Post Number:#24 
August 12th, 2009, 2:41 am
I haven’t read Day’s book yet, although I mean to, because it sounds like a wonderful antidote to Harris’s, Dawkins’, and Hitchens’ strident and unsupported claims.
One such claim is that religious fanaticism is far more dangerous than the fanaticism of secular movements such as Communism. The premise is that religious claims, such as the idea that Jesus is God, are not falsifiable, whereas ideas such as the viability of centrally planned economies are disprovable. So Communism ended when empirical fact discredited it, but religious fanaticism never ends because its premises can never be discredited in the eyes of the believers.
This line of reasoning is nonsense. It doesn’t account for the historical fact of religious fanaticism waxing and waning. Nor does it acknowledge the existence of competing non-fanatical religious movements. When atheists condemn Islamic supremacism, for example, they (and the Western press) often ignore the existence of widespread peace & love Sufism among the world’s Muslims.
But nonsense isn’t the sole province of the new atheists. Quite a few religionists preach nonsense when they argue that morality is impossible without God. You’d think that these people had never heard that many branches of Buddhism are non-theistic.
Atheist materialism does not commit one to analyzing all aspects of human experience at the molecular or sub-atomic level. The fact that bricks per se do not constitute shelter does not mean that brick buildings cannot constitute shelters. The fact that molecules per se are not moral agents does not prevent humans (even humans conceived as comprising molecules) from being moral agents.
So whence moral agency? IMO, necessity. Most parents barely get through a day without imparting and refining rules of conduct for their children. If they did not, their children would not only drive them nuts, but would also wind up in jail. What is more, most people do not want to be killed, stolen from, slandered, or cheated on. What is more, although people are not inherently good, they are capable of developing empathy with other people provided that they get to know them.
Yet, in the face of all these facts, some Christians insist that nothing short of an infinite supernatural power could inspire anyone to formulate and obey a moral rule. Even more amazingly, Christians insist on one hand that moral principles are part of the Cosmos at large, but on the other hand acknowledge, along with everyone else, that moral rules apply only to people. Not to dangerous animals. Not to tidal waves. Not to the Andromeda Galaxy. Just people, and then only people whose minds are sufficiently mature and sound to know right from wrong.
At this point, one might argue that morality got its start in religion. To atheists, this means no more than the fact that astronomy got its start in astrology. What is more, moral rules have been promulgated not by one religion, but by many whose fundamental doctrines are mutually incompatible. The religious rules regarding religious observance, and the ones that justify destructive acts, tend to vary across religions. The religious rules that preserve their parent societies tend to be similar, satisfying as they do similar social needs. For which reason should I be moral: Hell or karma? I suspect that, for most people, the real reason lies in the desire to live in a community with a trustworthy majority.
At this point, one might adduce Vox’s data to suggest that atheists are less moral than religious people. As important as Vox’s data are in skewering new atheist claims, neither his data nor the new atheist’s claims prove that that morality co-varies with piety,
In the vast majority of societies including ours, criminals are in the minority. The crime-rate in a given state or county, red, blue, purple, or plaid, does not reflect that moral state of the majority of community members.
As for the differences in crime rates, street crime is always more rampant in urban areas. That was true when everyone in Europe and America had to be Christian or be ostracized. It’s still true in the modern age of religious and ideological pluralism. It seems doubtful to me that religion vs. atheism is nearly as important here as the difference between communities whose members know each other vs. cities where so many can act under cover of anonymity.
Also, it’s naïve to compare a modern tyrannies like Nazi Germany and the Stalinist U.S.S.R. with renaissance movements like the Spanish Inquisition. The former secular tyrannies had access to transportation, communication, and weapons technology completely unknown to the Inquisitors. It’s anyone’s guess what the Spanish Inquisition might have done armed with modern machine guns, railroads, and death factories. However, it does strike me as unlikely that the Inquisitors were so much more sweet-tempered than the modern dictators.
Also, both the “new atheists” and their Christian critics seem to forget that neither religion nor atheistic creeds are all of a piece.
To condemn Christianity as inherently dangerous and corrupt, one must not only confront Vox’s statistics, important though they are. One must also confront the reality of Quakers, Anabapists, the vast majority of rank-and-file Catholic religious, and the tens of millions of rank-and-file Christians who do nothing more sinister than worship their god.
(Christopher, Richard, Sam, I’m sorry I don’t live in fear of Catholic parishioners lighting votive candles, but I’ve never seen a Catholic brandish one.)
To condemn atheism as inherently dangerous and corrupt, one must confront the vast majority of modern atheist rationalists, who, unlike their ideological forbearers in the French Revolution, do nothing more sinister than claim that the universe appears to be dominated by impersonal forces. One must also confront a fact that both Christians and atheists should agree upon: that Christianity makes some extraordinary claims. How then, can anyone consider it morally suspect to doubt that a man three days dead can rise again?
By the way, why *wouldn’t* a lot of atheistic writers be irritated or angry when a dozen forms of Christianity claim that even a God of perfect love and justice would condemn them to burn in Hell for all eternity?
Anyway, I’d better read Vox’s book.
Jim G.
