A Christian responds to some of the jargon used by atheists, and the comments get into the nature of the US’s religious and political conversation.

The fundamental problem I’m seeing in the self-styled “freethinking” crowd is conflating goals, and thereby applying an inappropriate solution.

Consider this parable: There once was a man who lived in the suburbs, and he needed to get from his house to the grocery store. When he went to start his car, though, his car wouldn’t start. So he popped the hood and started fiddling with the things inside. Nothing worked to get his car started. He became hungrier and hungrier, and so he worked harder trying to fix his car. Eventually, he began to starve, so he took extreme measures, ripping apart his lawn mower, sink, and refrigerator, cannibalizing them for parts for his car. He simply could not get his car to start, and ended up starving to death with his hand on a ratchet.

The same kind of thing is happening with these atheists. They have two explicit goals: 1) opposing the hyper-conservative intolerance of many religious people (a stance which I agree with them on), and 2) expanding personal understanding through a critical analysis of religious and spiritual ideas (another point I agree with them on). The problem is that they conflate these goals, assuming that the hyper-conservative intolerant people are the ones they should engage to expand their personal understanding. That’s simply not right.

If you want to engage in a theological conversation, and seek deeper personal understanding, than you have to engage with those who are interested in that kind of conversation. That’s not going to be the pseudo-literalist bigots: they’ve long ago left the realm of that analysis, and they’re not coming back. If they want that deeper personal understanding, they need to engage with the scholarly wing of the church and the long tradition of self-criticism and apologetics in the Christian church.

On the same token, if you want to oppose the psuedo-literalist bigots, then you have to engage them on the points that draw them into that faith. I’m not entirely sure what that is, because I’ve never understood that viewpoint, but it is abundantly clear that it is not theology. And therefore, attacking their theology isn’t going to be useful. We need to find a different tact.

For example, I know that not all Catholics are bad people- in fact, the vast bulk aren’t. My parents, for example, are still practicing Catholics, and consider themselves devout. But when you start talking about the morals and politics of Catholicism, the discussion begins and ends with Pope Benedict XVI. Falwell and the various megachurchs also have huge followings. You cannot simply ignore the influence these people have.

And from the outside, they’re the problems. I don’t have a problem with the Methodists or Presbyterians Unitarians or Lutherans, who may have deep spirtual lives I never see. That’s OK. Because they’re not trying to force their religion on me. They may welcome enquiries and new members, but they’re not out there trying to mandate their religion into law, for example.

Also, I didn’t call them stupid. I called them irrational. If your religion requires you to beleive that pi is 3, or that the earth is 6,000 years old, and you really beleive this, then you are irrational. You are not dealing with reality. There are more subtle forms of irrationality as well- for example, beleiving a single celled organism should be given the same rights as a full-fledged human being, for example. Or beleiving that an action causes damage simply because it violates your religion. Gay marriage, for example. These are more subtle forms of irrationality, but they’re still irrational.

Not all religion is evil, or irrational. A signifigant fraction of it is, however. And that fraction is the part that is most visible to those of us on the outside- because they’re the ones causing problems, the onces trying to enforce their religion.

The problem is that kind of conversation doesn’t work. The people who already subscribe to those positions are lost — you aren’t going to get them back. Worse, by attacking them on theology/philosophy, you’re missing the point.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson aren’t winning because they have a better theology. They aren’t recruiting their supporters because they’ve reasoned them into their positions, or because they’ve laid out and negotiated a social contract which their followers consider favorable. They have these people because they’re giving these people something they deeply want. If they’re really a threat and need to be combated, then that’s where you have to hit them. Talking theology or philosophy simply won’t work, because that’s not their motivation. And stating your philosophy and how stupid theirs is simply intellectual masturbation. It’s childish.

If, on the other hand, you’re actually interested in engaging in conversation with philosophy/theology for self-improvement, then you need to find other people who are on the same path. And there are people on that path who happen to be religious. And these people may already having a meaning for “Biblical morality” (or, rather struggling with one), and you’re simply shutting down the conversation if you accuse them of intellectual dishonesty or being opposed to free inquiry. Engage with C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington and the rampaging contradictions and arguments and paradoxes that formed the modern Christian faith. There’s been a lot of free inquiry in the history, and even now the faith is being reformed over and over and over again — Hell, the Presbyterians even add new confessions.

And, hey, if you don’t like Christianity, that’s fine — there’s still a lot of other viewpoints to be considering and looking into.

But writing them all off as stupid — as piles of people who are cowering from the piercing sunlight of knowledge — is just wrong.

Assumptions that if you do question, then it’s your fault. Read this article, for example, except replace “Atheist” with “Jew”, and see how well the shoe fits on the other foot. Or Muslim. Or Christians in China, for example. Hey Christians in China- just keep your head down, don’t bring up your religion, and don’t rile the natives, and you’ll be fine. How well does that go over?

Therein lies the rub- because one of the fundamental precepts of religions, all religions, is not only to beleive this long list of statements, but to make other people beleive them (or at least act as if they beleive them) as well. Successfull religions are memetic virii- that’s why they’re successfull. We can’t expect the Christians in China to simply shut up and keep their heads down, because their religion requires them to try and convert others- at which point the Communism religion decides it doesn’t like the competition. Which is no different a problem, I mention, than Chrisitians in Saudi Arabia- or Communists or Muslims here in the US. Guess what- you rile up the nativites, and they’re going to feed you to the lions.

This is, of course, what is wonderful about government-mandated religion, so long as it’s your religion- you don’t have to deal with those pesky questions, you just feed the questioners to the lions. Of course, if it isn’t your religion, then it’s a terrible crime. Which just goes to show what heathens those barbarians really are.

As for morality extending beyond Leviticus and Deuteronomy, that’s not a limitation imposed on supposedly religious people by the atheists. That’s a self-imposed limitation. And actually, the limitation is stricter than that- there are a whole bunch of restrictions in those books which are routinely ignored by the “devout”. Morality, in this country, has been reduced down to homophobia and anti-abortion, by the so-called religous people themselves.

So I’m all for opening up the moral debate. Let’s have a discussion over the morality of denying poor children health care. Heck, let’s have a discussion on the morality of denying health care to over fourty million Americans. I’m pretty sure Jesus has something to say about curing the sick. Let’s have a moral discussion about bombing other countries that we don’t like, and torturing prisoners. I’m pretty sure Jesus has things to say about those issues too.

The thing is that you don’t need religion to convince me that not curing a sick child we can cure is bad. If I have the least ounce of human empathy, I’m on board. You need religion to convince me otherwise. The greatest crimes throughout all of history have had religion, if not as a motivator, then at least as an excuse. God can not be wrong. God commands this action. There for, this action can not be wrong. Even if we might otherwise think so. God wills it. Allahu Akbar.

The great danger of religion is it’s ability to override people’s common sense. Which brings me to my last point- empiricism. There are intellectually honest and rigorous epistemologies- I’ll name one, a non-religous one. Mathematics. Mathematics is not empirical, it is not experiment and observation driven. Mathematics can be used to model the real world- but simply by proving a result in mathematics does not tell us anything about the real world, nor does it claim to. It simply says that in all domains where the assumptions hold true, the results also hold true. It does not say that the assumptions hold true.

It’s not that other intellectually honest and rigorous epistemologies don’t exist, it’s just that they are held to the same standard mathematics is- in that the predicitions they make about the real world must be verified empricially, by observation and experiment. A good book to read demonstrating this, taking physicists to task for dropping empricism, is “Not Even Wrong” by Peter Woit.

If you’re going to talk about reality, it’s only fair to give reality the right to rebut. That’s just common sense. Forget that, and you’ve wandered into the realm of flat earths, young earths, and pi = 3.

Note that everything of importance, however, ends up talking about reality. Especially politics. Which is where the real attraction to simply nailing the opposition to a tree, or feeding them to the lions, comes from. Unfortunately, that is where it is most important to resist the siren call of irrationalism.