Religion in America, And Why You Shouldn’t Be Part of It

I suppose I’m at the end of the cycle on this: first, the Republicans increase their appeals to the evangelicals in their successful efforts to win 2000-2004 elections; then a handful of atheist/agnostic academics (note: for this essay, “atheist” will mean “either positively disbelieving in God nor particularly believing in any god” and “agnostic” will refer to the compatible position that we cannot know anything about any world beyond our own reality),write best-selling anti-religion screeds; then major news magazines reflect upon whether this wave of anti-religious sentiment can mean much in a country that is roughly 80% Christian and 85-90% theist, and try to make some ponderous and non-committal statement to look as if they’ve made some wise conclusion; and now I try to take things back another step and reflect on the whole mess.

I’ll be up front with my own convictions: I have no religious beliefs, and have not since the social-control dynamic of religion was pointed out to me in a ninth-grade history class, and I further reflected that a) nothing about my character would change if I stopped believing in God, and b) that I couldn’t justify being amused at the silliness of Hindus and Shintoists for believing in all sorts of bizarre anthropomorphic traits and moral failings when I was part of a religion whose God termed himself “a jealous God” in his First Commandment and who felt someone that sending His Son to Earth to be offed would be a good way to redeem mankind for (what we would term today to be an eminently healthy) thirst for knowledge that had occurred ages previous. Furthermore, for a long time I’ve found it nigh-on inconceivable that any intelligent person could maintain religious beliefs past high school, a feeling that has been doubly frustrating by knowing many undeniably intelligent people who are religious. And while “religious tolerance” is held as a central doctrine of modern liberalism, I feel like I can’t avoid begrudging people their religion because it manages to keep butting into issues that actually are important—issues, indeed, of life and death.

So in this essay, I’d like to go step-by-step through what religion in today’s world is like (using American Christianity as the go-to test case), what the reasons for and against its existence are, and the problems with its continued existence. As I’ve said, I’m in the agnostic minority—at least, I think I am. After all, in 1998 I was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church, only to reject it a year later. Particularly considering that I attended every Sunday for several years more at my mother’s insistence and continue to get the church bulletin mailed to my apartment, I imagine I’m still listed in any relevant census data as part of the 80%. More people might be in this boat with me, but, I’ll assume the polls are more or less accurate, and I will begin by trying to outline their attacks on atheism and justifications of religion. Of course, one merely charges that atheists are simply flat-out wrong, and if they cannot feel the glory of God within themselves or within Creation, then that’s their problem, because everyone else sees it. This line of argument devolves very quickly into a “Uh huh!”-“Uh-uh!” debate over whether God’s presence is evident on its face; the fact that this argument exists suggests that it isn’t, but I’ll address this later.


Religious “Tolerance”

Some people might claim that undertaking such a project is beside the point, because all religions should be accepted charge that atheistic screeds against religion are “intolerant.” After all, one of the biggest complaints non-religious people have had against Christianity is that Christianity’s intolerance toward other religions (of course, you can replace “Christianity” with “Islam” or with any sect or subsect and this would still be true) has led to countless wars and persecutions. It is thus a commonplace that the during the Enlightenment move towards tolerance of religious practice is central to an open, liberal Western society: it is taken as a given that there will be many religions, and mutual respect of worship will be the best way to keep these groups from fighting with each other. In this line of reasoning, atheists who try to convert, denigrate, or express personal offense at religious practitioners are little better than the Spanish Inquisition. Some take this counter-attack further and claim that atheism is a “religion” itself, just one that happens to have no God, and is as much an article of faith as anything else, and thus is in no position to judge other religions.

This last line of attack can only exist because of this word “tolerance,” which has subtly done, with little remark from the popular press, immense harm to the foundations of popular liberalism (as wonderfully depicted in Doonesbury some years ago). While on the one hand it seems to lovingly accept all views into its fold, and thus shuts out no one. But it is often taken to a level of amorality that leaves liberals literally unable to refute anything, because anything that has enough cultural clout becomes a simple “cultural tradition” that must be respected. As an undergrad at Williams, I watched a classroom full of very intelligent African Studies students come to the conclusion that female genital mutilation was an acceptable tribal practice; Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind documents a similar phenomenon with the burning of widows in India. (A more complex case comes with the 1990 Supreme Court ruling that Native American tribes are allowed to use the relatively mild but still quite dangerous hallucinogen peyote in rituals.) While Karl Rove can mobilize an evangelical base by playing on their unrelenting intolerance of homosexuals and by plainly portraying them as “bad” people, liberals cannot draw up a similarly mobilizing ire for foaming-mouth Christians. Why? Because their religious views must be respected and tolerated; to be “intolerant” of “intolerance” is simply hypocritical, as both liberals conservatives try to get away with claiming.

Liberals badly need to redefine what “tolerance” means to avoid such ridiculous logical grounds. Imagine that there grew a religious sect whose principles encouraged casual murder as part of a sort of naturist method of communing with the spiritual through our primal roots. We might say this sect’s members would be quickly arrested, because committing murder would violate the law, but since the law is obviously malleable based on the religious leanings of the people in power regardless of national norms (cf. gay marriage laws in liberal bastions like San Francisco and Massachusetts), this might not be true in a community where its members were dominant. As a society, I believe we could condemn it without qualm, because having random murders going on would completely destabilize the everyday functioning of life as we know it. Furthermore, it would break the axiomatic “self-evident truth” that people have a right to their own lives, which has been central to America since the Constitution. Of course, you could argue that this axiom is not self-evident (and I will discuss why it is later), but in essence the problem with this sect is that its beliefs are just illogical—if you caught someone arguing for that position, you would fight his principles as vigorously as if you caught him trying to knife his neighbor, because there is only a very small step between people honestly believing stupid things and doing stupid things.

Through this extreme case, I think it’s clear that tolerance should never extend to things that don’t make any sense. What many people forget is that there is a difference between relativism and, say, anarchy. Relativism does not say that anything goes—it merely claims that we should examine things in terms of their relationships to each other rather than as strictly interpreted by some arbitrary and rigid system. The problem with the latter is that life tends to be more complex than predicted, and even the best imaginable moral code will lead to some conclusions that do not seem, based on the principles informing that code, to be just. But relativism does not destroy morality—like Godel proved for any logical system, it requires an assumed first principle that cannot be logically proved. From first principles, though, we should be able to deduce the rest of the system. Now, there’s a great deal of disagreement over what does and does not make logical sense against the generally agreed upon first principles of our current America, because they’re somewhat vaguely defined, as they were the product of rhetoric rather than logic—for example, even limiting ourselves to the Declaration of Independence, a liberal argues that restricting abortion is affront on liberty, while a conservative argues that allowing it is an affront to life—but unless anyone wants to dispute that the pro-murder sect describes above has stupid beliefs (pending my reinforcement of the “life” self-evidence), I think we’ve established that there are cases where the logic or illogic of a particular position is clear.

Atheism, of course, is not really a position. Very few atheists will categorically claim that they know that God does not exist, due to the limits of Russell’s Teapot. Most will claim that we do not have believe in other things for which there is no reliable evidence or they will take the agnostic position that the issue of “evidence” becomes too complicated when dealing with religious matters and that nothing can be known about God at all. Atheism, thus, is not a religion; it is a lack of one. It can encompass a great many ethical systems, political perspectives, and aesthetic choices. It mandates absolutely nothing, while most religions mandate quite a few things. Therefore, it makes no sense to compare atheists who look to convert to fundamentalists, because atheism has no fundamentals beyond the lack of proof for the existence of God; it is a wholly logical position. But of course, it is common today for people to decry opponents on any issue as “religious fundamentalists” of some kind, most notably on global warming. This misses the point; if every authority on religion, after studying the matter closely for years, came to a single conclusion which could be supported by data and models, I would gladly convert to their religion. Charges of “fundamentalism” should be limited to those who rely on assumptions that are neither questioned, provable, nor terribly good at describing the world—in an uncharitable mood, I might describe many of the market capitalists who circularly rely Smithian ideas of the “invisible hand” to both explain how the system allows CEOs to make hundreds of millions of dollars when their companies fail and to morally justify such actions as fitting into this group.

“Faith” and “Reason”

Another argument against a study such as this essay is that pursuing a logical justification for religion is beside the point. Many religious people, when asked for the reason that they believe in God, claim that to ask for reasons for faith is silly—faith is that which must carry humanity on when reason inevitably proves inadequate.

This brings out the tricky relationship between “faith” and “reason” in popular discourse, particularly as some religious people argue that “faith” and “reason” are not opposed to each other. And yet whenever one tries to argue that they do not contradict through specific example, it becomes clear that they do: the Bible, for example, has a very specific description of Creation that is not at all the one all scientific evidence tells us, so when Sam Brownback made this argument recently in an Op-Ed in the Times. Of course, many reasonable religious people over the past 500 years have said that the opening of Genesis is primarily symbolic or metaphoric, but even this move should demonstrate the gap between faith and reason—for 1500 years, three quarters of Christianity’s existence, few Christians questioned that this was literally how Creation took place. Certainly nothing in the language of Genesis suggests that this might be anything other than literal truth; one might think that if God was revealing His Word here that he might choose to be less circumspect. This argument seems then only a retroactive attempt to keep Creation relevant while capitulating to things that science demonstrates and that few reasonable people want to reject. But it represents an unqualified defeat of faith by reason—the two disagreed, and, excepting a few Young Earthers, on every point where the two overlap reason seems to have won out. The position of faith has now moved to an unfalsifiable poetic realm, where it is supposed to “represent” something to make a certain narrative point —though no one will pin down what it represents other than a narrative point. Indeed, if God inspired Genesis, He probably could’ve come up with some metaphoric creation that actually used the metaphor to say something profound, but other than noting the primacy of “the Word,” the misordered and woefully incomplete Creation seems to say no more of use than, “things that now exist once had to come into being.”

Every Christian who does not believe in this literal Creation has thus, with no qualification, chosen reason over faith. Presented with something from a trusted source that does not make sense and something from an impartial source that does, they go with the latter without even compromising. And that’s not much of a surprise to anyone; after all, what do we have in this confusing world except our reason? I think that when people talk about the limits of reason, they don’t really understand the implications of what they’re saying. Of course there are things that we don’t know yet, and there are things, such as weather patterns, that are of a complexity far beyond our current understanding; thus, there are things reason can not (yet) do. But there is nothing that can be done without reason. Just about every single thing any human ever does is rational. And you form habits because you go by the theory that things that are repeated in more or less the same way multiple times—whether it be tying your shoes or playing a sport or having sex— will have basically the same results. If you threw out everything you came to by reason you would be literally paralyzed; there would be almost no function you could perform. Indeed, you could not even argue for the primacy of faith without using reason. This gets confusing sometimes because the fact that all of our decision-making is rational does not mean that we are particularly good at it. If a happily married man goes off to have an affair with a co-ed, he is not abandoning reason, but he is making rational decisions that he might regret; that is, he will decide at a given moment that it pains him less to repress the hormone-driven fantasies of a half-naked twenty-year-old in his lap than to contemplate what the future reaction of his wife might be. That when he sees said wife’s reaction his priorities become reversed does not mean that he was not using reason, only that he was using it poorly. After all, the deceptive imagery that certain decisions take place in our “heart” or “stomach,” etc. hides the fact that all of this is going on in the various lobes of the brain, coming together in the cerebrum.

Indeed, many things that people refer to as “faith” are actually the results of rational processes. For example, in the finale of Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, a song called “Have a Little Faith In Me” plays while Matthew Perry and his wife benignly argue over religion and then have a loving reconciliation; the implication is that their “faith” in each other is more important than this minor matter of religion. But what they feel isn’t “faith”—they know that the other person has a track record of doing decent and kind things, and will likely continue to do so. Because of their different metaphysics, they don’t quite understand why, which makes the experience a little mystical, but then there are lots of scientific effects that have been repeatedly observed without being fully explained which are relied upon as if they were (most prominently, gravity). It might make sense to lend money to a friend with a record of prudence and resourcefulness if he asks you to have “faith” in some harebrained idea; it would be foolish to put faith in someone who had a record of borrowing money and not repaying it. Given the incredibly poor predictive power of religion as well as its tendency to be entirely misguided on matters of history, natural science, and ethics, I think it would be eminently unreasonable to put their kind of “faith” in God.

And many people of faith, in fact, do not. When they see a difference between the Bible and reason, they take the reasonable conclusion and find some way to twist the Bible into a position where it metaphorically or ironically leans away from its literal meaning; over a millennium’s worth of Europe’s most brilliant men have been wasted on this project. This tradition goes back at least to someone as pious as Milton, who managed to talk his way around Christ’s clearly-stated prohibition on divorce by stitching together a few other passages that could be construed as placing a priority on a functional marriage, which could be used to argue for the divorce of a bad marriage. Milton was quite straightforward about his sophistry in doing this, noting that the Bible could be used, in such a fashion, to argue anything, and that interpretation needed to be left up to the individual Christian. And yet such a conclusion seems against the entire purpose of religion—if it is up to the individual to decide what parts of a religion are valid and which are not, why have religion at all? Clearly there is some other decision-making mechanism at work that supersedes religion and does not require it, that pushes people to discard the literal meaning of Creation and choose one of Christ’s passages over the other; by Occam’s Razor, why not simply rely on it without also tying religion into the mix? Let me blaspheme for a moment: if John Milton, who, next to Dante, is undoubtedly the greatest Christian poet who ever wrote, lived in an age where anyone but the most shunned heretics openly disavowed God, he would unquestionably have called himself an atheist. Why? Because he believed in the power of a (learned) individual’s reason over that of faith in tradition and text.

Then this comes down to a case of logic—is there a God, or not? We should investigate the standard logical proofs for the existence of God, and if no convincing ones are found, we might be able to make a judgment regarding the logic of believing in any supernatural deities. If there is no logical reason to do so, we can conclude that religion is a waste of time.

“Proofs” of the Existence of God

Since a small minority of religious people claim to have had a personal, direct experience with God, the burden of proof is on those who have religion to make the case to those of us who don’t. As far as I know, there are six major logical arguments for God’s existence. I don’t expect that I’m adding anything terribly new to philosophy, but here they are, along with the best refutations I know for them:

First: Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the idea that, due to the law of cause and effect, every that happens is caused by something else, and since we can’t just keep going back and back infinitely, there must once have been an effect without a cause. This Unmoved Mover, whatever it is, we define as God. Of course, ever since mankind conceived of a negative infinity as well as a positive one, an infinite retreat into the past has not seemed unnatural to the Earth we know. Even if it were, why would such a being need to be a God? Could it not just be some random blip in the space-time continuum on its own, that we might finally begin to understand in a thousand years? Furthermore, a slavish dependence on cause-and-effect doesn’t work in religions where there’s free will (as there is in most of Christianity)—if nothing can happen that has not been caused, then everyone is at the mercy of the forces around them, which, as Ahab noted when nearing his doom, must have been “set in motion a billion years ago.”

Second: ID (Intelligent Design), which I call FI (Failure of Imagination). This is the idea that the world works so fabulously that it couldn’t have come into existence by mere chance; if everything simply happened on its own, the odds that a functioning universe and planet could emerge are minute. It’s better than Unmoved-mover because the being it defines as God seems to be more Godly in nature. Furthermore, the odds it sets are probably right; if the Big Bang had even slightly different properties, the raw materials would have just compressed back into their original form, and even so, the odds that a planet that could support life would magically appear make these odds even smaller. But if you count up the billions of stars in the universe and then the tens of billions of lifeless planets around them, put that in the denominator, and then put our one Earth in the numerator, we’d get a pretty small probability. On the cosmic scale, while we say that the universe is only 14 billion years old, that date is just measured since the Big Bang. Imagine if, before that, there was an infinite expanse of time and space, of which we know nothing. Let’s suppose there’s an even smaller probability of the Big Bang happening that there is of life on Earth, given a Big Bang. But if the probability is non-zero and time is infinite, and each failed Big Bang collapses back to a set of initial conditions that are basically unchanged (or indeed, if there are infinite other sets of materials that could cause a Big Bang), not only is the Big Bang possible, but, according to the Infinite Monkey theorem (one of probability’s most basic) it must happen. There may well have been a billion googolplexs of Big Bangs that didn’t work and collapsed back in on themselves, but so long as there is any probability of our universe arriving from the pre-Big Bang state of being, the universe as we know it had to happen, one of this dodecillion years. And one more point on the perfect design of our universe: if IDers understand this divinely-created universe well enough to claim that its complexity is irreducible and only the work of God, why then did God make so many barren planets? Why not put life-supporting capabilities on all of them? And if Design is divine, what kind of joke was God trying to pull when he made the same organs perform sex acts and elimination?

As a sidenote: this argument generally flows from the “God in the gaps” fallacy, i.e., that since we do not understand something now (and perhaps even lack the basic vocabulary in which to conceive it), that its true nature must exist on a plane entirely beyond comprehension and thus be the result of some higher intelligence. That may well end up being true, but there was also a time when we could not understand earthquakes, tides, and disease, and we rightly look back on the people who thought these were the results of demons and direct Divine intervention as being ignorant and superstitious. We are slowly learning more about the universe around the time of the Big Bang, and I suspect that in one hundred, or one thousand, years we will know so much more that it would be silly to even speculate on it now. The bottom line is that it is the Intelligent Design position that is the close-minded one—we can’t possibly figure this out without the presence of God—and the rationally investigative one that is not—we might figure something else out, but this is what we have now.

Third: the ontological argument. I may mangle this a bit, but I believe the reasoning goes that since we can recognize imperfection, then we must be able to conceive perfection, and if we know what perfection is, we must be able to conceive a perfect being, and if we can recognize a perfect being, we must have gotten that idea from some fixed standards of perfection that can only exist in a non-relativistic universe with a God to provide them. I don’t think anyone uses this these days, because it so clearly collapses when you try to make two people define why something that they agree is imperfect is imperfect. For example, we might say that being uncharitable is an imperfection. But is it imperfect not to give a given beggar change—might that beggar only be acting, or just trying to get beer money? But refusing to give change is just as bad; perhaps the beggar will be near death without it. If we do decide to give change, how much should you give? If we do decide on the “proper” amount, how will know that that was the “right” thing to do—who says so? In short, the fact that we recognize imperfection is because everything is imperfect; we know that perfection is impossible due to our lack of omniscience, and without knowing everything, we can never comment on the presence, or absence, of perfection.

Fourth: Pascal’s wager that, even if we can’t be sure of the existence of God, it’s better to believe in him, and have even odds of eternal heaven and nothingness, than to not believe in him, and have even odds of hell and nothingness. This is one that, happily, goes away as populations diversify; even in the Enlightenment, Diderot noted that the presence of multiple mutually-contradictory religions made this difficult to swallow, because it implied that you should be both a Christian and Muslim. Still, Rick Warren used it in a Newsweek interview with Sam Harris a few months back and got away with it, so clearly it still persuades some people. While I’ll give Pascal credit for realizing that his argument for religion is based more on wishful thinking than reason, the fact is that we are not dealing with 50-50 chances of a Christian universe or a godless one—we are dealing with hundreds of current religious worldviews and, more importantly, infinite conceivable metaphysics, so many that assigning probabilities to them would be ridiculous. John Fowles has it right; Pascal’s wager makes more sense as an argument for atheism. By keeping yourself from committing to a religion, you both get to make the most of life on its Earthly terms, and in the event that you have to answer to St. Peter (or some other gatekeeper), you can honestly say, “I tried to figure it out, dude, honest. You might suggest that the Boss be clearer next time, and not let so many equally-ludicrous religions run around all over the place.” Of course, you still might go to hell, but all of the other sensible people will be there for you to hang out with, and if you ever get bored, you can get together a party to go to Satan and sign up to rebel against the Almighty Tyrant again—what’s he going to do if you lose, send all of you Hell? If we accept Pascal at all, it should make us all Mormon—that’s an awesome afterlife.

Fifth: the argument that man, without ever having a particular reason, naturally believes in the divine and only bothers to come up with reasons after the fact, which indicates that belief in God is a natural state of being, in comparison to the vast creative projects required to imagine a world without God. I only mention this because an author of one of Stanford’s Philosophy pages pulled this silly theory out. There are a lot of things that mankind, across cultures, “naturally” believed in: that sickness was caused by demons, that earthquakes were direct emanations of God’s anger, and all other manner of silly things that we later found natural explanations for. Because it is “natural” does not mean that it is true or even makes any sense; humanity proves many things to be true that had seemed implausible, if not utterly counter-intuitive. Consider how improbable it is that the area under a curve should equal the difference of the antiderivative of its bounds, no matter what the curve on those bounds looks like. That required an immense amount of thought to generate, and practically all modern science—and by implication most of modern life—requires it.

Sixth: the argument from moral impetus. As far as I understand it, this claims that most of us aren’t complete bastards, even when we could get away with being complete bastards for our own personal gain. This suggests that we have some innate sense of responsibility and decency towards others, which, since it repudiates worldly gain, must come from a sense of moral duty, some little spark of the divine that makes us (even us atheists) merciful and kind. Perhaps there is a clean refutation of this floating in philosophical circles, but I haven’t heard it yet, and the last time I got into a theological discussion I couldn’t deflect it. I suppose I’m in good company, as Socrates can’t get around it in The Republic when discussing the Ring of Gyges. The Republic, of course, is honest about its use of religion: the religion is to be a complete lie that is completely believed in by the society so as to give shape and meaning to everyone’s life and keep order, which is inherent in this argument but not usually admitted.

As I formulate the theory now, it seems full of holes. Of course, many people are bastards when they can get away with it (cf. aforementioned CEOs), and this tends to have little to do with their religious affiliation. If we are all divinely-created, why do these people lack this sensibility? Beyond that, let’s assume that some of us do have some sensibility that is not completely self-interested, that does reach beyond our own selves so that we will do some things selflessly, without fear of punishment. I will admit that I feel something like that, or at least I have since I began to emotionally mature around middle school. As with the Unmoved Mover, defining this essence as God does not make sense. Let me formulate a secular version of it: if I am to repudiate all ethics beyond self-interest and fear of punishment, I must tell myself that I am fundamentally different from all of those around me, at least from my own perspective. If I have also repudiated God, this makes me a very lonely person. Now, some solipsistic people can deal with such loneliness, and even be happy because of it (again, said CEOs…). But most people cannot. Most people, especially those who do not have the solace of a God, require the company of others. But to make any kind of connection, we must admit that we have something in common with those around us—from ancient times until this day, one of the primary social activities of mankind has been finding things to have in common with other people. If we do, then we cannot fully separate ourselves. To be Darwinian about it, I would guess that genes (or, indeed, social theories) that promote cooperation and understanding between people would generally be selected for, as teamwork tends to led to better survival rates, except in the case of those who can succeed at tasks nearly single-handedly and need not care about anyone else (again, CEOs). Thus, we only end our loneliness if we empathize with others, and if we empathize with others we would tend to do unto them as they would do unto us. Indeed, I think it makes sense that the Universal Moral Rule need not be derived out of any particular religion or ethics, but comes from the basics of the human condition.

The Logical Angles, in Summary

I believe that these are the major logical justifications for the existence of God, and I hope that this demonstrates that none of them are terribly sound. Many of them still suggest or allow the existence of some God-like being, and in some cases some even say that the existence of God is a simpler and more elegant thesis than getting rid of him (e.g., ID). But whenever this is the case, it is because we find that human thought is not complex enough to understand Life or Creation at its primal stage—for example, the moral impetus argument takes a behavior that we do not understand, and attributes it to the vast unknowability of God. Therefore, the defining feature of these logically-argued Gods is that they operate in areas we know nothing about. How can these Gods be explained by religion if they are utter mysteries? How can we logically justify any religion when the argument for the existence of the supernatural requires God to be incomprehensible?

The logical extension of this is that any religion that identifies particular things about God will almost immediately self-contradict. Let us look at Christianity, which affords so many examples of this that it’s hard to pick just one. I’ll take this one—a famous Christian saying is that God never gives a person more than he or she can bear. I would argue that if God believed the Middle Passage of the slave era to be bearable, particularly in comparison to the burdens of the middle-class West profiting from it, He understands nothing of his creations. The best proof of Christianity’s logical instability comes in the double-sided responses to questions of why certain things happen to certain people. Brother Juniper’s conclusion in The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a fine example, where an identical misfortune happens to people who stretch the moral gamut. The holiest of them is said to be rewarded by being called home, for God is only concerned with heavenly rewards. while the latter is believed to have endured just punishment, indicating instead that God is concerned with meting out earthly punishment for earthly action. This kind of ex post facto reasoning would be laughed out of in any other discipline, but is accepted in Christian discourse, particularly regarding praying for God’s intercession in an Earthly matter. Can a theory like this make any predictions that are consistently true? Christianity has provoked not a single, valid, repeatable insight into our world that can not be derived by secular means. When faced which this, Christians often say, “We cannot understand the ways of the Lord.” I agree—which is why assembling any kind of religion, which through its inevitable moral ethics and stories of creation attempts to explain God’s nature, is ridiculous.

This brings us back to tolerance. Secularists who don’t want to directly attack religion say that religion should be kept between a practitioner and his or her own God or gods, and not enter public life. And it’s this position that really brings out how we should “tolerate” religion; I have no problems with whatever delusions people hold, whether it be the firm conviction that the Brewers will win the World Series this year or that people born in August really are more aggressive and leaderly than those born in March, so long as it has negligible effect on their behavior. When we list the major categories of toleration, religion is lumped together with things like skin color, gender, and sexual orientation. But notice that the logic for tolerating these other three things is that, a) people have little to no control over them, and b) they are entirely superficial and carry no moral weight as part of a person’s character. The fact that we unblinkingly include religion in this category shows that, at least unconsciously, mainstream American society believes religion to be this: a matter of what culture you were born into and something that really doesn’t matter as part of your character, despite the fact that most religions insist that faith is an important and necessary part of a person’s character.

But the biggest problem with religion is that many people (including, usually, the heads of the religion) do see it as an important part of their character, not some superficial category that they happened to fall into, despite the fact that religious divisions, since they cannot be based in any logic, are inherently arbitrary. While I dislike religious liberals for coating religious debate with a vast amorality, religious conservatives, with their random moral standards, are worse. Religion becomes an incredibly damaging distraction in this case. Consider Iraq at the moment. Why is there so much violence right now? Any realpolitik cynic would say that many different political groups, formed by family and cultural ties, are seeking to violently fill the gap in power. But that’s not the reason the people within the various insurgency, militia, and terrorist groups believe they are fighting. They believe (and I believe this is sincere) that they are fighting to defend the proper successors of Muhammed’s caliphate, whether through Abu Bakr or Ali. That is, they are fighting over an event that happened 1300 years ago, on which no living person has been conceivably qualified to comment for a millennium. Now, they take the side they take because that is what they were brought up in, so we can conclude that this is really a serious of regional and familial disputes. But since religion is (at least outwardly) such a central part of many of their lives, there is simply no way to resolve or even address the dispute through its actual socio-political terms. The Middle East is probably looking at a century of religious wars between Shi’a and Sunni resembling those that ran through Europe between Catholics and Protestants from the age of Luther through the 18th-century wars of succession. As then, the difference comes over something completely artificial.

Christianity as Practiced in America

Of course, there is a big difference between religion as theorized and religion as practiced. Many Christian writers, like Terry Eagleton, attack atheist screeds because atheists caricature people of faith by comparing the best atheists against the worst theists, those who believe things that are not believed by anyone who has studied the religion. This is true, though of course people look at their opponents’ exceptions as the norm, while ignoring their own exceptions, in all political debate—gun-rights advocates invoke the good citizens who used concealed weapons to stop holdups while pointing out how inept the law is at controlling contraband arms, while gun-control experts point to accidental deaths of gun owners and the low gun-crime rates in certain countries that have banned guns. Certainly atheists have engaged in the kinds of petty wars that I excoriated among the Sunni and Shi’a. You could reasonably argue that Naziism, at least in its eugenic angle, was only possible in the Age of Darwin, though I would note in that case that at least the dispute was taking place on a clearly-stated logical playing field, and since Nazi logic was so clearly nonsense, WWII is the only war of the century were there is little ambiguity over right and wrong. But it is unfair for theologians to insist that atheists argue against only the principles of the most learned Christians, because the vast majority of Christians, who atheists must encounter every day, have beliefs immensely different from that of Christian theologians.

We hear in polls that over 80% of Americans are Christian. But then the question is how Christian these 80% are. The only definition such polls have is self-identification. But self-identification, as we know, is meaningless: 80% of drivers self-identify as part of the top 30%, and 40% of Americans believe they are, or expect soon to be, in the top 1% of earners. What then, defines a Christian? There are so many different official versions of Christianity it’s hard to pin it down. Even seemingly certain things, like belief in the Ten Commandments, fall under question: if you’re ecumenical, you don’t think that people need to believe in God before all others to be saved; many Catholics, historically, have had no problem praying to idols of saints; King David, an ancestor of Christ himself, had no problem murdering Uriah to sleep with his wife. In the end, perhaps all that ties together all Christians is that they belief Jesus Christ is the fully-human, fully-divine Son of God, whose death redeemed mankind. We will forget the ludicrous logic of why Adam and Eve’s sin has to been passed to their heirs or why God needs to send an avatar of himself to death to redeem man—or why, in fact, an act that essentially amounts to God’s suicide provides any kind of redemption for us other sinful bastards. No sect has ever disputed this, as far as I know, since the minor objections of the Arians in the fourth century over exactly how divine Jesus was. If you do not accept Jesus as divine—if you just think it’s a good idea to love your neighbor and are happy that Jesus pointed this out—you shouldn’t be considered a Christian, because then you are following his word because you think he makes good ethical sense (and indeed, many other ethicists say similar things without being either themselves divine or subscribers of any religion), rather than because you have faith in His Word.

A clear corollary of this litmus test of Christianity is that Christ never committed a sin on Earth. After all, in Christianity sin is a tendency for humanity rather than a law, like entropy; e do not need to sin, but we tend toward it. On the other hand, sin is defined as an infraction against God, and surely God himself cannot commit such a thing. Therefore, to believe that the fully-divine Christ committed a sin—indeed, to even entertain the possibility that he might have—means that you do not have faith in his divinity and thus are not a Christian. After all, the Immaculate Conception of Mary and Christ’s Virgin Birth were created precisely so Christ could be without sin. We should then, without too much trouble in our conscience, be able purge the ranks of self-identified Christians of anyone who fails this test. But in fact, if we were declare anyone who did not believe in Christ’s sinlessness to be un-Christian, we would have evicted SIXTY PER CENT OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANS. By this one rather undemanding stroke, we would cut 150 million people out of Christianity.

The thought boggles the mind. And yet this statistic isn’t that surprising. Most people in this country have a very fluid and vague definition of Christianity, and neither they nor the church seem terribly interested in further defining it. America’s churches act more like our political parties than like intellectual movements: they are more interested in having people sit under their banner than in actually changing their minds or behavior. Much in the way that the Democratic party tried to broaden its platform to include many flatly conservative Southern and Midwestern candidates this past election, under the vague catch-all of cleaning up the corruption and missteps of Washington (though, of course, the methods by which such mistakes were to be cleaned up were never agreed upon or even discussed, leading to voters who wanted to significantly up our Iraq commitment and those who wanted to immediately withdraw voting for the same candidates), many (usually liberal) churches tend to promote a very hazy version of God that will appeal to the most while offending the least. This is God as Father Knows Best (to compete, perhaps, with the current TV view of American dadhood, Homer Simpson), the guy who you go to for advice and to help you out when you’ve stumbled into a situation over your head, the guy who may have a stern word or two but, whatever you’ve done, will laugh it off and forgive you. This nicely dovetails with Freud’s paternal reading of religion, but the big problem with it is that it’s so clearly God-as-imaginary-friend, as a solipsistic projection of whatever you’re feeling at the moment into a universal truth. This is what leads to all of the silly I’d-like-to-thank-God speeches by the victors of award ceremonies and sports, who seem to think that trial-by-combat has proved, say, the 49ers to be, like vanquished knights in medieval times, agents of darkness slain by the Godly Rams. Again, as a personal delusion, it’s simply amusing. But when people think that taking a moment to pray every evening excuses, and in fact spiritually elevates, their livelihood selling cocaine, it should be clear how disorienting this position is.

Good Works Through Faith

One of the frequent justifications of religion is that it has, practically, done a lot of Good Things, whether or not it makes any sense. Many great civil rights leaders were preachers—it would be difficult to imagine King putting together his movement without the aura of Christian mercy behind him—and John Paul II certainly did some fine work to combat the abuses of Soviet power using Christian framework. Atheists are often criticized for ignoring this aspect of faith, and indeed for being close-minded by failing to admit that such things would have been impossible without faith. But—and I will cop to stealing the terms of this argument from a Newsweek letter-to-editor, who may have taken this from Hitchens—certainly religion is not sufficient for people to do these kinds of Good Works. Christianity has a long, bloody history of sanctioning, both on official and popular levels, horrible things, from the Crusades through World War II. Nor is it necessary—the basic conclusions of King and John Paul about individual rights and dignity are also those of secular humanism. Thus, the relationship between religion and Good Works seems feeble.

At the most, we might say that religion can be effective at motivating people into action. But this seems merely to come from its structure of community, from the international sects down to the individual church, rather than from anything inherent in religion itself. Secular humanism has no Sunday gathering where scholars read from Jefferson, expound upon Russell, and lead a congregation in the “Ode to Joy.” Were such a thing to exist, I suspect that it might have an equally mobilizing effect on its populace. Furthermore, if it had its own Sunday School, it could provide some antidote for the brainwashing that Christian children go through, where we are all told that it is wrong for us to lack belief in God despite the lack of evidence for him, thus preparing us to accept a lifetime’s worth of similarly tortured logic from political figures trying to hid their ignorance of how the world really works and how to make it a better place. A Christian might respond again that, if Christianity still can promote morality, and atheism still is used to enable immorality (which it undeniably is), then atheism still has no claim over religion. But again, atheism is a null space, a state of rejecting beliefs rather than developing any particular ones. Many different movements fit under the banner of atheism, and an infinite number of others could be added. The fact that Christianity, as well as all other religions, consistently fails to do what it implicitly promises—produce people of significantly better moral qualities than people who are not religious—seems fairly damning to me.

Ecumenism

Then there are ecumenicals, many of whom I would guess have spent this article noting to themselves that I have failed to address their approach, by which individual religions do not and cannot claim the exclusivity I have ascribed to them, that separate paths of worship are all valid attempts to relate to the supernatural and have faith in a Higher Power. But I have to agree with Stanley Fish on this matter: the entire strength of religion comes from its exclusivity, from its claim that “THIS is right, and THAT is wrong.” Without this, religions are little better than Poor Richard’s Almanac, providing little tips without any bite and giving no imperative to join. There are tracts of scripture in nearly all major religions ascertaining this kind of exclusivity, which most ecumenicals have to dance around to make their claim. If you take away exclusivity and grant that other religions may well be equally close to the Truth, then what is left? A vague set of ceremonies to worship that which you do not quite believe in, and a sense of futile searching after that which has not yet been found and is extremely unlikely to be found.

There is a name for this basic point of ecumenism, that no religion has a monopoly on Truth because humans do not, and in most ways cannot, confidently understand a level of reality beyond our own. It’s called agnosticism. We’d love to have you join us.

This might seem like sophistry, since all I’m doing is trying to rename the position without changing the viewpoint. And indeed, the distinction between having faith in a Higher Power, and even following a particular tradition toward it, and having no such faith is not a minor one. But the open-mindedness of ecumenism, it seems to me, has far more to do with agnosticism than with the more rigid versions of Christianity. And I think this re-naming is vital, because names practically matter much more than principles. After all, political power lies not in the position argued but in affiliation—this country’s views on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and America’s place in the world have not changed much over the past 30 years, despite recent shifts of power back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. To me, it seems that the meaningful distinction to be made on faith is between those who have a religious dogma, who have a conception of the exact nature of God and how we should lives as his Creations, and those who do not, who believe that mankind has not only not yet found God, but likely never will be able to whether or not He exists. And yet right now the distinction is between so-called “Christians” who have a huge variety of positions, most of which are conflicted and unsure and in conflict with official Christian doctrine, on the nature of God and those who are both willing to admit our ignorance and are bold enough to dissociate from the faith of the country.

America is now divided into 80% Christians, 15% non-religious peoples, and 5% people of other faiths. Most commentators look at this and see us as an overwhelmingly Christian country. But if you look any closer, you can see that Christianity in this country is as ready to collapse as Rome was after the capital moved to Constantinople, and that most of the 80% are Christian in name only. Imagine if that 60% who believed that Christ sinned were told that their belief made them un-Christian, and that they needed to choose between what they thought about Christ and the label they gave themselves—how many would obediently revise their thoughts, and how many would decide that it was time to call themselves by their true name? I’m really not sure; after all, social science has shown that people will doggedly defend themselves against any criticism that they see as integral to their personal character, even if they must put themselves in the position of arguing something ridiculous. But I would like to see what would happen if a powerful enough orator could drive that wedge in, so we could see how much of that 80% broke off. And I have even more hopes for a dialogue between agnostics and ecumenicals, because I believe that it would not take long for the two to realize that they have much in common.

And the end of this, I think we would find that this country would then be defined as containing something more like 60% Agnostic/Atheists, 37% Christians, and 3% other religions. And dear Lord, what a difference that would make to everything—not the least our political discourse. I do believe with Sam Harris: there are concentric circles to this kind of thing. By calling themselves by the same name, liberal Christians legitimize conservative ones, who legitimize evangelicals, who legitimize fundamentalists. If people like Pat Robertson could not stand up and claim to speak for a vast majority but rather a significant minority, his comments would need to be more modest if he wanted to be relevant, and politicians would not need to treat him as if he represented hundreds of millions of people. Most importantly, a state of non-belief would become the default in this country, rather than Christianity. Even if you don’t agree with anything I’ve said, I think that it’s fair to say that religious principles, or the lack thereof, are an important thing, which should require long amounts of thought and careful consideration. It’s the kind of thing that you should not commit to until you are mature, able to make decisions on your own, and have seen enough of the world to know what’s out there. Certainly it’s better than it is now, where America is a Christian nation that doesn’t know the first thing about religion.