Atheists Vs. Faith (Round 1 . . . Ding! Ding!)

What is it about atheists?

I totally respect their right to have their own beliefs. If they want to deny the existence of the Lord, that’s cool with me. I’d still be their pals, nor do I feel some desperate desire for them to worship God or think any less of them for not wanting to worship a divine being. In other words, I respect their beliefs and I would even hear out their thoughts on why they don’t believe in God (last night I actually had an interesting discussion with my brother who is a Jewish atheist) without resorting to screaming and name-calling, but only wishing for them to maintain the same respect for my beliefs in the process.

Over at this discussion, we got into an interesting debate about whether feminism and religion are reconcilable. Although a few responded to the topic, the discussion quickly devolved into an Atheist versus the Faithful verbal sparring match. The moderator, Jeff, who is an atheist male feminist got accused of being borderline anti-Semitic by a Jewish Feminist. For the record, I felt Jeff was discussing in good faith and I didn’t find anything he said to be anti-Semitic. But as the disclaimer statement goes I don’t represent the voice of every Jew, I only represent my own. Although I disagree with Tara about the extent and degree of Jeff’s offensiveness (let me repeat, I didn’t find him offensive at all), I think she is right on the money when it comes to Atheists and Judaism. I think there is a deep misunderstanding that centers around atheists tendency to attack all religions (including more moderate forms of Christianity as well) based on their experiences with Christian Fundamentalists.

My bigger concern in that thread was the comments of Doug S. who I felt was approaching me in Bad Faith. How else is one supposed to take quotations such as:

“Faith is the license that religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. To keep believing in the absence of evidence.” – Sam Harris

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick

Consider it from my position, as someone who believes in the existence of God, how would you respond to someone quoting material like that at you? What would you think of their possible motives?

I mean what kind of person begins a post wanting to know about another’s religious beliefs and positions by condescendingly linking to two atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins (he linked to two interviews by these writers in addition to the quotes) as if I had never read Dawkins before and I am about to be oh so enlightened.

This reminds me of the time I was sitting at work with my atheist co-worker and peer in my grad English program who happened to make a comment that basically suggested: “God is a figment of the imagination, and only idiots believe in God.” Not his exact words, but it conveys the gist of his comment. You can imagine how this must have made me feel. Here was my friend, co-worker, and peer basically implying that because I believe in God I must be an idiot.

Of course, I don’t think he was explicitly taking into account that the person he was sharing this insight with happened to believe in God and might be a little hurt by such a statement. To put it another way, he merely shared his own atheist views without thinking about the other people in the room and what they thought or believed (the other person being me); I don’t think he intended to make me feel bad. In fact, I don’t think he thought about me at all when speaking his honest feelings. In that one moment, however, he demonstrated an act of pure intolerance (at least from my viewpoint), insinuating that my position made me inferior to him, a downright savage compared to his rational scientific enlightened mind that had rejected silly notions of divine beings and supernatural deities.

I suspect all you atheists out there dislike having religion shoved down your throats, well, unsurprisingly I hate having atheism shoved down my throat. It’s one thing to have a respectful discussion and disagree; it’s another to resort to mocking people and calling them idiots for their beliefs or implying it. That in my view is the difference between Jeff’s comments in the thread versus Doug S. comments, quite clearly there is this underlying mocking tone when one considers the context of the latter’s post.

From a Jewish standpoint this is troubling. Not only do I have to hear crap from Christians that I am going to hell for not believing in Christ, but I also now have to hear crap from atheists telling me I am stupid and irrational for believing in God in the first place. Instead of being my natural allies, atheists become just as bad and dogmatic as Christians in this instance.

I think one major problem that I noticed while reading interviews with Dawkins, Harris and our commentator, Doug S., is that they all apply their experiences with fundamentalist Christianity and extrapolate those experiences to all religions, which just doesn’t work out so neatly. In Doug’s comments you can almost see him waiting in an anticipation for me to say something whacky (from his viewpoint even saying that I believe in God might seem whacky) and go into a Creationist Rant about how science and all those other religions got it wrong, and how they are all destined for the fiery pits of Tartarus (those evil bastards!). Alas, he’ll be waiting a long time only to inevitably be disappointed.

Judaism for the most part has no proselytizing tradition, hence why it doesn’t matter much to me if you believe in God or not. Unlike certain forms of Christianity and other religions, it is not my job to convert you or preach the word of God to you. From a religious standpoint, it is only my duty to believe in God myself, to love him with all my heart. What you do is your business. This is also why Judaism for the most part (perhaps Orthodox aside) can allow the existence of members who are atheist. There are many Jews who don’t believe in God, but accept Judaism as their heritage and culture; there are many who will even go to synagogue for cultural reasons rather than religious considerations, though that is probably the minority who attend (more on “Judaism as heritage and culture” later).

On top of this, Judaism has no dogma about the afterlife. I’ve met Jews who believe in reincarnation, Heaven, Heaven and Hell, Sheol (a kind of purgatory similar to the Greek conception of Hades), the world-to-come (reincarnation only when the Messiah arrives), and this is it (”from dust you came, from dust you shall return”). Not only has this led to Judaism focusing on this life rather than an afterlife, but also you can see why there is less pressure to convert outsiders if you don’t believe their lack of conversion means an eternity burning in flames. We don’t all agree what happens to a person’s soul when they kick it, even when two Jews agree that there is a heaven and you go to it, there isn’t always agreement on what one needs to do to attain it. Our religious leaders might share their view, but it isn’t necessarily to be considered the one and only right view. So it becomes a matter lots of times of personal interpretation and opinion.

Thirdly, since Judaism also functions as a cultural heritage presumably of people with roots extending back to the Ancient Israelites (this is a contested on-going debate among geneticists and others with political interests) you can also see why Jews would not encourage conversions. I’ve met a couple of convert Jews and the first thing that stands out is how different their values and their family backgrounds are from what I’ll term the average “heritage” Jew.

Next point to address is that Judaism has always been a tradition that encourages the acquisition of knowledge, as well as one that stresses interpretation. Besides, sidelining a certain amount of dogmatism by requiring that a major portion of a Jewish man’s life (female as well in Reform and some Conservative traditions) will be spent engaging with the Torah, interpreting it, and reading the Oral Torah, Judaism has always encouraged, at least in this modern age, the importance of secular education coextensive with religious education. You’re going to be hard-pressed to find too many Conservative and Reform Jews, the vast majority of those living in America, who do not believe in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (once again Orthodoxy aside).

There is this implication in all this that religious folk aren’t as smart as atheists. Dawkin’s explicitly states this:

“there is a correlation between IQ/education and atheism. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist. Or the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist.”

All I can say is that my religious beliefs has never interfered with me excelling in school during college. I graduated from the Honors programs at two Universities earning a BA in English and a minor in history, Magna Cum Laude, Dean’s List multiple times, Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, full scholarship at one school, half scholarship per a semester for academic achievement at the other school, and I am now working on completing two separate Masters degrees, one in English and the other in Library Science. I’m not trying to brag or show off (certainly I have a ton to learn still before I die), but safe to say I am not exactly stupid or lacking in intelligence. In fact, as I mentioned above my Jewish values are in part what led me to take my academics more seriously, the complete opposite of Dawkin’s thesis about the nature of religion in his interview (this is not to say that all Jews take their studies seriously).

The fact is faith and science serve very different functions for human beings. This is the other fallacy extreme atheists tend to make, they seem to view religion almost strictly as a kind of immature science.

From the standpoint of the discipline of Comparative Religion there are four main explanations as to how one should read and understand religious texts:

1) Religion and History (aka euhemerism

2) Religion as Immature Science

3) Religion and the Unconscious

4) Religion and Society

Of course, there is a fifth way to read a religious book as well: religion as divinely inspired, an actual religious text, a holy book. I tend to combine all five when reading a book from my own religion, and in some cases other religions as well. The main point here is that I think atheist evolutionists like Dawkins seem to mostly read religion as immature science, reflected when he says:

“And when I discovered the Darwinian explanation, which is so stunningly elegant and powerful, I realized that you really don’t need any kind of supernatural force to explain it [all].”

“[Religion] encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren’t explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life.”

As can be seen from both quotes, he emphasizes religion as an explanation for the origins of life, which of course ignores the far more important areas of “Religion and the Unconscious” and “Religion and Society.” These two ways of reading religion do a nice job at explaining why people socially, culturally, and psychologically need religion (which extends far beyond a mere explanation of life). After all, if that were the case then most religions would only need a cosmological story and they could be done with it, yet as is plainly evident from looking at most of the world’s religions they far exceed their Creation myths.

Stan Marsh in a South Park episode puts my objection to this dichotomy best: “Couldn’t evolution be the answer to how and not the answer to why?”

Basically, overzealous atheists oversimplify the role of religion. It does far more than just attempt to explain where life and the world came from.

The third fallacy overzealous atheists tend to make when engaging with religious folk is the belief that religious folk never question their own views, that they accept all their religious teachings at face value. First, there is the problem that Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism all exist, that there are hundreds if not thousands of Christian denominations, that the same can be said about scores of other world religions (I’m avoiding talking about specifically talking about Islam, Eastern religions, and other smaller religions for now in this essay) which by their very existence prove that adherents questioned their parent orthodoxy and broke off because of disagreements. Even the most religious of religious have questioned their faith at times, see for example Mother Theresa.

Speaking for myself, I’ve had similar phases. I went from being a non-religious cultural Jew to a short stint as a Jew for Jesus to a Deist to a short period of being Agnostic to returning to Judaism as cultural heritage to believing in God and thinking of Judaism as my religion. I could go into more detail about each of these changes in my spiritual life, but safe to say there was a lot of self-inquiry, pondering, thinking, questioning that was involved in these various transitions.

When Richard Dawkins states that:

“I started getting doubts when I was about 9 and realized that there are lots of different religions and they can’t all be right. And which one I happened to be brought up in was an arbitrary accident.”

I can’t help but laugh at Dawkins words here because those were literally my own words around the same age; I swear that they could’ve been taken straight from my mouth. I remember talking to my mother about how I noticed that the religion you were brought up in was an arbitrary accident (of course, if you believe in a divine being, perhaps it isn’t an accident at all, or so my thinking goes now); I could just have easily have been born to a Catholic family and that is what I would believe, I could just as easily been born to a Hindu family and that is what I would believe.

So the mistake most atheists make here is this false assumption that religious people have not gone through some of the same religious crises they have, but in the end came to different conclusions. They tend to assume that religious people have just always gone through the motions like unthinking sheep — which may be true of some people — but I suspect not for a great deal of the religious people in the world.

The last fallacy extreme atheists tend to make is the belief that religion is one of the main causes of the world’s problems and violence. Dawkins states:

“If you’re taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die — anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed — that clearly is evil. And people don’t have to justify it because it’s their faith. They don’t have to say, “Well, here’s a very good reason for this.” All they need to say is, “That’s what my faith says.” And we’re all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we’re actually faithful ourselves, we’ve been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it’s had historically — the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York — all in the name of faith.”

“ the moderate, sensible religious people you’ve cited make the world safe for the extremists by bringing up children — sometimes even indoctrinating children — to believe that faith trumps everything and by influencing society to respect faith.”

There is certainly no denying that religions have caused a great deal of violence in this world (believe me I’m Jewish, I know this all too well), except as has been pointed out by some conservatives it is atheists rather than religious types can also be counted as some of the world’s leading mass murderers. Some atheists have responded to these accusations by pointing out it was the men’s political ideologies that are to blame, and the killings weren’t done “in the name of atheism,” therefore atheism has nothing to do with it. Except this tends to ignore a couple of important facts. For example, among the many people Stalin killed, he specifically targeted religious groups and their leaders for mass killings, perhaps for political reasons, perhaps what we might also call “in the name of atheism.” There is a cop-out happening here, in my opinion.

What do most atheists turn to once they get rid of all the so-called superstition from their lives? For all the ones that turn to science, there are also those who turn to politics and theorists. They turn to the likes of Foucault and Derrida, proclaiming them as their new gods of reality. They turn to feminism and Marxism. Everything is a social construct don’t you know. My identity is caught up in the stream of society, writing upon me and shaping me. Oh me, oh my; I’m a slave, I’m oppressed, the dominant culture is effacing my real self, the dominant culture is forging me a new real self, I’m nothing but a forgery. Autonomy is a mere illusion.

And what do conservative types who stop believing in God tend to turn to? Neo-Nazism, of course, chalk full of racist ritual that does a white body good. I suppose some of them also become Lefties as they abandon their religious values.

A few might also turn to Libertarianism, of course. Others will turn to whatever other “ism” looks fairly kosher this week. But what becomes quickly apparent is the “isms” still exist without religion. They turn away from God only to worship the secular theology of Racism, Sexism, and Classism, the holy trinity of Progressive politics that offers the real explanation of what is going in the world beyond what we see with our own eyes (because you know its all invisible of course, hard to see unless you have the true faith, sort of like the way God works in the world).

Religion in some ways is a facade, my actual religious beliefs in God aside. Even if I were to shed my religious Judaism this would still leave all sorts of problems. As I pointed out earlier, Judaism has a double function as both religion and cultural heritage. As the Jews who converted to Christianity found out the hard way in Nazi Germany, once a Jew, always a Jew. If I stopped believing in God nothing would change for me really, other than perhaps divine retribution (but if you’re reading this argument you probably don’t believe in such things). The point is because of this double function I would still believe most of what I believe now, I would still act the way I act, I would still think the way I think, except I wouldn’t situate my ethics and values as being part of relationship to God. I know because I had these values long before I came to believe in God, and it was still all cultural for me. That is how situated the religious is with the cultural in Judaism; it is why even though my brother identifies as atheist, he is still a Jew. To put it another way, if extreme atheists managed to end religion tomorrow I doubt too much would change, all those religious folks with the values you dislike would just find other ways to justify those values outside of religious beliefs.

Joseph Stalin might not prove that atheism causes people to become mass murders (a point I agree with), but it does point out that even if everyone became atheists tomorrow we’d still have potential mass murderers living among us. The fact is people will always find differences to fight about, religion or no religion. It is not the faith of moderate people that are to blame as Dawkins naively claims, but the world-views of extremists such as Dawkins, Stalin, Hitler, terrorists, fundamentalist Christians, certain feminists, and the other assorted ideologues of the world who cannot respect difference, who find differences from their beliefs to be grossly intolerable. There is the root of your problem, folks.

Dawkins Interview that I quoted: Click Here for Interview

* Edits 12/18/07 11:42PM: Fixed some broken link tags. Other minor sentence structure stuff.