it?” If saying something is normative religious behaviour means that all religious people are doing it all the time, then nothing is normative, but if normative means something that derives from religion’s (or a religion’s) basic principles, then poisoning girls who go to school is normative religious behaviour.
Eric, I think we already have our powerful idea — in fact, several powerful ideas. The idea is science, and the ideas behind it are evidence, reasoning and deductive logic. When we can get politicians, doctors, public servants, teachers and parents to make their decisions on the basis of finding the best empirical evidence and logically deducing its implications, then we will see the City of Faith crumble into dust.
But to cobble together yet another untested ideology, stuff it with straw and set it at the head of our ranks, as if it represented anything but wishful thinking? No thanks!
David:
Nonsense, Christian antisemitism was an early product of belief in Jesus as the messiah, and was practiced for centuries. Muslim racism was practiced almost from the start, and is still based on the Arab as the representative of Islamic perfection. Muslims traded in African slaves long before Europeans, and also bought and sold European slaves in markets throughout the Muslim world. Besides, humans are not more evolved than animals. We are animals, and each extant animal is as highly evolved as we are. Other animals simply fill different niches in the environment. We are a highly successful, highly rapacious species of animal, characteristics which religion tends to amplify.
Corio. Science is vital, no question, as PZ says, but he also points out, what I think is true, that more is needed, and that someday, someone will come along and produce a new synthesis, in which, of course, science will play a central and essential role, but will also deal with aspects of being human that science does not and cannot really touch. But it will be the product, even so, of the critical mind, and will no longer depend upon belief in supernatural agencies. People like Dawkins continue to say that, of course, they can understand and appreciate and even enjoy religious art and music. And so they can. But in a world without religion, science alone will not provide the inspiration for art, for sensitivity, for the expression of emotions, and for the creation of human community. This is a huge transition. Whether we make it well or ill will depend upon how it is done, and what is the product. I think PZ is right about this. We cannot only be scientists; we must create the possibility of a new culture, one that has never so far existed, one in which religion plays no role, in which we build a human city, and sack the city of god. This is a huge cultural task. It will not be accomplished in our lifetimes, but it will come, if we continue our assault on the city of god, which is still strongly defended.
Ophelia, yes, I think this is the only way. I am willing to do “arguments for the existence of god” until the cows come home, but it won’t make a shred of difference, because religion is not based on reason, but on the passions (to use Hume’s terminology), and reason is slave to the passions. Belief in god is simply the context of religious faith; it’s not the determining thing. What is essential for religious belief is confidence in the knowledge of god’s will and purposes, and that you, as an individual, are central to those purposes and are called to do god’s will, and this is a communal thing. You only believe such things in a community that has a tradition. And if you start asking questions the whole thing will start to unravel. How do you know god’s will? And what if you only think you do? And why should anyone else believe that this is god’s will? And by what right do you impose this on others? When you start asking these questions in the context of what we know about the nature of things, and in particular, about the nature of being human, you realise that you simply cannot know. It is not possible. It is unreasonable to think that you do, and that everyone else must be wrong….. And so on and on it goes. The beginning of the end for me was reading the Origin of Species. Not a word of a lie. That and Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea set the stage for that final “Non placet!” It took the archbishop of Canterbury’s tyranny to push me over the edge. Just that simple. He knew, and Elizabeth could not, and so we parted, not altogether friends.
I don’t know if you guys (especially Eric and Ophelia) can see this news item by the BBC in your countries, but this is incredibly distressing, a story about acid attacks in Pakistan, and how the so-called justice system are ignoring these women and allowing the attacks to go free, women who in some cases are choosing to commit suicide because their lives are destroyed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17780153
Egbert, thanks for the link. I could watch it here. It is extremely distressing. No more beating with small sticks to get women to obey. Threaten to throw acid on them, and men think they can turn women into trained monkeys. It’s deeply, deeply disturbing.
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I worry about the logic that dictates that another new synthesis or grand idea is needed so that humanity may at last move on to a new stage of enlightenment. History is littered with such grand narratives, catholicism, islam, marxism, for example. Each has at its core virtues imagined into existance as ideal, and then an ultimate destination, often utopian, at which humanity must ultimately arrive. The journey then becomes about excluding those who clearly (to the enlightened elite), possess character faults which make them “unchoosen” and thus unfit for either the journey or the destination. Grand narratives are often built with the blood of the “unchoosen”. What is science? It is not a goal, it can not tell us where it is humanity ought to go, it is only a tool, the best one yet devised, to understand and navigate the natural world. Observe, investigate, test, and self-correct. Why not methodology above ideology? Why not focus on the journey rather than the destination?
Northstar. Whatever we might say about a grand narrative, in any that would be suitable today, science and its methodology would play a crucial role. The centre of it would be an epistemology based on methodological naturalism, and so it would include, as an essential part, the epistemological modesty, but imaginative and creative dynamic, of the best science. This, of course, is presupposed in PZs idea of a cultural system that would at last be able to sack the city of god. The point here is that there must be something that will provide the kinds of community support and emotional satisfactions that religion now provides, precisely without the concept of the “unchosen” whose blood must be shed in order to establish itself as a possible alternative. Though I have not read it yet, I think there may be elements of this in some of the things that Kitcher has been writing lately. His Living with Darwin is a good start, but The Ethical Project expands on that (I believe — though I have only made fitful attempts to get into it, I have so many other things on the boil), and provides an understanding of the moral life which recognises religion’s part in the ethical project so far, but projects it far beyond that. Nevertheless, we are not looking, nor should we be, for a grand narrative as a new orthodoxy. That goes out of the window with the first acknowledgement that we are engaged in a cooperative project, in which freedom to think new thoughts, and to explore new possibilities, is a central aspect of any new social arrangements which are appropriate for human beings and their proneness to error.
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Eric: Sorry for the late response. I was out of town all weekend.
Clearly I need to do more thinking on this issue. Though I’m aware of the horrors large and small committed under religious motivation, I still wonder if religion (as defined) is the appropriate thing to lay blame on. It seems to me that the buck does not stop there. Where modern secular values have been unable to penetrate, religion does manifest itself in terrible ways. Where modern secular values have been able to penetrate, religion is less dangerous a thing. So the question I would ask is this: can you think of a costly committment to a supernatural agent that doesn’t result in social pathology? (I think I agree with you that it does result in “intellectual pathology,” since any religious belief would require a failure of reason.)
This is, after all, precisely the thing that would falsify your claim. If I am a believing christian who goes to church but believes in many of the same values that humanists do, am I suffering from or causing social pathology? Would large numbers of people like me cause social pathology? I think, based on what you’ve written, your answer would have to be “yes,” but I don’t see how it’s true.
One thing that does occur to me is that the “cost” of the religious committment might be central to its pathological nature. Humans who are paying a price want to see others pay that price as well. It’s possible that the more costly committments are the ones that encourage people to control each other. This is a testable claim. And it begins to answer the question of how religion results in pathology. What is the specific mechanism by which it occurs? Perhaps it is the human desire for fairness run amok.
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