[Dialogue] {Spam?} Objections to Religious Faith

Sat May 12 17:12:54 EDT 2007

Excerpt from, "God is not Great", by Christopher  Hitchens 
There are four irreducible  objections to religious faith: 
1)  that it wholly misrepresents the origins  of man and the cosmos,  
2)  that because of this original error it  manages to combine the maximum of 
servility with the maximum of solipsism,   
3)  that it is both the result and the cause  of dangerous sexual repression, 

4)  and that it is ultimately grounded on  wish-thinking.  
I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already  discovered 
these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious  fact 
that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with  
authority) before my boyish voice had broken. 
I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar  
conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in  
hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never  
believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of  them 
had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous,  
though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and  
more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road.   
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not  a 
belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and 
 reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we  
distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ 
on  many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the  
pursuit of ideas for their own sake.  
We  do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between 
Professor  Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated  
evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as 
well  as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not 
by  mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel  
Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly  
nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) 

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have  music 
and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are  better 
handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and  George 
Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature,  not 
scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the  
soul.  
We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that  
without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or  
violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever  
be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to  
living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy 
 to notice that we must make way, and room.  
We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the  
fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each  
other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be 
lived  without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that 
 religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no 
better  than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that 
would  make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.   
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of  
reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to  
the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."  

____________________________________

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on  any 
high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow  in 
our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy  
above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to  
us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including  
objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book).   
To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the  
ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing  civilians in 
the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can  counterpose a 
leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the  gallery to 
another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or  beauty.  
Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery  will 
obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and  
believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of  
Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have  written 
many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of  the germ 
theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar  system, 
let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no  more 
of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow.   
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long  time 
ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as  
did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for  
his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages 
from  the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the 
echoing  repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as 
to  ward off the terrible emptiness. 
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might  
cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C.  
S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of  
strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the  
incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make 
sure that the  sun would rise.  
Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that,  
perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively  at 
that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?  How 
much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm  
continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must  be 
made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of  
science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient  
man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are  
required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite  
pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those  
dogmas?  
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way  
about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and  
religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all  about us 
and that has so retarded the development of  civilization. 
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most  
devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on  
what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can  
they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments 
which  were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by 
 them.  
And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know  
everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised  
the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us—from our diet 
to  our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and  
complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can  
still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed 
of  mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we 
already  have all the essential information we need.  
Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to  
exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims  
divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It  
may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be 
 protracted. 
The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments,  
because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy,  
science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the 
 end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith 
is,  precisely because we are  still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will 
never die out, or at least not  until we get over our fear of death, and of 
the dark, and of the unknown, and of  each other.  
For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very  
generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same  
indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and  my 
religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest  to 
admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to  
marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was 
 dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to  
interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.  
And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the  
polite reciprocal condition—which is that  they in turn leave me alone. But this, 
religion is ultimately  incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you 
read them, people of  faith are in their different ways planning your and my 
destruction, and the  destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I 
have touched upon.  Religion poisons  everything. 

Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
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