Altar in the Big Green Sky
I can’t help but wonder… just how religious is Portland? According to this site, some 17 percent of Oregonians classify themselves as ‘non-religious’. I can’t help but think that Portland’s numbers spike above this, but every day continues to offer surprise. Subsequently, the question lingers.
Do liberals and greenies equal a smaller god-fearing populace? Just how many Portlanders get up every Sunday and march down to their local church, washing away the effects of their weekly misgivings? How many pray to the imaginary unicorns in the sky before slipping into bed at night? Tell me people, just what percentage of this great, progressive populace of ours roots their every moral decision in ancient supernaturalism?
I just kicked-off a new diet of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and I haven’t felt better in my life. Logic and reason have a tremendous affect on a person’s outlook -especially when delivered with such brilliance, as is the case with these two astute chaps. For Dawkins and Harris newbies, I’m simply too much of a novice to do either any justice, so I’ll let them speak for themselves. First, Dawkins:
A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50 percent of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book – Genesis – which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and disseminated to almost every home in the land plus – infuriatingly – every hotel room. Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach Darwin’s bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal.
And for those who need further food for thought, let Sam Harris guide us into the light.
In response to his amazing book, The End of Faith, Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in god. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. I’ve just started reading this succinct little gem after listening to The End of Faith on audio book. Using rational argument, Harris presents a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In his “Note to the Reader,” he writes:
Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen—the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.The book you are about to read is my response to this emergency…
But hey, it’s not all heavy hitting iron and steel. How about a laugh or two? Let me add a little dollop of joy to this big happy non-believin’ pie. Please enjoy a lovely little quote from one of my favorite writers, Mark Morford, as he describes an amazing new drug, now available for your pleasure:
‘The Jesus.’ Perhaps the most widely used but enormously misunderstood drug of all time. Developed centuries ago by regrettably biased researchers but constantly being reintroduced, with new variants coming on the market every few years in often dangerous, unregulated levels of potency. Sadly, millions of users often become horribly addicted without the slightest understanding of context or history, thanks to a brutally organized marketing campaign that gets just about every aspect of the drug’s true nature incorrect.
Available in capsule, gel, liquicaps, spray, ointment, suppository, communal wafer, dogma, proscription, foolish law, dildo, t-shirt, hat, book, unbearable rock music, sexual fantasy, justification for war, bobblehead. Often taken in enormous doses just prior to death. Frequently appears on burnt toast.
Portlanders, I don’t know how many of you are ‘believers’ but it intrigues the skittles right out of me. Anyone have any notion of the state of religion in Portland? If so, step up to the altar and let your testimony be heard!
Just to clarify - it seems like you’re equating religion = Christianity. At least if I read the references correctly.
I wouldn’t check off the box that says I’m religious - but I do belong to a synagogue, and our family participates in the activities there. But for us, being a member means we believe in an moral, ethical way of being that incorporates, for example, equality for all, a responsibility to care for those less fortunate, and a mandate to care for the planet. All good goals - they just happen to be wrapped in a thin blanket some would call religion and I just look at as just another community we belong to.
Religion = Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc… all the same to me.
With all due respect, Betsy, I believe religious moderates are diluting the truth. But I am far too intellectually clunky to comment further. I’ll let Sam Harris do the talking:
“Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser nature–forces like greed, hatred, and fear–for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy.”
Harris goes on to add:
“Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance of the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience”
Harris then frosts this glorious cake of truth:
“Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word ‘God’ as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who ‘really’ believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world–to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish–is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. we must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.”
Liberals who condemn the beliefs of others simply because they have different beliefs obviously don’t understand the basis of what being an open-minded liberal means.
@divebarwife - Condemning a belief is different than condemning the believer; and tolerance does not mean we have to shut up when we disagree.
To each his/her own. I haven’t read Harris, but I find Dawkins to be nothing more than a Coulter-esque blowhard for the atheist set. I did read a goodly portion of “The God Delusion” and found it to be laughable. Among other things, Dawkins posits that modern day atheists are facing a persecution akin to that that homosexuals faced in the 1950s. Puh-leeze.
The bottom line is that, despite what the fundies (be they religious or atheist) may tell you, science is not meant to explain spirituality, nor is spirituality meant to explain science.
@divebarwife - thank you. Your comment illustrates Sam Harris’ arguments against moderate behavior, perfectly. Moderate religious belief and acceptance of said belief is just as dangerous as fundamentalist beliefs and the acceptance of said fundamentalist beliefs. Why? Because belief leads to behavior that can escalate to unthinkable means.
As Harris writes:
“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.
This paragraph appears after a long discussion of the role that belief plays in governing human behavior, and it should be read in that context. Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. Read in context, it should be clear that I am not at all ignoring the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous.
When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, the answer cannot be, ‘because they have killed so many people in the past.’ These men haven’t, to my knowledge, killed anyone personally. However, they are likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what they and their followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. As I argued in The End of Faith, a willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty (which I am). Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in most cases this is impossible.”
Religious organizations in this country often hide behind their gods, and subsequent non-profit religious designations, to justify hate and intolerance, enabled by an administration that sees said organizations as the great social equalizers. And no, Obama doesn’t offer any help here. In fact, he’s openly called for more funding and support for these organizations. These are organizations that hide behind the guise of moderate religious belief to help propel their agenda, which is, at its core, far from moderate.
To believe that the gods of the Bible and the Koran are anything other than hateful, vengeful megalomaniacs ruling through childish mood-swings is disregarding the texts themselves. Moderates choose to take the pieces that can be easily swallowed and kick the more vile truths underneath the proverbial rug. But these pieces still remain, providing the rock-steady foundation of the their core agendas.
Totally with you on this one….fundamentalist christians, hearing the voice of god with one finger on the button….freaking scary. Check out Christopher Hitchens….probably gets more hate mail than those other two guys combined.
Hmm. That’s funny. I know LOTS of religious folks (even those nasty Christians that you’re so afraid of) whose “core agenda” really goes no further than Jesus’ words to “love your neighbor as yourself”. What a vile truth, indeed. Must have been written by unicorns.
@Foil - It’s unfortunate that their moderate, selective love for the doctrine empowers the conservative hate-mongers that so deeply riddle their ranks. This is, at its core, the most prescient issue with religious moderates.
The Christian Scriptures provide fertile ground for Sam Harris’ assault on the supernatural: “The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding, given the contents of the book.” He cites passages from the Hebrew Bible that urge violence, including death, for various transgressions and condone slavery, and points out that “If we take Jesus in half his moods, we can easily justify the actions of St. Francis of Assisi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Taking the other half, we can justify the Inquisition.” Because it says many different things, he argues, “people have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.”
Letter to a Christian Nation was reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jean Barker in 2006. The review brings up an interesting point regarding Harris’ attack on moderates:
“…Harris’ dismissal of the religious middle ground may backfire by leading moderate Christians to side with conservatives against Harris’ attack rather than acknowledge his points that they agree with. And it’s hard to see how Harris’ uncritical use of logic—as a weapon to eviscerate others’ ideas rather than as a tool to foster understanding—won’t further polarize the debate.”
True enough, but so be it. If you choose to cherry-pick from your faith to suit your own purpose, then you choose to empower the faith as a whole, accepting all strains, regardless of the implications. Lest we not forget 9/11, which was executed by true believers -men who held hard to the fundamentals of their faith, enabled through the political correctness of moderate belief.
Most Americans oppose violence spurred by religious fundamentalism, but few agree on how to address it. In ‘The End of Faith’ and ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’, Harris contends that religion itself–not its more extreme forms–is to blame. As Harris deftly states, “…there are many important differences between religious moderation (…’Christianity as it can be’) and religious fundamentalism. And I agree that these differences have something to do with doubt and the progress of reason on the one hand and a hostility to both doubt and reason on the other. But… I don’t view the boundary between moderation and fundamentalism as ’solid,’ or even principled…”
He goes on to write:
“First, on my frustration with religious moderates… It is true that your colleagues in the religious middle have taught me to appreciate the candor and the one-note coherence of religious fanatics. I have found that whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, religious moderates claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken ‘extremists’ to be representative of these ‘great’ faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason, and our attack upon religion is, therefore, ’simplistic,’ ‘dogmatic,’ or even ‘fundamentalist.’ As a frequent target of such profundities, I can attest that they generally come moistened to a sickening pablum by great sighs of condescension.”
He continues:
“But there are several problems with such a defense of moderate religion. First, many moderates assume that religious extremism is rare and therefore not all that consequential…. religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. This idea is extreme in almost every sense—extremely silly, extremely dangerous, extremely worthy of denigration—but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare. The problem, as I see it, is that moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have…’integrated doubt’ into their faith. Another way of putting it is that they have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody ever really is motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis his heartfelt religious beliefs. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects—often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now particularly unhelpful, given the hideous collision with Islamic certainty that is unfolding all around us.
Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between extremist and moderate religion. But there isn’t. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is not a moderate. Read scripture more closely and you do not find reasons for religious moderation; you find reasons to live like a proper religious maniac—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc. Of course, one can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are pretty slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are destined to be ground up in God’s loving machinery of justice.”
And finally, Sam Harris’ nail in the coffin:
“Religious moderates—by refusing to question the legitimacy of raising children to believe that they are Christians, Muslims, and Jews—tacitly support the religious divisions in our world. They also perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life. While religious moderates don’t fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”
Jeremy, at this point, perhaps it’s just best to point to a Powells.com link to Harris’s book?
Jeremy,
I’ve tired of presenting arguments to you, only to be responded to with block quotes from a book you’ve read followed by a quick “me, too”.
This may suprise you (and Dawkins and Harris, et al), but there are a large number of people who realize the scriptures are flawed. Some of them *gasp* even realize that they were written over a span of centuries by a large group of men, and then translated numerous times by other people - many of whom had agendas. Some of us understand that words, names, entire passages have changed. Some of us are actually pretty smart! Since your on a Dawkins kick, you should read “Misquoting Jesus” to see just a sampling of how little we actually know about what the original scriptures said. Even knowing all that, some of those words resonate with us, and we choose to live according to a philosophy that promotes pacifism and charity. Heck, we’re even voting for Obama!
This is not “cherry picking” as you (or is it Harris? Jean Barker in 2006? with your sloppy and long-winded quotes I just can’t tell) put it (and as people like Dawkins put it because it doesn’t suit their argument) - it’s finding your own spirituality. Linking “cherry picking” of religious beliefs to 9/11 is as preposterous as linking atheism to Pol Pot or the persecution of Jews. Really, dude - it’s just a stupid argument.
Your new favorite book has set up a strawman argument. Of COURSE the Bible is intolerant when every single word is taken literally. Duh. But not everyone takes every word of the Bible literally. Hell, some people even take bits and pieces from the Koran, the Bible, and Buddhism and form their own belief systems. And they are not a moderate “front” to some type of insidious belief system - all the block quotes in the world won’t change that fact.
Moreover, asking how many of your readers “pray to the imaginary unicorns in the sky before slipping into bed at night” is both pretentious and amazingly insulting. As a person who knows as little about religion as yourself (seeing how quick you were to lump all religions into one ill-advised bucket, and how few of your own words you use to support said arguments), you might want to spare the insults.
Truth is - I don’t NEED to explain my faith to you - and I couldn’t if I tried. It doesn’t fit into the scientific method - which is why it’s spiritual. Get it? Further, you don’t know me. While I find it funny that you (and Harris, et al) think I’ve “betrayed” reason AND faith (a twofer!) AND am a walking gateway to extremism (a threefer!), I gotta tell you that it just ain’t true. Sorry. And when you accuse me of praying to unicorns, I’m really more inclined to just write you off as a jackass - which is basically where I’m at right now.
Now I’m going back to my own blog to talk about beer.
Jeremy, are you really curious about “How many pray to the imaginary unicorns in the sky before slipping into bed at night?” Because if you are, you might get a better response if you frame your question a little differently. Perhaps in a way that makes a “believer” feel like commenting here will not be fuel for more mockery by you.