When in Doubt, Don’t Trust Religion
One of the more curious attributes I have encountered among very intelligent and thoughtful religious people is the tendency to give great deference to traditional beliefs, and the texts in which those beliefs are written. For devout Christians, the Bible is given de facto preference, and they will quote from it liberally to validate point after point. The great contradiction inherent in this approach, of course, is seen when they will not give any other source, any other thinker or any other piece of evidence the benefit of the doubt on any other issue. Out of all symmetry with these very smart individuals’ outlook, the Bible enjoys a special status not accorded to anything else.
Needless to say, this is an extremely dangerous and unstable situation to place oneself in. To speak only of morality, the Quran, the Bible, or any other holy text contains a significant amount of material that will clash with the overall moral framework that most people in the modern world have (including countless well-read and well-spoken religious people). We are therefore depending on them to only pay attention to or take seriously those passages and verses that conform to their peaceful subjective beliefs.
The average Christian wants to believe that God is good and just and merciful, and so she will pay closer attention to those Biblical passages that demonstrate a good God, and ignore those that point to a bad God. But, at the end of the day, it is only her emotional architecture and subjective assumptions that keep her from killing us. Those who derive their morality from religion are playing with fire.
The default position should be to not trust religions that were created centuries and millenia ago. We know that ancient people were not smart. We know they were not wise to natural processes, that they did not have a framework of empirical reason or systematic skeptical inquiry. Rather, they only had the myths of their fathers and their own interpretation of them in the context of subjective experiences. Why anyone would give the benefit of the doubt to an ideology or belief system created in such a backward intellectual climate escapes me. It’s like giving the car keys to a 3-year-old, for goodness’ sake.
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It’s true that poeple tend to read any holy book only to the extent of what they want to find there. That’s the source of many debates and disputes in the world.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with religion in and of itself–for individuals it can make a profound difference in their daily lives. On a person-to-person basis, faith can be self-tailored (which to a degree speaks to Cynthia’s point above) so that it benefits the individual of faith, but does impinge upon the liberty of anyone else.
But when religion and government are mixed, religion becomes standardized and rigid, and deviation from it heresey.
Smaktakula:
You said “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with religion in and of itself”
It depends on what on one’s definition of “religion” is. If one defines it to mean just one’s own personal opinions about things we can never know with certainty (like life after death), then you might be right.
But I define religion as any belief system based primarily on claims and assertions for which there is no evidence. The default position (as I argued in the post) is to not accept such claims, without necessarily rejecting them altogether. And insofar as religion’s claims (without evidence) clash with claims that are backed up by evidence, religion should be rejected.
More fundamentally, the overall mindset engendered by religion of blind acceptance without evidence is very much harmful to human understanding.
On religion and government, you might be interested in this article:
http://100treatises.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/why-religious-freedom-requires-secularism/
I’d push back the intelligent religious peole tend to do the opposite of what you do. Fundies quote the Bible (or the Quoran or the Talmud) excessively and preferrentially to justify their points. The rest of us quote all sorts of other documents.
Philip, but there are many fundamentalists that are very intelligent and well-read, as well. I’m including some fundamentalists in that category of “intelligent religious people” as well as non-fundamentalist but still devout individuals. And I’m not talking about all religious people in this post–but a significant enough number to count.