How Religion "Advances"

Today it is relatively rare to find racist Christianity. Nowadays, fundamentalist megachurches proclaim that members of any race are equally invited to donate money to their coffers. But it wasn’t so long ago that many white fundamentalist Christian groups did not want to associate with members of other races.

It is even rarer to find Christians who insist that the Earth is the center of the universe. The only example of which I know is fixedearth.com. But it was not very far in the past that churches all insisted on geocentrism as a fundamental belief.

In these and in many other cases, the advances in belief—advances toward racial harmony and a scientific understanding of the universe—were the result of forces and processes that were not inherently religious. After slavery was abolished, people began to gradually realize that people of other races were fully human and deserved the same rights as one’s own race. Partly this was due to the utter failure of supremacists to find scientific verification for their beliefs, but mainly, I believe, because more and more people became acquainted with members of other races and discovered, usually pleasantly, that people they might once have disdained were actually nice, ordinary people. In many cases it was devout people who led the push toward racial harmony—and there is hardly a better example than Martin Luther King Jr.—but it was not religion itself that led these advances. None of the leaders, or followers, of racial integration re-read their Bibles and discovered, “Holy Moley! Right there is a verse that we’ve been overlooking for two thousand years.” The Bible did not change. There were, or so the fundamentalists claim, no new revelations from God. The advances in racial harmony, inside and outside of churches, came from accumulated experience which most religious groups have now acknowledged. Reason and experience led the way; religion followed.

It is clear that the conversion of religious people to heliocentrism occurred because science advanced, and religion followed.

Science, experience, and reason are the head of the animal of society; religion is the tail, sometimes wagging, sometimes dragging.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.