Mr. Moderate

It has become quite popular for atheists to bash the very idea of religion. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have produced a trifecta of recent best-selling books asserting that religion is bad for humanity. Well, doing away with religion altogether would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. If there is some bad (bathwater) about religion, then by all means, please do throw it out. But the baby represents our future survival as the only known intelligent species, and religion has been demonstrated to be vital to the continued survival of the human species.

It is no coincidence that every known civilization that left monuments or writings for us to analyze clearly had a dominant religion. In his landmark book, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler asserted that culture is born out of a strong religious feeling which becomes held in common by all of the people who will eventually comprise the civilization that the culture produces. It is the purpose of religion to bind a people together for common purpose by continually reminding them that they have duties to entities larger and/or older than themselves. Any good psychologist can produce multiple theories about why religion has good effects upon groups of people. For instance, it creates a common bond of trust and security among fellow believers. It acts like an insurance contract in that your fellow-believers will rush to your aid if you are victimized in some way, by another human or by nature itself. All of these attributes are pro-survival, and as I’ve shown in yesterday’s blog essay, survival is the foundation of morality.

Nobody can ever be an expert on every intellectual topic. The days when the educated professor could have read every book in his university library are long gone. The story of the advance of human civilization is the story of individual specialization in an ever-increasing number of possible specialties. In the beginning, there were the hunters and the gatherers. Eventually, the gatherers developed into farmers, and that tied a community of people to a particular piece of land. While the need for hunting gradually diminished, particularly as farmers began to raise “domesticated” animals, staying in one place for long periods of time allowed some members of the community to specialize in things they were particularly good at. Most primitive communities have a characteristic style of pottery which is made in only one place by those who are trained in the pottery arts. Some farmers specialized in raising grain and others specialized in raising cattle. Community leaders would specialize in leadership, and live in grand dwellings supported by contributions from the rest of the community. Eventually, those contributions became mandatory and the specialty of tax collector was created.

Any community of humans works on the basis of a common bond of trust which we naturally feel for our fellow community members. If that bond of trust is enhanced by membership in a common religious community, then that bond of trust is a great deal stronger. As strong community bonds is a pro-survival trait, it is obvious that those communities which share a common religious heritage will be inherently stronger than equivalent communities which do not share such a heritage.

A good religion, then, is one which tends to grow those community bonds into a larger and larger community, eventually aspiring to be a worldwide community of like-minded humans. Similarly, a bad religion is one which tends to divide communities into religious sects that are at war with one another to some degree or another.

Unfortunately, it would seem that we’ve never had a really good religion at any time in human history. Instead, we’ve only had those kinds of religions that foster warfare against those whose religious beliefs are different. Whether you are a fundamentalist Christian or a fundamentalist Muslim, you are adhering to a bad religion because you are at war (to some degree or another) with everybody not from your own particular sect. In Iraq we can see the bloodshed from battles between Sunni and Shiite adherents. “The troubles” in Northern Ireland are a clear example of this sort of behavior in the Christian community. While the United States has tended to be more pluralistic than other nations, history still notes the anti-Catholic riots of the 1800s (such as the Philadelphia riots of 1844). The underlying feelings rose to the surface once again in 1960 when the first Catholic President was elected. There is still a very strong undercurrent of mistrust between most Christian sects. And if you listen to the anti-Muslim bigotry of right-wing talk radio, you will be under no illusion whatsoever that Muslims are anything more than grudgingly accepted in the USA. They are viewed as sort-of “on probation” to see if they can “fit in” to our culture. The consensus at present seems to be that they cannot.

This leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I despise those religions which use force (either force of arms or force of law or both) to expand and/or retain the numbers of their believers. But it also seems that any religion which does not engage in such practices necessarily withers out and dies.

So, humans clearly need a religion. But I don’t find any known religion to be acceptable for future humans. This is a puzzle that needs to be solved.