Harry Marks wrote:geo wrote:
Obvious or not, belief in gods deserves to be challenged. Believers owe it to the world and our collective future to at least hear and consider basic questions about gods. These claims can't be given a pass because they are connected to some of humankind's most divisive and dangerous behavior.
To me this is the sign of dangerously shallow thinking. While some of religious behavior is divisive and dangerous, most of it is aimed at generating cohesion and cooperation. This author has nothing but confirmation bias to show that religion is on balance responsible for division and threat. . . .
It takes a certain amount of dissociation
not to see the religious aspect of terrorists flying jetliners into buildings while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar.’ But actually, Harrison doesn’t mention the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this chapter. He’s more interested in some of the rationalizations that believers use to prop up their beliefs and the tendency, especially, in the U.S., to give religious beliefs a very wide berth.
You do make a good point that it’s not religion alone that accounts for hateful and divisive beliefs. But frequently we see a tendency to fly the religion banner over a wide array of beliefs that often overlap into other areas, especially politics. Kim Davis, for example, didn’t want to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and some tried to make it about religious freedom. But clearly this issue spilled over into other areas which do, in fact, affect other Americans.
In the U.S., at least, it’s pretty much open season on politics all the time. Political ideas are openly and vigorously challenged. Indeed, all bad ideas should be challenged in the marketplace of ideas. But in the U.S., there’s this strange hands-off attitude when it comes to religion. And it has led to all kinds of religiously enshrined anti-intellectualism and bigotry, which has almost nothing to do with religious theology.
I agree that there’s a tendency to focus entirely on religious beliefs when, in fact, stupidity comes in many flavors across the spectrum. But because of the tendency to lump fringe politics and anti-science attitudes under the guise of “religious belief” or even religious freedom, we have junk thought (an expression I take from Susan Jacoby) getting a free pass in the marketplace of ideas. This contributes to a dangerous ignorance that threatens our democracy. In the U.S. (again), we see the mainstream conservative party in bed with religious fundamentalists and the results aren’t very pretty. We actually have had presidents (George W. Bush, for example) and even in the current crop of GOP presidential candidates who pay lip service to the idea that evolution is “just a theory” and that intelligent design should be taught alongside of evolution in public schools and that immunizations should be voluntary and that stem cell research is morally wrong. We also have a whole movement, especially in Texas, attempting to rewrite the history books to de-emphasize inconvenient facts that conflict with the revisionist fantasy that America is a “Christian nation.” And pushing the idea that all beliefs are equal, implying that belief in evolution is on par with religious fantasies like Noah’s ark or that there actually was a first man and a first woman (who actually came from the man’s rib).
Pandering to widespread anti-science attitudes and wholesale ignorance and much of this junk thought has only a cursory connection to theology. It would be strange if someone said, I’m entitled to my political beliefs and it’s downright rude or UnAmerican to challenge them. Because all bad ideas, no matter where they come from, should be challenged in an open society.
