2 Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1999). Toward an evolutionary taxonomy of treatable conditions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 108, 453-464.
3 The Denial of Death, e.g., p. 51.
4 Ibid., p. 227.
5 This is the foundation of cognitive-behavioral therapy: The cognitive aspect means that we do need to work on our thinking, but the critical behavioral aspect means that we must also act in order to learn.
6 Buss, D. M. (1999). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind (p. 99). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
7 Dawkins, R. (2006). The god delusion (p. 184). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
8 Miller, C. C. (2014, December 2). The divorce surge is over, but the myth lives on. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html
9 Richard Dawkins extends the conversation to speculate whether a transcendent, irrational brain mechanism naturally selected for love may have at some point become co-opted in mediating our transcendent, irrational devotion to religion (The God Delusion, p. 185). It’s a fascinating, if not creepy, notion … and conjures thoughts of the most sensual book of the Bible, Song of Solomon.
10 Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien Trans.; p. 73). New York: Vintage International.
11 “The divorce surge is over, but the myth lives on.” (NYT article cited earlier.)
12 Gould, S. J. (2007). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist program. In P. McGarr & S. Rose (Eds.), The richness of life: The essential Stephen Jay Gould (p. 428). New York: W. W. Norton.
CHAPTER 8
Antitheism and the Disprivileging of Religion
One apprehension assails me here, that haply you reckon
Godless the pathway you tread which leads to the Science of Nature
As to the highroad of sin. But rather how much more often
Has that same vaunted Religion brought forth deeds sinful and godless.
— Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
YOU CAN’T WRITE A BOOK ABOUT ATHEISM without addressing the following worthwhile dilemma: “If religion works for people, why not just leave them alone? If it soothes them, gives them hope, and helps them function, why challenge that—why all the hostility?”
Well, I promise my intention is not to make anyone feel bad, not even the most radical, misguided Christians in the country. You could strap hate-mongering, funeral-protesting, fundamentalist pastor Fred Phelps to a chair, hook him up to some sort of brain implant device with “Feel Good” and “Feel Bad” buttons, put me at the controls and force me to impose an experience upon him, and I wouldn’t choose the bad option. I just couldn’t, regardless of what he represents or what he has done.
No, I’d much rather help people feel good. Specifically, I’m hoping to contact those folks sitting on the spirituality fence for whom religion is not working. They are confused and distressed about spiritual and existential issues and in need of some communion about it all. I would have loved to have read this book when I was about twenty. I would have felt much less alone and disoriented, knowing there is someone else out there like me struggling with some of the same problems. So, yes, I’m actually more interested in comforting others and connecting with them than I am in inciting conflict. And if anyone’s faith is diminished in the process, I only hope that it’s as good for them as it has been for me.
As part of that communion atop the spirituality fence, it’s perfectly appropriate and natural to discuss whether religion (or even spirituality without religion) can be toxic, which will inevitably antagonize some readers. Besides the good religion can provide, is there also collateral damage? Now, for a debate to be worthwhile, we have to assume that the reward of an eternal life of bliss through faith is merely a fantasy. A real blissful eternity would unfairly bias most people to defend religion, regardless of how many problems it causes in this life, I have to assume.
If we resort to studying history, even Holy Bible-based religion becomes easy to abhor. Some of the best fodder comes from the Inquisition as, according to celebrity atheist writer Sam Harris, “there is no other instance in which so many ordinary men and women have been so deranged by their beliefs about God.”1 He explains that torture was officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church as a method to interrogate alleged witches and other heretics for several hundred years from 1215 to 1834 (that’s not a typo; I double-checked it elsewhere). All it took to initiate an interrogation was an accusation by your peers, of which attempts to recant would only have resulted in them being punished along with you. The accused was allowed to confess but the confession would not be accepted unless she named accomplices, who were then interrogated as well. Despite the inconceivable horror and injustice of this process, Sam suggests confession was the easy way out, as punishment then might only be as bad as life imprisonment. Apparently, the worst was saved for those who maintained their innocence, as they would be subjected to torture devices such as “a pear-shaped vise … inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase.” If you were a particularly stubborn victim, you might have your arms dislocated, your feet roasted, or a cauldron of mice placed upside-down on your stomach until the mice would “burrow into your belly in search of an exit.”
The men in charge of the Inquisition were not renegades; some were fan favorites, like Saint Augustine. Of course, there was no shortage of justification for their behavior from the Old Testament, but Sam argues that even Jesus could be perceived as on board, as suggested by, for example, John 15:6: “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch, and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Such verses are actually not unusual. I’d like to add, for example, Matthew 10:34-35: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother …”
Some defenders of religion will reflexively remark, “Well, that was all in the past!” And this is one of the points at which we atheists get angry at faithful people and feel so intolerant of religion in general. We’re angry because you’ve just demonstrated what may very well be our greatest grievance with religion: insensitivity to suffering. In order for you to validate your religion and to maintain your faith that God is good and invested in your safety today, you have to somehow account for the Inquisition and other similar catastrophes of religion. No matter which coping strategy you attempt to use, you invariably end up minimizing what happened to those countless victims of Christ’s misguided sword.
I know what that denial feels like because I did it, too. I may not have asserted “That was all in the past” out loud, but I definitely recall contemplating something along those lines when I was a kid (or perhaps struggling with is a more accurate characterization). Later, when I had matured enough so that I couldn’t help but appreciate that the torture and murder were real—and that they felt just as bad back then as they would to us today—I had to adopt the more effective “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” That is, I was forced to characterize the mayhem as a phenomenon that was simply not for me to understand or even question. Either way, it’s all denial. Typing this now, I can readily recall those numb feelings of emotional defensiveness, kinda staring off into space in a daze, knowing on some level that it really happened but just not letting myself embrace it and appreciate the implications.
Once the defenses fall and we let go of faith, we are overcome by a sobering clarity: Of course, a religion that ever failed so miserably must be the product of humans, not divinity. There is no way that a god would sit back and watch for 600 years while his highest priests tortured thousands of innocents via the likes of anal vice until they denounced him. Something truly holy would never have been subjected to such gross misunderstanding and atrocious implementation in the past. It would be timeless, not a work in progress; otherwis
e it reduces the billions of people who have lived before us to some sort of experiments for our own well-being today, us living in much better times. What a horrifically narcissistic and insensitive attitude this would be, to disregard the past in order to soothe our own existential fears about our own deaths, most of which will be quite pampered relative to theirs. Again, I did it, too. And now I’m ashamed. In fact, it makes me wonder if some of the hostility I have towards people who remain faithful is projected, that is, I’m mad at myself for ever having been in so much denial, too.
The truth is that we have come a long way so that religion is more civilized than ever before. But this is not because God cares more about us today than he did those living in the Middle Ages; it’s simply because we’re smarter than we were back then. And, despite how far we’ve come, we’re far from out of the woods. There’s still much more divinely inspired torture and murder in the world today than there ever should have been, and religious-based oppression of a less lethal nature remains quite rampant, even in the progressive and privileged West. Overall, we are still in a state of progress, meaning that we are actually an ongoing experiment for the people of the future who will have even better religious lives than us, one where there is even less murder of heretics and less oppression of slaves, women, and homosexuals. We can all see where this is ultimately headed. Eventually, someone’s gonna have to write a Brand New Testament that usurps the New Testament. But it will be even shorter than the New, most of the emphasis being on the Golden Rule—the punchline again being that people have never needed spirituality to live the Golden Rule. They have only needed spirituality to help pretend that they were different from animals, that they have immortal souls.
Even if the terrorism and oppression motivated or enabled by religiosity were to be completely eradicated, we’ll always have unjustified suffering and innocent victims in other contexts. Just as we atheists believe that the faithful can’t fully acknowledge the victims of religion throughout history, we feel that they disregard the modern victims of relatively secular injustices as well. Religiosity and the authentic appreciation of suffering are mutually exclusive, as religions frame suffering as a necessary element of some kind of plan. The faithless atheist sees it more clearly, raw and cruel, without mitigation or meaning.
In God’s Problem, professor Bart Ehrman’s metaphor is exceptionally provocative:
What would we think of an earthly father who starved two of his children and fed only the third even though there was enough food to go around? And what would we think of the fed child expressing her deeply felt gratitude to her father for taking care of her needs, when two of her siblings were dying of malnutrition before her very eyes? 2
You can’t unread that passage.
So, yes, whenever I’m around people who are praying, whether at dinners or any other ceremony, I don’t bow my head along with them. Today, I look around—defiantly—because I’m not going to give thanks while my siblings are starving before my eyes. Don’t get me wrong: I am thankful—exceedingly thankful—for my food, but not to a God who would design things as such. Indeed, I feel that my contact with reality helps me appreciate my food more than a praying Christian. If the praying Christian truly appreciated how lucky he is to have so much good food, he wouldn’t be offering thanks for it! He’d be baffled like Bart Ehrman, and he would even feel guilty and wonder what he has done to deserve such bounty. If he truly appreciated how most of the world is hungry while he’s praying, he would begin to see the obscenity of his prayer. He might even lose his appetite for a while, if he really understood the problem, deep down.
By thanking God for our comfortable American lives of air conditioning, grocery stores bursting at the seams with food, functioning automobiles all our own, magical cell phones, gigantic wedding rings, and yes, healthy children, we are—by default—validating God’s choice to neglect the majority of the world who are deprived of these luxuries. Most of those people don’t deserve their lot. They are victims of circumstance, born there instead of here. Bart is absolutely right: Thankful prayers are offensive, plain and simple.
At about this point, books on atheism often detail stories of horrible crimes in order to jolt readers and to lay the foundation for a discussion on how the magnitude of evil in this world can’t be reconciled with the notion of a benevolent God in Charge of It All.
For my example of mayhem, I decided that I’d teach you about one of the most disturbing phenomena in all of psychology, one that is rarely discussed even in professional circles. I had merely speculated about this for most of my own education, and wasn’t formally educated myself on the topic until—shit, after graduate school, when I finally needed to look it up myself because of my job. No professor during the countless psychology courses I took between 1988 and 2006 ever delved into this. I’m not sure why, but I have several suspicions.
Instead of explaining it myself I’m just gonna quote from a scientific research article. The journal has a dry but descriptive title, as many do; this one is Child Abuse & Neglect. Volume 22, number 10, published in 1998 has an article called “Factors Associated with Sexual Behavioral Problems in Young Sexually Abused Children.”3 This is not pornography; the point of the journal, and article, is not for anyone’s enjoyment. Its purpose is to educate professionals, like me, about very real phenomena, in this case, to help identify which victims are at highest risk to abuse others, for the sake of imposing treatment interventions and preventing further abusive acts.
In this study, researchers looked at 100 sexually abused children, aged three to seven, in treatment centers. The authors were working in Toronto and Calgary but only needed two centers to get their 100 subjects. In the end, they found that two major risk factors for victims to become perpetrators themselves include: (1) if they had been sexually aroused when they were abused; and (2) if their perpetrators had been “sadistic.” And, sure enough, some kids experienced both pain and pleasure when they were victimized.
The authors provide disturbing descriptions of the research that are difficult to read, even for my relatively experienced and hardened self. This is a blurb from what is usually the blandest part of such articles, the Methods section, where the authors have to explain how they determined whether kids had been aroused or treated sadistically when they were sexually abused. Put on your serious hat:
For example, for arousal, the child either needed to disclose that physical changes occurred in his/her body which would indicate arousal (i.e., “Got tickly feelings in my pee-pee,” “My dinky got hard like his”) or would actually show signs of arousal while disclosing or playing out sexual abuse (e.g., red face and heavy breathing while disclosing sexual material, having an erection, masturbating to flushing while enacting sexual abuse on dolls, etc.). Perpetrator sadism was noted if the child disclosed how the perpetrator “enjoyed” the child’s physical pain or discomfort or enjoyed tricking the child into fearfulness or terror (e.g., laughing at the child while hurting them, forcing the child to beg for the abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing, etc.).
That passage is one of the most unsettling texts I have ever read. And I’ve read a lot, as police reports are a routine part of my job.
I don’t know where to begin. All my life, ever since I was old enough to realize that some kids are subjected to sex against their wills, I had never imagined that it could possibly be anything like that. And apparently, that is so common, you can research it—in peaceful and progressive modern Canada!
I went to Carlsbad Caverns for the first time recently. Way down in that most incredible place, my atheist friend who was with me, Wally, overheard some woman say to her husband, “I don’t understand how someone could see this and not believe there’s a God!” I like to imagine she was morbidly obese and had her kid on a leash. Anyway, my reflexive, smart-ass response is that despite how beautiful that cavern is, geologists can explain it perfectly, without magic or anything else.
My more serious response is that, despite how
beautiful that cavern is, there are also little kids all over the world—right now—being sexually abused in a manner that is simply unthinkable, but paradoxically manages to turn them on to sex themselves, at the extraordinarily tender age of three. They become what we call hypersexualized, and often go around abusing other kids themselves, some of whom, of course, will also become hypersexualized, and so on. Sexual abuse is here to stay; no public service announcement is ridding us of that.
Carlsbad Lady, that’s one reason I can’t believe in God, or any other divinity, for that matter. I see your magical caverns, but I raise you “forcing the child to beg for the abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing.”
And of course it gets so much worse. At least those kids are alive. I can’t help but think about the ones who are dead, whose final experiences on Earth were being forced to beg for mercy, only evoking laughter from their demonic, psychopathic killers.
Unfathomably, it can be even worse. We can find stories where victim’s loved ones, whether during the Holocaust or a modern home invasion, have to watch this truly unimaginable horror unfold before their own eyes before they, too, are tortured and put to death—or perhaps worse, allowed to live. Absolutely, unequivocally inconceivable—but it has happened, and it still happens, and it always will. I’ve heard other war stories of pregnant, living women having their fetuses cut from their wombs with bayonets, and stories of SS Nazis putting born babies in bags and smashing them against brick walls in front of their parents. I’ve lost sight of the citations, so I can’t include those here, but it doesn’t matter. We all know that human hatred is capable of such atrocities; we don’t even need the citations.
Optimistic Nihilism Page 21