The trouble with religious and magical thinking (Part 1 - Christianity/Protestantism)

This post is the first in what I hope will be a series. I intend to examine a few of the major religious faiths that often ensnare the minds of the world. I'm not trying to attack people for their faith, but rather to understand why these belief systems appeal to people in the first place. Many people (often otherwise rational thinkers) embrace religions without being brought up in them or being coerced into them; what would make people want to convince themselves that such beliefs are true?

Ideally, I would like to have a discussion with a devout member of each religion before writing about it in this series.

Conversation with a Protestant

I recently (by which I mean a few months ago) had a discussion with a devout Christian who is by most measures quite intelligent, evidenced by his profession (computer programming) and by his skills as a conversationalist. He's studied his faith, studied other faiths, and come to the conclusion that his faith must be the true one.

To be honest, I'm not sure how our conversation turned to religion, but I was very interested in what he had to say once he got started on the topic. I didn't bring up the fact that I'm an atheist, and I'm not sure if my reputation preceded me or not, as he didn't bring it up either.

I'm sure that from his point of view, his statements revolved around reasons why his religion is true; from mine, they revolved around reasons why people should want it to be true.

Something positive for a change of pace

A lot of what I see going on in the world tends to grind my gears, and thus inspires many a ranting blog entry to vent my frustrations. The problems of civilization are numerous, tangled, and complicated; it's easy to forget about the good things in life, from simple pleasures and amusements to grand gestures of kindness. It's also easy to take for granted all of the progress our species has made.

It might be stating the obvious, but so are a great deal of my complaints. This post is dedicated to a few things that I think we humans are doing right.

Using religion as a scapegoat for bigger problems

I have, and things wouldn't be any better.

A trope I've noticed among fellow "New" atheists, particularly of the blogging variety, is the blaming of society's evils on people taking orders from an imaginary being.  The sentiment is that if all people embraced a naturalistic worldview, then things like war, terrorism, pseudoscience, sexism, and homophobia would all but vanish from our civilization.  

I think that's a naive attitude.  Just as all of religion's positive effects (charity, volunteering, community, etc.) could easily come from secular sources, isn't the same true of the evils it has produced?  Is belief that you are acting at the behest of an almighty spirit necessary to torture dissenters? To enslave and/or rape those weaker than you? To ritualistically starve your children or deny them medical treatment? To crash airplanes into occupied buildings?

I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "religion"; should it include cults of personality? We've seen people do some awful things in the name of charismatic leaders, never applying a skeptical mind to their sovereign's claims.

Officially, most North Koreans are nontheistic, but is the Juche philosophy really so different from a religion apart from its answer to the "god" question?  The Dear Leader promotes an air of veritable divinity around himself even as his country's citizens starve, and he need not appeal to a higher power to keep it that way.

Religious obedience, or tribal loyalty?

Even religious fanatics like the Muslim extremists assaulting and killing non-Muslims in the Middle East are not too dissimilar from criminal gangs; it's tribalism in its most extreme form.  We see its benign cousin every time there's a major sporting event, though the disdain that one team's less sportsmanlike fans express toward the opposing team tends to subside after the game (the violent and destructive episodes of football hooliganism being a notable exception).  Belief that violence against the "other" makes some invisible being happy is unnecessary; it only requires pent-up anger, often brought on by socioeconomic factors, to be channeled as hatred toward another individual or group.

Now there's the matter of suicide terrorism.  The promise of an eternal paradise after death is certainly a useful tool for convincing people to sacrifice their lives, but is it the only way?  I think it's entirely possible for someone who accepts that death is followed only by the end of consciousness to willingly die for what they think is a good cause.

If you were utterly convinced that your people were at war with an entire civilization, a monolithically evil enemy whose every member was like a worker wasp supporting the nest you want to destroy, could you be persuaded to commit a kamikaze attack that would take out thousands of them?  Would you need to believe you would be rewarded for it in the afterlife, or would it be worth it solely to aid in the defense of your loved ones back home? It's really only necessary to unquestioningly hate those you perceive as enemies, to believe that every last one of them deserves to die, to carry out an attack like 9/11.  

A disease, or merely a symptom?

Christopher Hitchens claims that "religion poisons everything"; I can't help but wonder if it's analogous to potassium cyanide sprinkled atop the arsenic cocktail we'd be drinking anyway.

Perhaps a better analogy is that many atheists see religion as a disease when it may well be merely a symptom of other ills to which the human mind is inherently susceptible.  I'll dare to assume that most people are not skeptics, and even people who consider themselves skeptics are fighting an uphill battle against their own desire for certainty.  This gives the masses a tendency toward blind obedience of authority, whether that authority is a manufactured deity, an ideology, or an individual psychopath.

Even if religion vanished overnight, we'd still have no shortage of man-made problems. Hateful people create hateful gods in their own image, and those people would remain hateful even without their imaginary friends egging them on.

No Hell below us, above us only sky

I was recently asked for my feelings on the idea of evil going unpunished in the atheistic view; without a final Judgment for our actions, doesn't it seem unfair that we all end up equal in death no matter what kind of life we lead? The fact that the world's two largest religions teach that people are judged by God on their adherence to the faith rather than their deeds alone notwithstanding, this is an interesting question.


Heroic actions often get the hero killed in action. Humanitarian workers sometimes die at the hands of the very people they are trying to help. Many murderous dictators have stayed in power until their natural deaths. Some vicious serial killers live out the rest of their days without ever being caught. Would it be comforting to believe that people who do good deeds in life are eternally rewarded, and those who perpetrate evil are eternally punished?


I personally don't think so, but I understand the sentiment. I understand wanting to live in a universe where the good guys win in the end and the bad guys get what's coming to them. I understand wanting to believe that death is neither an escape for the wicked nor an indignity for the righteous.


But I disagree.


Without an afterlife, people who prey upon their fellow humans for material gain or sadistic pleasure aren't just making a futile gesture in an ephemeral life before eternity; they are depriving other human beings of life, liberty, and dignity in the only brief existence their victims have. It should give us a moral imperative to stop injustice while the people involved are still alive instead of waiting for an almighty judge to condemn the perpetrators after death.


Without an afterlife, people who risk their lives or donate significant time and money to improve the world for their fellow humans aren't just trading ephemeral resources for eternal favor; they are using their brief existence to help improve or protect something they believe in and making an impact which may well outlive them. It should inspire us to pay good deeds forward and help them have a greater impact instead of taking for granted that they will be rewarded after death.

You are here.

Ultimately, the universe doesn't seem to care what we do to each other on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. We humans are the ones who care, and in the end, whether we spend our lives selfishly preying upon others or striving to make a positive impact on human society, we all die and rot. I'd personally rather give people of the future something positive to remember about me; after all, the legacy I leave behind is the only thing about me that will survive death.

On Community Without Communion

In the various conversations I've had with religious people in my life, I've often heard one commonly cited "pre-mortem benefit" (my terminology, not theirs) of membership in a religious group: the sense of community they feel among members of their congregation.  It seems to me that it's more than just being surrounded by people who reaffirm their beliefs; people in religious congregations can serve as a network of support (material and/or emotional) for one another during times of crisis, provide an ample supply of volunteers for service projects, and simply present another venue of opportunity for forming new friendships.


Non-religious organizations focused on common interests and hobbies can do some of these same things, of course, but it doesn't seem like it happens on quite the same level.  I found that sense of community to some degree as an undergrad in Phi Sigma Pi (a national co-ed honor fraternity, through which I met several good friends, including my wife), but in all honesty I still felt just slightly out of place at fraternity events, and I haven't felt motivated to stay involved as an alumnus.


In the past I've considered joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation - the idea of interfaith cooperation and a search for truth across different theologies certainly has appealed to me, particularly back when I called myself an agnostic.  To be honest, however, it just doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy in the long run; I'm really just not interested in feigning credence toward spiritualism, and if I'm going to commit my free time to an organization, I'd rather not feel like I'm wasting it on something I just don't believe in.


In the past year I've become aware that there are a growing number of secular humanist organizations out there for people who want this sense of community without the mythology.  These are groups of atheists and agnostics, centered on the philosophy that human beings should help one another find truth, health, and happiness in our material world without needing to speculate about gods, spirits, or an afterlife.  I'll likely be paying a visit to the Humanist Community of Central Ohio in the near future to see if they're right for me.  I'm also planning on going to an atheist Meetup next week in order to (for lack of a better phrase) meet up with some other atheists in Columbus.  Maybe I'll feel right at home with the group, maybe I'll feel like an outsider who just shares their skepticism toward religion.  There's only one way to find out...