Helmintholog

Michael Gersen, the man who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil”, had an op-ed defending religion in the Washington Post. There is the nice irony that if his beliefs are correct, the consequences of his wicked act will be worse for him than if death really is the end. But let’s lead that aside. What he does believe is that religion is good for other people, and for society:

The death of God has greater consequences than expanded golf time on Sunday mornings. And it is not simply religious fundamentalists who have recognized it. America’s Founders embraced public neutrality on matters of religion, but they were not indifferent to the existence of religious faith. George Washington warned against the “supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” The Founders generally believed that the virtues necessary for self-government — self-sacrifice, honesty, public spirit — were strengthened by religious beliefs and institutions.

I know perfectly well that he is not asserting that the founders themselves were orthodox Christians. This is clever of him. But the point that we ought to respect certain pieties is a sensible one. All religions are equally true to the populace, false to the philosopher, and useful to the magistrate — and we need to remember that there are damn few philosophers and magistrates. This is the point that Hitchens elaborately misses. He asks

Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first — I have been asking it for some time — awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

The argument here is a statistical one. There will always be atheists, agnostics, and so on who behave at least as well as Christians. Some will do so out of a completely admirable, unillusioned altruism, just as some religious believers do. Many more will do so — just like most religious believers — through a mechanism of psychological reward that seems to me at least as implausible as a belief in heaven: I’m old enough to remember when progress seemed as real as paradise.

In both cases, though, it seems obvious that more people behave well because they believe they will be rewarded for it, or at least not too severely punished than do so in a completely disinterested fashion. Since that is the case,and since we all have an interest in living in a society where people do on the whole behave well to one another, then surely Washington and Jefferson were right to suppose religious belief was useful to society. A country where only naturally good people behave well is not going to be pleasant or even prosperous. Arguments about outliers, like those that Hitchens makes, simply miss the point.

The idea that people should only believe what is true seems to me stupid, cruel and unnatural.

I have had to read Sam Harris’ book "The End of Faith" for a project I am doing. My (then) publisher urged a proof copy on my in 2004, saying that I should see what was being said about religion. It didn’t seem from the blurb to have any novelty in it, so I read something else instead. But as part of a more serious piece about the new atheism, I thought I should have a go at it now, and rather than simply write "crap" or "???" where it’s needed in the margins – they are hardly large enough – I thought I would blog my adventures.

The book opens as it means to go on, with a story about a suicide bomber on a bus, blowing up an innocent middle-aged couple. All the details are left anonymous, and, he writes, we can know almost nothing about the young man except that "it is so easy – you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion."

There is a nice irony to this: the book was written in about 2003, when the preponderance of suicide attacks in the world were in fact performed by Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers. The only detail that suggests this bomber was a Muslim is the identity of his victims – they have just brought a refrigerator, and are wondering how it will fit into their kitchen.

This sets the tone for his treatment of fact, historical and otherwise.

Let’s see: on the next page, we learn that "criticising a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture" – this is so true that Harris has sold 186 thousand copies of his latest book, Dawkins half a million of his, Hitchens nearly 400,000 of his …

"the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error, or, at best, dangerously incomplete." [my italics, his definite article] ; Curious how, in my copy of the Bible, when Jesus is asked what the commandments are, the original verse "Remember you’re smarter and better than those other bastards" has been replaced by the commandments to love God and your neighbour. The text must have been corrupted by believers. That’s the only explanation.

"When a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents in a Jerusalem street the role that faith played in his action sis invariably discounted". God, I can hardly remember the last time I heard a politician associate Islam with suicide bombing.

The next big theme of the book appears on the next page. This is an extraordinary grandiosity, which puts me in mind of an old joke about the Lone Ranger. He and Tonto are riding along in the middle of nowhere when a horde of yelling apaches appears on the horizon and they have to flee down a canyon. After a mile or so of breathtaking chase the apaches are getting closer and closer. They can be heard baying for the blood of the white man. "Tonto", says the Lone Ranger, "I think we’re done for." Tonto looks at him. "Who ‘we’, white man?" he asks.

Who ‘we’, indeed? This is a central question in a book whose argument moves from the immorality and inhumanity of religion to the necessity of torturing religious believers, because a truly scientific morality demands this. It is also, I think a question whose answer explains its popularity. "We" are the people threatened by Islam, and to some extent by fundamentalist Christianity, as indeed genuinely middle class Americans feel that they must be. "We" are also an omnipotent construct, who can put the whole world right if only we have the will.

For instance, "We" can extirpate not just fundamentalism, but all forms of religious belief. Indeed we have no choice: "One of the central themes of this book is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma the imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance – born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God – is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."

Having thus established that religious tolerance is a luxury "we" can’t afford, he goes on, immediately, to argue that religions are obnoxious because they are necessarily intolerant.

"We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbours believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia … words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ or Baal’ or they will unmake our world."

How little time it seems since the possessors of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were a threat to "us" because they were godless communists.