Asymmetry Again
A couple of our readers are cross with Dawkins and with me for being blunt about religion, or perhaps for oversimplifying it. Of course that’s one of those perennial irregular verb things that I’m always noticing. One of those eye of the beholder things, one of those glass half-full or half-empty things, one of those Well it depends on which way you look at it things. Granted, I did speak bluntly and even rudely – I said as much at the time. But this is part of my point. How odd that hardly anyone rushes to upbraid Lieberman for being rude about atheism or secularism. How odd that there’s such a radical asymmetry in public rhetoric about the whole question, and that we’re so used to that asymmetry that we never even notice it. Why is it all right for Lieberman and other believers to chastise non-believers, but not all right for non-believers to chastise back? This set-up is bizarre and inequitable in at least two ways. One, it’s just unfair on the face of it. They can say we’re wrong, and we’re not allowed to say that they’re wrong. Two, it’s particularly absurd because they are in fact so very much more likely to be wrong than we are – and that’s putting it politely. That, you see, is why I put it so rudely. Because surely there is something grotesque about the fact that religious people get to scold non-religious people for, precisely, not sharing their ‘faith’ or ‘belief.’ What does faith mean in that context? It means believing something is true without good evidence. The word itself carries the implication that one is supposed to overlook the lack of evidence and just believe anyway – a procedure which is not considered intellectually respectable in other contexts. We don’t just have faith that the earth moves around the sun or that the Holocaust happened or that viruses cause colds, do we – we rely on evidence. Granted it’s not evidence that we ourselves have examined or produced. Even if we are astronomers or historians or medical researchers, we still have to rely on researchers in other fields to examine that evidence in our place; nobody can examine the evidence for everything we believe. But that’s not the same thing as no evidence at all. There are no equivalents of astronomers in religion – theologians don’t look for evidence, that’s not in the job description.
So that’s why it is grotesque that religious people think they are entitled to scold non-religious people – because they are urging people to believe something that there is no good reason to think is true. We are so accustomed to the grotesquery that most of us don’t notice it, but that doesn’t make it less grotesque – arguably it only makes it more so. Hence the need to point out, loudly and firmly, to windbags on the campaign trail, the epistemologically shaky status of what they believe. However rude it may seem.
I really would like an answer to the question that you pose, OB. I would try to phrase it as generically and objectively as possible, maybe, “Why is it that the most common response to atheist chiding of god worshippers is that the atheist gets criticised, while the most common response to god worshippers chiding of atheists is to take what the god worshipper says at face value?”
So would I, JC. Good point about the phrasing. That’s what I was trying to do: phrase it in such a nearly algebraic way that the asymmetry would become obvious.
Let’s see –
Believer rebukes non-believer: fine.
Non-believer rebukes believer: bad.
Always knew that algebra stuff would come in handy someday!
I think a lot of believers are scared of a godless world because they think there can be no morality in it. Their religion comes with guidelines and so on, while they see the scientific view as having nothing to look up to/back to but the ways of apes, nature red in tooth & claw, etc. E.g., all those books that say war and rape and sexism and xenophobia and so on are hardwired into the brain, and not enough about how we, the brain owners, can subvert that wiring. I won’t even start on the ones who imitate certain religions by telling us everything we like is bad for us.
If evidence of effort to overturn all that vileness was more visible to the religious crowd–and of course some of them wouldn’t know it if it fell in their coffee–they would not be so quick to think us valueless (in both senses of the word.)
There are a few people who “associate guidelines” with their own idea of Darwinism, whether it is a nutcase grinding out sci-fi about planets full of slave girls, or a suit claiming that the poor and sick got that way thru their own shortcomings, and cutting off their benefits. Religion might not have the only corner on cruelty…but it does seem to have one of the more visible ones.
Some people’s spiritual beliefs afect their daily lives more obviously than others. When these others try to impinge on MY freedom because they really think their god cares, that isn’t irrelevent to daily life. Especially when they run for office, or influence those who do.
Yes; just so. I was going to go into that (the motivation, the association with morality, the fear of a godless world) in chapter 4 (or whatever chapter it is by now) of this little Blast Against the Godbotherers – but I hadn’t got to it yet, and I had half-decided not to get to it, if only because now we’re near the end of the month the page is quite slow to load for people (like me) with dial-up. But maybe I will after all. Not that I have anything new to say, of course, but that doesn’t matter – what Soapy Joe said isn’t new either, but it does damage all the same. The silence of atheists does a lot of harm. So, perhaps I’ll make some more noise.
WWhat an intractable mess.
The problem is so vast and pervasive. I just can’t help but believe that this “asymmetry” is symptomatic of a deeper problem, and that any attempt to correct it at this level would be ineffective. Perhaps I am wrong, and I am sure that such attempts can’t possibly make it worse.
What could be the source of the problem? How can people with the capacity for reason totally abandon it in this area of human concern? There is frequently a rabid reaction to challenges of the “Godbotherer” belief system. Alternatively, if I were to acknowledge that I was godless in a non-confrontational manner, it is met with pity, “oh you poor man, I will pray for you”, and not inquisitiveness. There seems to be no path for dialogue, it is sealed and the beliefs self preserving and perpetuating.
Is it the terror of death’s finality? The fear of unalterable insignificance, the fear of a godless world? Why are these beliefs protected almost as viscously as life itself?
What can possibly be done about it? Perhaps we need a Hegelian army of new priests from the church of empiricism to craft a new folk religion for these imbeciles. And give them something that is not so divisive and reactionary and so prone to causing so much suffering. Some sweet poison they can comfort themselves with. Perhaps this is too harsh and shows too much contempt and too little compassion for the afflictions of my fellow man?
What a mess.
Yes, I think it’s those things. And religion can be somewhat consoling (I gather) when people one loves die. That may be the main reason it survives. There are times when life is just so painful that – we grasp at straws.
But I think it also has to do with a lot of illusions and bad thinking – bad thinking that is not particularly useful or consoling or inevitable. Like the confusion of religion with morality for instance, or the notion that if one is not religious one is therefore not ‘spiritual,’ though I’m never entirely clear what that fuzzy word means.
So that’s one reason I think it’s worth yanking away at these confusions; disentangling that which is tangled; clarifying; pinning things down. Because they’re not inevitable; they’re not useful; they are often harmful.
Don’t despair too much. Plenty of places are nowhere near as god-ridden as the US. Though on the other hand of course, plenty of places are also more so, with terrifying results. Oh go ahead; despair.