God Without Religion

by Michael Arnheim

  Conversion: In common with most other creed religions, Islam is a highly proselytising religion, and conversion is very quick and easy. Like most other communal religions, Shinto is not a proselytising religion and there is no mechanism for conversion to Shinto.

  Violence: Islam is associated with a lot of violence, and never more than at the present time, but Graham Fuller argues convincingly that this has less to do with religion than with “political and cultural frictions, interests, rivalries, and clashes”. As for Japan, the militarism and ultranationalism of the period up to 1945 should probably not be blamed on Shinto.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Conclusion

  The “New Atheists” and traditional organised religion are equally arrogant. Religious arrogance all too frequently manifests itself as intolerance or persecution of other religions or even of some denominations by other denominations of the same religion. Atheists tend to put the blame for all the evils in the world on religion and (with some notable exceptions) pin their hopes on man’s ingenuity and prowess. But this naïve faith in humanity creates more problems than it solves. What is the solution? Communal religions tend to be more tolerant than creed religions, but the most tolerant and least arrogant position is belief in an impersonal God, accepted by some of the greatest minds of all time — possibly including Charles Darwin himself.

  Religion, Atheism & Arrogance

  Organised religion and radical atheism are equally arrogant. By contrast with the meek atheists of the past, who challenged the bastions of established religion at their peril, the “New Atheists” of today are emboldened by the decline of traditional values in the West coupled with a naïve faith in mankind’s own self-perceived power and ingenuity.

  Here is a good example of the denigration of religion coupled with a naïve faith in science on the part of one of the most strident of the New Atheists: “Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on.”319

  The link between humanism and atheism is well illustrated by the “Atheist Bus Campaign” launched by the British Humanist Association in 2009, with this slogan on buses, first in London and then elsewhere in Britain and internationally: “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”320

  In rejecting any kind of supernatural force, the new militant atheism essentially places its faith in man as the be-all and end-all. There are a few notable exceptions to this. Richard Dawkins, to his credit, is opposed to “speciesism” in the sense of regarding animals, including primates, as expendable by comparison with “a single human zygote”.321 However, not surprisingly, this is used by Dawkins as a stick with which to beat the religious pro-life movement.

  Religious Arrogance

  Organised religion is equally arrogant. While claiming to subordinate man to God, it actually does the opposite. We read in Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”322 In fact, of course, it was man who created God in his image.

  The Arrogance of Creed Religions

  Most creed religions — and most denominations within most creed religions — believe that they are superior to all other religions and denominations, that their creed embodies the “Truth” and acceptance of it vouchsafes to its adherents “salvation” and “everlasting life”. Central Christian texts include the well-known, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”323 In Islam, similarly, true believers who lead a righteous life are promised paradise.324

  Paradox

  There is a paradox here. For, if your religion has a monopoly on truth and guarantees you eternal life, why should you want to share these benefits with outsiders? Yet, paradoxically, most creed religions are imbued with missionary zeal to proselytise and recruit converts — with intolerance, prejudice or even persecution reserved for those who refuse to see the light.

  How is this paradox to be explained? There may be an altruistic motive for this — “true believers” wanting to share with others the bounty that they themselves enjoy. A more cynical, but possibly truer, explanation may be that proselytism or evangelism is a deliberate strategy employed by the leaders of creed religions to expand the size of their flocks and thereby their influence. Christianity owes its very existence to Paul’s missionary work all around the Roman world, and Islam’s prominence as the second biggest faith in the world today is at least partly the result of conversion.

  The success of the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which now has about 15 million members, is attributable at least in part to the (generally) two-year full-time missionary work expected of all young male Mormons, more than 88,000 of whom are currently in service.325 There must be few people in the West who have never been visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who now number some 7.96 million, or who have not been approached on the street by someone distributing Watch Tower Society publications, which are available in no fewer than 700 languages. “Witnesses”, as members are called, are expected to spend as much time as possible on spreading the word and are even required to submit a monthly “Field Service Report”.326

  The Arrogance of Communal Religions

  By contrast, communal religions generally do not engage in missionary activities and may make it difficult for outsiders to convert. Judaism provides the best-known example of this position, but Hinduism and Shinto are also non-proselytising religions.

  The reason for this is not hard to understand. Communal religions, as we saw in Chapter 4, do not have an identity distinct from that of the nation, state or community of which they are an integral part. It would be as unlikely for, say, a Hindu to convert to Shinto as for an Indian to become Japanese — which is indeed what would have to happen for the religious change to take place. Communal religions therefore tend to be tolerant of other religions.

  Does this mean that the adherents of communal religions do not regard themselves as superior to others? Not at all. Jewish claims of superiority are well known. And, as we saw in Chapter 7, in the 1945 Shinto Directive or Bunce Directive issued by the Americans in Japan, the doctrine of Japanese superiority was specifically banned, although it was evidently not extinguished in practice.327 These beliefs in a people’s superiority may be dressed up in religious garb, but they are in reality simply an expression of nationalism.

  Two Types of Religious Arrogance

  It is a form of communal arrogance, but with exactly the opposite effect from the arrogance of creed religions. While the arrogance of creed religions expresses itself in missionary zeal combined with intolerance of other religions, the arrogance of communal religions leads to toleration of other religions coupled with an exclusive and even unwelcoming attitude to prospective converts from those other religions.

  Default Religion?

  There is some evidence to suggest that becoming a communal religion is, as it were, the default position for religion in general — in other words that the most natural position for a religion to adopt is as part of the identity of a nation or a community and for that religion to be the dominant, or even the sole, religion in that community. Despite the evidence in favour of this proposition, it also raises some problems.

  Shia Islam in Iran is a modern example of a religion which, while remaining essentially a creed religion, has some features of a communal religion as well, deliberately introduced as it was by Shah Ismail I in the 16th century to give Iran a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the Sunni Ottoman Turks, and now serving also to distinguish Iran, a non-Arab nation, from its Arab neighbours as well as from the non-Arab Sunni Turks. What then about the Shia Arabs, particularly in Iraq, 60% to 70% of whose population is Shia? There was large-scale migration from Iran to what is now Iraq in the 16th century, and in the 18th and 19th centuries there were many converts from Sunni to Shia as a protest against their Sunni non-Arab Turkish rulers.328

  A si
milar link between nationality and religion can be found in Europe. For example, it is no accident that the line-up in Northern Europe is:

  Northern Germany — Lutheran

  Poland — Roman Catholic

  Lithuania — Roman Catholic (pagan until 14th century)

  Latvia — Lutheran

  Russia — Eastern Orthodox

  This is a form of checkerboard politics. Just as the squares on a checkerboard alternate black-white-black-white, so the geopolitical line-up of countries is based on the philosophy, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The religious labels hide the national and political realities lurking beneath.

  Reversion to Communal Religion?

  But is this expression of nationalism in religious terms really a reversion to communal religion? Not quite. Because, as we have seen, communal religions, which were the norm in the ancient world, do not normally have a definite creed or set of beliefs, and as a result tend to be tolerant of other religions. So, for example, although a Roman citizen would undoubtedly regard himself as superior to a German or a Persian, it would not even occur to him to convert these foreigners to the Roman civic religion.

  Christianity can never become a true communal religion, because even when closely identified with a national or political struggle, like that of the Northern Irish Nationalists or the Poles, it remains a creed religion with its usual intolerance of other religions coupled with a desire to bring members of those religions into the Christian fold. The same applies, for example, to Iranian Islam, where Shia Islam is something of a hybrid between a communal and a creed religion. It is an expression of Iranian nationalism but at the same time remains a creed religion with the usual creed religion features of intolerance plus missionary zeal.

  Hybridisation of this kind between a communal and a creed religion is particularly poisonous in the case of Judaism, as was seen in Chapter 5, where a traditional communal religion has been overlaid with creed features, resulting in the development of the worst features of both: the exclusivity of a communal religion coupled with the intolerance and internal dissensions of a creed religion, without the creed advantage of attracting new converts to its ranks.

  The Rise and Decline of Toleration

  Although creed religions have an intrinsic tendency to be intolerant of other religions and indeed also of other denominations and groupings within themselves, it is undeniable that western Christianity has become more tolerant in the past century or so, albeit evidently sometimes still through gritted teeth, as can be seen in the definition of “Religious Toleration” in the current online edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia: “By religious toleration is understood the magnanimous indulgence which one shows towards a religion other than his own, accompanied by the moral determination to leave it and its adherents unmolested in private and public, although internally one views it with complete disapproval as a ‘false faith’.”329 Despite the clear contempt and disdain evinced here towards other religions, this nevertheless reveals a much more tolerant attitude than would have been expressed before the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. A similar relaxation in attitudes to other faiths has been detectable in Protestant churches over the past 150 years or so. How can this development be accounted for? Presumably largely in recognition of the decline in belief and in attendance at church resulting from liberalisation of attitudes in society at large. At the same time Islam has generally shown a decline in toleration, probably largely as a reflection of political and economic conflict with other Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In short, the degree of religious toleration in evidence in any creed religion at any time would appear to be a function of attitudes feeding in to religion from the broader political, social and economic background. The fond idea of religious liberals like Hans Küng expressed in the slogan “No Peace among Nations until Peace among the Religions” is probably back-to-front: a political settlement needs to come before a religious one. A similarly mistaken view has been publicised by the succession of meetings of the so-called “Parliament of the World’s Religions”, which has met periodically since 1893 without any tangible result.

  Man and Nature

  This brings us to that favourite pastime of deciding who to blame for all the evil in the world. The recent quantum leap in the development of science and technology has certainly been impressive. For thousands of years the fastest form of transport was horse-drawn, the only machines were powered by hand or foot, and the most advanced writing instrument was the quill pen. Then about two hundred years ago, with the advent of steam, technology started to develop. But even in 1900 the automobile was as yet in its infancy, the telephone was a novelty, electric lights an experiment and air travel a dream. A short century later and the world (or at least the so-called developed world) was unrecognisable: everything was powered by electricity, international air travel was taken for granted and a new electronic technology based on the silicon chip had revolutionised everything from control of water mains to travel to telecommunications.

  However, although man has landed on the moon and the boundaries of science have recently been expanded in different directions, such as by the discovery of the “Higgs boson”, by the formulation of the hypothesis known as “M-theory” (an extension of “string theory”) and by the Human Genome Project, cures have yet to be found for many serious diseases, and even the workings of the human brain are still only very imperfectly understood.

  The “BRAIN Initiative” (“Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies”, or the “Brain Activity Map Project”) was announced by the United States Government in April 2013 in response to a need expressed by top-level researchers in these terms: “Understanding how the brain works is arguably one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time.”330

  The wonders of the universe — including that of the human body itself — were not created or even invented by human beings: they were all there from the beginning. What is remarkable is how long mankind took to “discover” these wonders. Electric currents and radio waves have been lurking in the ether for millions of years and yet they have only recently been harnessed by man. Even circulation of the blood in the human body, which ought to have been obvious at an early date, was only fully described by William Harvey less than 400 years ago.

  Even the earth itself is still far less well understood than might have been expected. In the year 2014 the complete disappearance without trace of an airliner with 239 people on board gave pause to anyone who assumed that the task of locating so large an object could not possibly defeat human science and technology.

  Population Explosion

  Modern man’s impact on nature has been much more negative than positive. The debate about climate change and global warming goes on unabated, but the preponderance of the evidence points to man’s responsibility for this development. In 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that: “It is extremely likely (95–100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”331 The obvious answer is to reduce population growth by means of birth control, but, strangely enough, this possible solution is not even mentioned in the IPCC report.

  In 2011 the world population for the first time reached 7 billion, having climbed to 6 billion in 1999, only 12 years earlier. Here are some relevant figures:332

  It took the whole of human history until 1804 (the Napoleonic era) to reach 1 billion. But the rate of growth soon picked up. It took 123 years to reach the second billion, 33 years to reach 3 billion, and since then the population has grown by a billion every 12 to 14 years. This is an exponential rate of growth.

  The alarming increase in world population is sometimes blamed by atheists on religion, but the true culprit really is naïve humanism.333 Conventional religion, notably the Roman Catholic Church, condemns not only abortion but also contraception (except for the so-called “rhythm method”). However, the Church’s influence is clearly not as great in practice as is commonly assume
d. For example, in Italy, a country in which 87.8% of the population identifies as Catholic, in May 2014 there was one birth every 1.1 minute and one death every 50.1 seconds, meaning that the population was only just managing to replace itself — including immigrants from the developing world whose birthrate was much higher than that of the indigenous Catholic population. A similar pattern is found in Spain and Portugal, two other overwhelmingly Catholic countries.334

  Religion can therefore hardly be blamed for the high birthrate in developing countries. This recent spurt in population is largely driven by population growth in the developing world. Well-meaning “humanist” western philanthropy (not necessarily associated with atheism) is far more to blame than religion for this third world overpopulation. By reducing infant mortality, HIV, malaria and polio this multi-million-dollar drive increases the population in countries that are already overpopulated, resulting in competition for scarce resources — including basic necessities such as rice, maize and water — which in turn manifests itself in civil strife, disorder and migration to the West, where the result tends to be an increase in crime and a threat to western values.