How Far Can You Trust Religious People?

Pretty far, but not far enough.

I now present a second reason why orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species.

The religious conservatives believe that God has given them absolute truth; they are God’s chosen, and the rest of us are God’s enemies; they are saved, we are damned.

In the past, religious conservatives took this belief to mean that they have the right to torture and kill anyone who disagreed with them, whether brown-skinned pagans or white-skinned heretics. Today, of course, they do not do this. They will lie about us in order to get their followers to hate us, but they will not torture or kill us.

But why not? If in fact they are God’s chosen, why shouldn’t they kill us? After all, Joshua killed the Canaanites, putting entire cities to the sword. Religious conservatives say this was right. But they will not put us to the sword, because…why? Perhaps, that’s just not done anymore. Or perhaps it is because they recognize the authority of human governments, which declare murder to be illegal, even if it is done in the name of God. But if God is the same for all time, then if he commanded genocide in the past, he could do so again.

So they will not kill us. But the basis for their refusal to kill us is operational, not fundamental. Read that again. They have operational, not fundamental, reasons to not kill us. They believe God gives them the right to, but has indicated that this is not the right time or place to do so.

But even recent history shows how quickly an operational restraint can change. Just a few years after the fall of Yugoslavian communism, genocide was raging across the Balkan states.

There is nothing fundamental in the refusal of religious conservatives to kill the rest of us. It is purely operational. And if, by some means, they should become convinced that the situation has changed and that God does, after all, want them to kill us, then they will do so, though perhaps with some hesitation. This can happen almost overnight. I prophesy that it will, and I fervently hope I am wrong.

In contrast, science provides a fundamental reason to not kill people who disagree with you. And that fundamental reason is that all of our conclusions, about what to believe and how to live, are tentative. Scientists cannot (without no longer being scientists) kill heretics because there are no heretics in science; there are only people who are wrong. We never say “God has proclaimed that…” but can only say “The evidence clearly indicates that…” In science, there always remains a slight margin of possibility that we are wrong, even about the most obvious things. Maybe the Sun really does go around the Earth, and God just makes it look like it’s the other way around. Therefore scientists cannot pass summary, lethal judgment on anybody on account of their beliefs. But religious conservatives believe that there is no slight margin of possibility of error.

Murderous religious zeal, so common in the past and still so pervasive in large parts of the world, remains within American religious conservatives like a tiny population of bacteria, so tiny that most conservatives refuse to believe it is there, just waiting to emerge when the conditions are right.

Whose Fault is the Human Condition?

In this essay, I present a very basic reason why I am convinced that orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species. In addition, I have another reason, which I will post as a later entry.

There is a famous story about an essay contest in England. The topic was, “What is wrong with the world?” The British writer G. K. Chesterton wrote the winning entry. It consisted of two words: “I am.”

In addressing the question of “Whose fault is the human condition,” I am not going to focus on individuals, as Chesterton did. Instead I am asking about larger human institutions or frames of thought. In particular, I want to consider science and religion: which of these two institutions or frames of thought has had more of an impact on the sad, bloody human condition? The answer is religion. I refer herein to conventional, orthodox religion.

Preachers such as the late D. James Kennedy have been relentless in blaming all human evils on evolution and on science. Of course, this makes no sense. Humans have been killing and oppressing one another as long as there has been evidence of human existence. Humans have always had religion, but have only recently had science. In fact the decline in atrocities has been coincident in time with the spread of science.

But there is another reason that I blame religion as a major cause of human suffering. Either God created human nature, or else God allowed Satan to create human nature. Either way, our nature is God’s will. That’s what makes it human nature; we cannot change it. We can “be saved,” they say. But most of the people I know who “have the Holy Spirit living inside of them” live in just as worldly a fashion as those whom they despise as hell-bound sinners. At the very least, even “saved” people still have human nature, Holy Ghost or no.

Therefore, from a religious perspective, “is” and “ought” are the same in human nature. Consider this example. Men are more violent than women. According to religion, this is the way things ought to be; God made us that way. As a matter of fact, it is bad for men to not be violent. I vividly remember a radio broadcast in which James Dobson, a major voice of the religious right, condemned the Berenstain Bears cartoons because they depicted a father bear who was not sufficiently assertive and masculine. It is always men who start wars and who do most of the fighting. And this is the way God made us, religious people claim. Women are supposed to stay home, stay quiet, and stay pregnant with fetuses of future warriors.

Evolutionary science, on the other hand, separates “is” from “ought” in human nature. Darwin proposed sexual selection as the reason that male animals are more “pugnacious.” Males fight more because they evolved that way. Maybe it made sense in the Stone Age. But today it is an evolutionary mismatch—what conferred fitness benefits in the Stone Age is now maladaptive except for a few lucky dictators. Evolutionists do not obtain morals from Stone Age biological and cultural adaptations. Religious people, in contrast, have to obtain their morals from the way God made us. Was God correct in ordering the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, even the kids? If God is unchanging, then either he is wrong or else all of the Old Testament killing was right. If God said it was right in the past, then it is still right. But if an adaptation evolved in the past, it is not necessarily adaptive today.

I believe I am justified in attributing a great deal of modern human suffering to the idea, strongly held by most Christians, Jews, and Muslims, that God made men to be fighters and that is the way it is supposed to be now and forever. For religious people, Homo bellicosus was intelligently designed. But to evolutionists, Homo sapiens is an ape struggling to subdue its old ape behavior with modern cultural evolution.

It has been this way for a long time. An historian who gave a series of lectures about the Paleolithic claimed that, until the start of agriculture, humanity progressed by “extensification,” that is, by moving into new territory and doing the same things as before. But when the territory was all gone, by about ten thousand years ago, humans had to turn to “intensification.” For example, humans could get more food from the same amount of earth by intensive agriculture than by extensive hunting and gathering. But I believe this historian had his dates wrong. With the exception of North and South America (and, of course, Antarctica), the entire world has been filled with humans for a long time. No extensification (aside from the people who migrated over the Bering Strait over 14,000 years ago) has been possible for at least the last 50,000 years. Modern humans, moving into Siberia, encountered Denisovans; and moving into Europe, they encountered Neanderthals. Modern humans had to practice intensification to take resources away from other human species and, later, from one another. Before agriculture, intensification took the form of conflict, much of it inspired by religion. There were religion-spewing conquistadores 30,000 years ago in Europe, just as there were 500 years ago in America.

I will take one further step. Orthodox religion is part of the Stone Age adaptation that conferred success at the time but which now needs to be transcended. Not necessarily by atheism; perhaps orthodoxy should be transcended by a different kind of religion. I think the Earth has had about all of the Moses-and-Joshua style conquest that it can handle; maybe it needs some more of the prophetic voice of people like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. And, wouldn’t you know it, in the Old Testament there were no female priests; but there were a few women prophets.