I must say that I also enjoyed the religion discussion as part of today's class. If I might venture that the majority of class opinion seems derisive of religion in general, I feel like that affected/affects all discussions we have about religion. Assuming that being true, I wanted to talk about something pertaining to the discussion completely, but remains outside of it. The fact of the matter is that Americans have totally supported "freedom and liberty" for everyone since the inception of this nation. This follows the author's line, and so does the fact that the popularly held definition of just who "everyone" includes has also changed, quite a bit. This is all elementary, but it poses the interesting issue: our discussion centered around the implicit assumption that we know so much better now. On the outside, this seems reasonable enough. Then, take into account that fact that this campus is at least somewhat athiest/anti-theist in nature. Then recall that the freedom of religion protects both those with and without religion, equally. Even further, this campus prides itself on being the most tolerant and accepting of all opposing views. Isn't it interesting, then, that "we" still seem (read as Americans, or our campus) still manages to find a way to pick who is in the group of protected rights, and who is out? I mean, Heaven (word-choice intended) forbid that anyone on this campus makes fun or attacks the background of someone who is a minority, whether by race, gender, sexuality, or most other criteria.... except religion. It is somehow alright to throw around the ideas presented by religion with little to no respect. No, thats not quite right - it is acceptable to take parts of religion, and villify them, and make them appear to be representative of religion as a whole. That sounds similar..... kind of like something else we have discussed.... OH. Its kind of like attacking the Native Americans for being in the "not liberty and freedom for all" category. Its kind of like denying rights to women for years. Not in and off itself, but it is wrong because a group that prides itself on tolerance and acceptance, it appears as though that has a limit... And for added irony, this is a Methodist school, whose Board of Trustees always includes the Methodist Bishop of Washington DC.
I am not directing this at any one person (nor am I saying that I am always fair or equal in my opinions); I am merely pointing out the inherent flaw in an assumption seemingly made at the beginning of class - that we today clearly know better and would never do anything of the sort as described in the book.
I look forward to dissent, to start some sort of discussion.
-Mike
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First, as an atheist antitheist, I can tell you that this is not the prevailing opinion on campus.
Second, I believe that the Free Exercise Clause is one of the single worst parts of the United States Constitution. It allows dogmatic thinking to flourish, which is one of the single worst things about our culture today as well as our history. When people stop thinking, the worst things are possible.
Third, try making fun of someone's religion here on campus. You'll get crucified (word choice intended). People are very touchy about religion because it doesn't make any rational sense. If you attempt to challenge someone's dogma, you'll get a grand response. I'm insulted that you would compare insulting someone's religion to insultimg someone's race or gender. Most obviously, people have a choice of religion, but not a choice of race or sex(debate me on this point, fine, but it's easier to drop your religion than your skin or penis). More significantly, though, race or gender does not prevent one from thinking clearly; religion does. People do not suspend rationality because of their race; they do for religion. And yes, we can take parts of religion and villify them as a whole, because religions are based on dogmatic texts. The fact that a person might not believe all of them admits a flaw in the text's infallibility, which sort of brings down the whole tower of cards. So yes, we can generalize many "religions" under the belief that a divine presence created the universe (and thus humanity) and that the same entity will be responsible for one's eternal fate. Further, we can say that these religions espouse myth over fact and dogma over logic. Tell me that's a good thing.
And yes, ha-ha, it's ironic that we're at a school that is technically Methodist. However, the curriculum is not affected by this affiliation. Many of the greatest universities (how about any of the ones that end in "Wesleyan," among the others) would not exist without the help of religious groups. But the Methodists do not decide curriculum. If they did, Dr. Kerwin would have a bit of a problem on his hands.
Today, we do know better. The fact that we don't know best is, I believe, what you're getting at. But I hope that eventually, we'll all "know better" than to accept religious dogma as reality. Maybe, then, we can stop fighting all those holy wars that have claimed more lives than any other single concept in history.
To close, I borrow from the dead and buried John Lennon:
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
What I find most fascinating about this exchange is that you're both right, to some extent. And your claims are not incompatible.
Mike's initial claim about religion as a "fair" target for criticism in a way that race and gender are not strikes me as capturing an important fact about contemporary higher education: its generally secular character. Faith Is treated as something of an anachronism by any insitution founded on ideals of reason; it can be treated as an object of sociological study, but cannot itself serve as a standard to use in evaluating facts. "Because God said so" simply doesn't count for much in contemporary academic discussions -- whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I don't want to get in to now. But the fact remains that active religious faith is quite out of step with contemporary academic standards of evaluation.
But this skepticism does not extend into private life. Religious faith, driven from the public sphere of contemporary university life by forces too complex to go in to here (not enough time for a full discussion of secularism in a comment!), it holds sway in private life to a very profound degree. Religious faith, so to speak, has been privatized. And the result is that it's extremely difficult to have an open and civil discussion about religion -- one that does not degenerate into name-calling and personal attacks.
Next week we're discussing Dune, and we can't help but talk about religion as we do so. We should all make a special effort to be civil as we do so.
The thing about the Free Exercise Clause, Chris, is that it allows you to be able to be an atheist in the first place. I doubt you'd like a US without it. Besides, if there were no religion you'd not have the second part of your self-definition, would you?
And if you choose to belittle someone for believing in something that can't be proven scientifically then you are ignoring the major part of religion: that it helps people make sense of the world and gives them hope for a brighter tomorrow. Yeah, it may be in someone else's hands for most of them but at least someone is seeing to it rather than just being negative all the time or just going along with it. Some people want that hope and you insulting that, insults everyone.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
Now first, it should tell us all something that this is the first line of the First Amendment, before freedom of speech or assembly.
Second, the Free Exercise Clause does not allow me to be an atheist; it prevents the government from activities that would bar the practice of religion. It is the Establishment Clause that "allows me" to be an atheist, though I'm pretty sure that there are atheists in Catholic France.
Have you ever heard of a cop saying that he'd trade anything to put himself out of a job? I choose to be an antitheist because I believe in encouraging the use of reason in people's lives and society in general, which is contrary to the practice of religion. However, I would gladly drop my identification as an antitheist if there was no religion around. To imply that I like having to do this is like implying that a cop likes crime.
To your next point, I didn't know that all atheists were negative. My fear is that religion will push us toward a worse tomorrow because it has the power to lead people away from logic, reason, and progress. I think that Galileo might agree with me on that one. I know that one of my personal heroes, Carl Sagan, did: "It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -The Demon Haunted World
Put simply, religion always has been and, due to its nature, always will be averse to the pursuit of knowledge because it belies faith. If you need proof, look no further to the people who would rather pray for health than take antibiotics. My memory may be a little weak, but I think that the people on antibiotics have a better survival rate.
Finally, you closed by saying that I was insulting people who want hope, which is insulting to everybody. Personally, I have very high hopes for the future. I hope that we will be able to colonize our little part of space and maybe even make contact with other species. For the moment, I hope that we can eventually overcome our worldly differences and, to quote Rodney King, "all just get along." I have very high hopes for the future indeed, but I fear that with religion in the way, we will never achieve them. Look at fundamentalism as evidence in my favor. As I posited before, religion is the number one cause of premature death in all of history.
Finally, your closing statement, while attempting to tug on the heartstrings or somehow bring an air of moral certitude to your argument, belies that your argument is principally fallacious, argument from popularity. If many people believe it, it must be right (or at least permissible). To extend your argument, for a time, it was okay to believe in a geocentric universe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
You've also made me into the Straw Man who apparently doesn't want hope. In any case, the only thing that I am "insulting" is not hope; it is faith. I rail against religion because it is contrary to progress - contrary to hope. I just want people to be hopeful because of real reasons and not the belief that people are only significant because of some supernatural deity. Think of how far we can go after we cast off the chains of dogmatism.
As a postscript, I'll reply a bit to Prof. PTJ's points. I stand by my statement that in most non-classroom (read:non-moderated) discussions, challenging one's religion will cause a greater response than challenging one's race or gender. If you challenge race or gender, you're characterizing yourself as simply ignorant, whereas if you challenge religion, you will get a genuine response and spark some genuine, well, sparks.
Your point about reading Dune is especially well taken. Even the most ardent atheist would not deny the sociological and literary importance of religion and religious texts. Case in point - the enormous number of stories that take their plots almost directly from the Bible. The tale of Faust is said to be the single most reproduced story in the Western world and its basis, a pact with the Devil, is certainly religious. To me, ignoring the influence of religion on history and especially literature would be wildly irrational. As Bender once said in Futurama, "Have you ever heard of the old robot saying, 'Does not compute?'"
We must examine all texts in the context in which they were written - I think that our class had problems with doing just that when discussing The Time Machine. Dune is a great piece of literature in no small part because of Frank Herbert's mastery of religious imagery. This is one of the book's strengths, and just because it is rooted in religion should be no reason for any atheist to belittle Herbert's achievement.
At the risk of belaboring this point too much, I wish to point out that while most of Chris's statements do apply to fundamentalist religious believers, by no means does religion force one to be fundamentalists. For example Chris stated: "Put simply, religion always has been and, due to its nature, always will be averse to the pursuit of knowledge because it belies faith". This is patently false, as there are many who look to discover new things and acquire more knowledge because they want to learn more about the world their Greater Being has created.
There is a need to make a distinction between religious and fundamentalist: what applies to one does not necessarily apply for the other.
Actually, my comments apply to all religions. Take Catholics, who by definition cannot be fundamentalist because they accept the infallibility of the Pope. Do they still not preach against birth control and abortion? Do so many of their followers not accept these teachings? Whenever I hear about a family with 6+ kids, I invariably hear the last name of Murphy or Sullivan or McPartlin. Religion certainly affects non-fundamentalists' behaviors and opinions.
In any case, research for the sake of discovering what a greater being has created is working from a false, illogical premise. Not a single shred of scientific evidence eludes to, requires, or even strongly suggests the presence of a supreme being. Although some religions (notably Judaism) do take it upon themselves to actively seek out new science, they are still basing their quest on the illogic of religion.
Even if religion does not directly counter science (as it has so many times, before and after Galileo), the fostering of religious belief causes people to forget the scientific method and the healthy trait of skepticism. Fact does, in fact, belie faith, because there is not a single shred of evidence that would lead a rational person to believe that there is a supreme being. As long as people hold these absurd beliefs, humanity will be stuck in the mud.
This doesn't even bring up the gigantic problems with being religious and not fundamentalist - if you believe some parts of the Bible and not others, for example, doesn't that just bring the whole thing down? If God was wrong in Revelations, doesn't that mean that he's wrong in Genesis? Picking and choosing is a cop-out, a compromise between reason and illogic without admitting to the fact that the two cannot coexist.
Max Weber, whom we're reading for next week, famously argued that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is itself irrational and illogical. Why put so much effort into creating something that one knows is only going to be superseded in time? Weber's answer was two-fold: 1) we cannot help but surrender to the prevailing irrationality of our times; and 2) human life is, ultimately, not about reason or logic, because reason and logic are instruments or tools rather than ultimate foundations.
In strictly empiricist terms, there is little difference between a presumption that the universe was created by a wise Creator, and a presumption that the universe was some kind of cosmic accident. This is because either presupposition is compatible with any empirical observation whatsoever. Newton believed he was reading the mind of God as he generated his three laws of motion; Einstein appears to have believed something similar as he surpassed Newton and embraced relativity. Now, a non-believer may use any of their results without accepting their beliefs, but this is because those beliefs are (as Wittgenstein might have put it) outside of the world rather than a part of the world -- they alter the way that one perceived and comprehends the whole, rather than the way that one comprehends any particular piece. Science, empirical science, is in this sense about pieces rather than about wholes, even when it is astrophysics or cosmology.
Chris, you have to differentiate between two kinds of claim: a claim about ultimate foundations, and a claim about specific objects. "God created the universe" is the former; "evolution is not true because of what is written in the Bible" is the latter. You might want to claim that both are problematic, but you can't use examples of the second type to mount a case against the first.
My own response to Weber's claim is one of survival. Assuming that we are driven to survive, both individually and as a species, and the best way of surviving is to learn about the world around us, then it is logical to do so. If science can cure polio, and polio's going to kill me, it makes sense to try to cure polio.
I do concede that there is no practical difference between believing that a cosmic accident, a creator, a VR simulation, or a gigantic turtle orgy (credit:Terry Pratchett) caused the universe. I think that too often, scientist-philosophers get bogged down in this argument, which is distracting from more significant, observable hypotheses. The farthest I see the creator line going is to agnosticism, which I classify as a philosophical branch off of atheism. I'll call on Woody Allen for my next related quote: "I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic, y'know. We didn't know which religion not to bring the children up in."
The possibility that a supreme being exists does not affect the pursuit of scientific fact, but my argument is that the baggage associated with this belief is, in most cases, insurmountable. At some point, religion catches up to the creator belief, which turns into the "evolution is not true because of the Bible" rhetoric. Obviously, I am over-generalizing and perhaps not giving enough credit to good agnostics, but it is certainly not these agnostics I am going after. So yes, my problem is directly against religious dogma, which implies but not requires that I have a problem with general belief in God. The arguments against belief in God can be found in the works of others, but for the sake of this argument, I will confine myself to the first issue.
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