A Word on Religion
If You Believe It, It Means Something
I don’t see eye to eye with Sam Harris on many issues, including the existence of God, the nature of free will, human consciousness, and the meaning of life, but he is one of the atheists who understands religion. While he may not understand every particular, he does have one important thing right: those of us who believe in God aren’t making it up. We aren’t playing a game. We aren’t pretending.
Some atheists struggle with this one. They seem to think that the devout can’t possibly actually believe that crazy stuff about God, so there must be some other reason why we’re willing to waste endless amounts of time and money, forego various pleasures, abide by rules we often find difficult, and order our lives in ways that are both inconvenient and odd.
Harris does us the favor of taking us at our word. This is, after all, the simplest and most logical explanation for the behavior of religious people. After all, many behaviors which would seem totally irrational if we were playing pretend make logical sense if we do, in fact, believe what we say we believe. It follows very logically that if we believe that the world was created by a supreme being, that He sits in judgment over our actions, that our souls will live on after our bodily deaths, and that our faith or lack thereof can determine whether we spend that afterlife in paradise or in eternal torment, that we might take very seriously those things we believe that supreme being has said regarding how he views our behavior. If we believe He has said, “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” it is perfectly logical, indeed even within our cold and rational self-interest, not to covet our neighbors’ wives lest we incur divine wrath.
Interestingly, Harris joins his fellow “New Athiest” Richard Dawkins in expressing strange, new respect for Christianity. I’m sure this only goes so far, but I was very pleased to hear Harris say, “one of the smartest people in our lab--she was a graduate student, but she had kind of oversight over all of the statistical methods we were using to analyze neuroimaging data. Right? She was kind of the math head in this particular lab. She was also a fundamentalist Christian--right?--who believed that evolution was a fiction and that God created the earth more or less as described; and probably as recently as 4,000 years ago,” which is quite a change from the way he talked about the faith twenty years ago. In the case of Dawkins, I will admit to being downright shocked when he said he thought of himself as a “cultural Christian,” that he feels “at home in the Christian ethos,” and that he is glad Britain is a culturally Christian nation. This from the author of The God Delusion.
Harris and Dawkins are both reformulating their views on Christianity in light of the spread of Islam across the West. Dawkins is as characteristically harsh towards Islam as he used to be towards Christianity. More interesting to me is what Harris has to say about Islam. Notably, before we go on, it’s worth mentioning that prominent atheist and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity this past year. I don’t expect either Harris or Dawkins to convert, but neither did I expect Ayaan Hirsi Ali to convert.
Sam Harris goes to great length to debunk the narrative, popular in the 2010s, that ISIS was not a religious movement. He points out that the majority of Muslims worldwide are not jihadists. But he emphatically makes the obvious point that those who are jihadists sincerely believe the things they say they believe.
“It’s not a mystery… there’s absolutely nothing mysterious… if you believe that economics is the reason or ordinary political concerns are the reason for jihadist behavior, then you have to be absolutely mystified as to why someone would drop out of medical school to join ISIS, right? I mean, that has to be a confession of just stark mental illness.”
And then you scratch the surface on this person: You say, 'Oh, no, he is not mentally ill. In fact, he was the captain of a soccer team. He had a lot to live for. He's not this weird person who is on some spectrum of psychopathology who just couldn't get his life together and in a desperate moment booked a ticket to Syria. No, he--'. There are endless examples of high-functioning people--people who are getting their degree in engineering or architecture, people who had wives and children that they were leaving behind, or mothers with children who were going to marry the jihadist who they fell in love with online. Right?”
What Harris understands is that religion offers people something deep and powerful which nothing in the secular, material, hedonic world can. The reason a person leaves behind a life of ease in Europe to join a death cult is precisely that his life of ease demands nothing from him and offers him no higher meaning or purpose. Religion tells people that not only does this life have meaning and purpose, the most important sources of meaning and purpose lie outside of this world. And that great sacrifice is required in this world in order to attain that meaning and purpose. There isn’t anything much outside of religion which can offer that – although radical, utopian political ideologies often come close.
“When you ask people, 'Why is it that you go to mass every Sunday?' Right? And, 'Why do you say the rosary? And, why do you teach your children what you teach them? And why do you force them to go to church when they don't want to? Etc., etc. Why do you do these things?' 'Well, I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe that the Bible is a divinely inspired book.' No one says, 'Well, does she really believe those things? Couldn't this be just--again, just economics forcing its way through into her experience in a way that's just totally unacknowledged and unconscious, and that that's the level at which we have to engage this?'
No. People believe--people rather often believe what they say they believe.”
People are hungry to be called to something which makes demands of them. They want to sacrifice for something, and not just anything, but something important, something for which their sacrifices were necessary. This is why the denominations in America which decline tend to be those which emphasize welcoming everyone, and the denominations which grow or hold fast are those which emphasize tradition and demand the most of their congregants.1
By way of digression, I will note that most student activities when I was in college were poorly-attended and remarkably thin. Most clubs struggled to attract members. They tried to welcome everyone out of fear of turning someone away. Club Running, by contrast, sent eighty runners to Kentucky for Nationals my second year. For most of my time there, a club which theoretically had high barriers to entry had no trouble attracting students. To be sure, we emphasized welcoming and didn’t even turn away the hangers-on who rarely ran much. But the center of the club was a rigorous training schedule intended to make our men’s and women’s teams some of the top in the nation,2 which asked our runners to practice almost every day, be at the track before nine on Saturday mornings, and subordinate normal college life to performing at a high level. None of this was required. But it gave members a purpose and a calling outside of school, and that was why so many felt compelled to make sacrifices for the team.
Similarly, religion motivates people precisely because it makes demands of them. But religion motivates people in a way that few other things can, because if a religion is true then it is the single most important thing in any person’s life. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam each make claims about the chief facts of human existence, claims which cannot be reconciled with anything else, and claims which if true implicate every facet of life.
Some would rather believe that terrorists are motivated by mental illness or even that all religious people are suffering from mental illness. Harris himself has perhaps said something similar in the past, but I could be wrong. But today, Harris seems to think it is delusional to believe that terrorists are simply mentally ill. It is delusional. It is as delusional as believing all religious people are mentally ill.
What always amazes me about this is that many atheists are very intelligent. And one of those things which intelligence is supposed to do for a person is make it easier to see that other people might think differently than you do. Some people struggle with the cognitive challenge of imagining a thought process other than their own. Theoretically, smart people shouldn’t struggle as much with this. Smart people should be better at this than other people. And still, we meet atheists who can’t wrap their heads around the fact that other people don’t “get it” the way they do. It’s obvious to them that there is no God. How can’t other people see that?
Well, it was obvious to billions of people that the Earth was flat (and some people still think it is). It was obvious to scientists that time couldn’t pass differently on Mars than it could here. It was obvious to almost every human being who ever lived that the length of an object didn’t change based on how fast it was moving.
But the Earth isn’t flat. Time does pass (slightly) differently on the surface of Mars, and length does contract at speeds close to the speed of light.
A Word on Outliers:
It's also worth spending some time on the phenomenon whereby some member of a particular religion (usually with some prominence or connection to elite institutions) comes out to publicly represent their religion as "not all about [fill-in-the-blank]." Many of them are well-meaning and by no means am I impugning anyone's faith. However, in the cases of which I am thinking, they are not in fact typical representatives of their faith, but rather the most-secularized members. When Muslim politicians proclaim that Islam isn't about sharia, many other Muslims criticize them, and point to the Quran. When prominent Christians say that Christianity is really just about being a good person and loving your neighbor, rather than about following Christ, they don't speak for the majority of Christians. I won't judge another person's faith (only God does that), but when someone talks more about rituals and comfort and less about Jesus and the Bible, it doesn't accurately reflect what the Christian faith is about.3 Likewise, when someone talks more about Islamophobia than they do about Mohammad and the Quran, we can't assume they represent the majority of Muslims.
Richard Dawkins - Richard Dawkins - has said that he's a cultural Christian. If one of the proudest and loudest atheists in the world can be culturally Christian, there's more to the faith than culture.
In every faith, there are some who are looser in their beliefs and some who hold to orthodoxy. Most mainline Protestant Christian churches are on the progressive side of the spectrum (in their theology – although politics is sometimes related), whereas the Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical churches are traditionalist or conservative (again, theologically). The majority of Christians around the world are "conservative" in this way, as were the majority of Christians throughout history. It's really only in Europe and North America where significant numbers of Christians are more "progressive" in their theological views. However, I will make clear that many theologically-progressive Protestants are deeply devout. The fact that there are bishops in the Episcopal Church who do not believe in God does not reflect the view of everyone in the pews. Also, for the record, there are mainline Protestants who vote Republican and evangelicals (a lot of evangelicals) who vote Democrat.
That said, the more "typical" Christian worldwide is more "conservative" when it comes to the Bible, tradition, and matters of sexuality.
Judaism has the distinction between secular Jews (who are mostly atheists) and more observant Jews (including Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox). But given that Judaism is not an evangelizing faith and that Jews can renounce their belief in God and still be the target of ethnic hatred, Judaism is a little different from the others on this front. Someone who says they are a Christian because they believe Christ was a great teacher,4 just not the Son of God, is not a Christian. Someone who is culturally Islamic but doesn't believe in God is not a Muslim. Again, I mean no disrespect to anyone, but it's important to make distinctions. Islam and Christianity are religions. They aren't lifestyles. (Some Orthodox Jews might say that secular Jews aren't Jews, but I won’t make that argument.) The majority of Muslims worldwide believe in the teachings of Muhammad, treat the Quran as a sacred text, and obey the strictures of their faith.
It's also worth noting the difference between a lifestyle choice and an article of faith. Secular folks will sometimes say that Muslims not eating pork or Hindus not eating beef are choosing a certain lifestyle. The vast majority of those believers would tell you that it isn't a choice at all. It is a commandment. It is a logical extension of their faith, an action required of their faith. They don't do it because they want to, they do it because they are told to do it. If they believe what they believe, then that belief must mean certain things and one of those things is that they must obey certain commands.
The Larger Picture:
The point of course is that the classic mistake made by those on the outside looking in is to view religion as a lifestyle choice. In many ways, it is the opposite of that. Much of it isn’t a choice at all.
The secular world goes to great lengths to come up with wild theories explaining why religious people act the way they do, all with the goal of ignoring or explaining away the obvious reason why we act the way we do. That reason is that we believe what we say we believe. And if we believe, for instance, that Jesus not only was a great spiritual teacher, but that he literally died for our sins (including yours and mine) and was raised again to life three days later, the logical consequence of that belief is that we will take seriously what Jesus commanded us to do.5
Psychologists and sociologists will try to explain why religious beliefs persist in terms of economic utility, or social value, or how they make us feel. But logically, at least for the Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity), none of those explanations make sense, because none of those things (economic interests, social standing, personal feelings, etc.) matter. Or at least, they don’t matter very much, because nothing in this world,6 according to these faiths, matters all that much except insofar as they bear on what happens to us in the next life, which matters a great deal.7
In my opinion, the true believer of almost any faith will be required to believe things he or she does not like very much, does not want to believe, and would choose to be different if he or she were running the Universe, which of course he or she is not. Now, over time, a believer may go from resisting some teaching to accepting and loving it, but at first the impulse in many cases will be resistance. The particular tenet or practice which engenders such resistance may vary from person to person, but if someone does not have any belief which makes him or her uncomfortable, he or she probably hasn’t wrestled hard enough with the consequences of belief.
Too many secularists (and if I am being honest too many believers) think that we can pick and choose what we believe. I thought this, too, when I was a child. But why would the Universe organize itself in such a way as to meet my particular whims and desires or yours? How realistic is it that any one individual would naturally choose to believe all the particular things about the Universe which are true, and not believe a single thing which is false, if he “stayed true to himself,” or “worked it all out for himself,” or “looked inside of himself for the truth?”
In reality, the world exists outside of us. We are in it. We are a part of the Universe, not the other way around. And there are many details of the world around us which do not conform to our desires and whims. It is therefore entirely illogical to believe that this principle would not extend to theology. To discover truth about nature, we have to look outside of ourselves. And to discover truth about religion, we do, too.
Most believers will accept the following as true: the sources we look to outside of ourselves include revelation through scripture (i.e., holy text), traditions which have been worked out over centuries and have been passed down to us and have survived (and therefore are more likely to be true than anything cooked up in the last five minutes), and other people – primarily through the hierarchy of our faith (i.e., clergy and the various individuals who fill out the offices of our churches, synagogues, and mosques). All major religions demand humility. They demand that we accept something outside of ourselves. And they demand that we accept as true certain teachings which will never be popular and which will always require sacrifice on our part.
Those teachings fall out of religious faith often as a direct and natural consequence, and sometimes as a product of revelation. One of those teachings is the one which secularists (and some believers) have the hardest time wrapping their minds around: the claim of exclusivity that each religion makes – that it is the sole, true religion, the one which all other religions merely imitate.8 Rather than a result of chauvinism or myopia, this claim is required by most of the major world religions. Remember that religious believers do not join a faith because they want to feel a part of something. They join a faith because they believe what it teaches is true. And if the claims it makes are true, other claims can’t also be true. If Christians are correct that Jesus was the messiah, Jews are incorrect belief that the messiah has not yet come. They have rejected Jesus, who said, “No one comes to the Father, save through me.”9 Islam also claims that Jesus was not the messiah, merely a prophet. Therefore, Islam and Christianity are mutually exclusive. Either the claims made by one are true, or the claims made by the other are true, or neither are true. But both cannot be. If Muslims are correct that the creator of the universe can only be found through the teachings of Mohammed, than all those of us who do not practice Islam are in fact rejecting our creator and living in sin.
Which brings me to ISIS.
Why They Hate Us:
By no means does ISIS speak for a majority of Muslims. More Muslims have been killed by ISIS than have by American drones. But the members of ISIS do speak for themselves. There are those who posit complex theories for the causality of human behavior, the goal of which is to eliminate personal responsibility. But for those of us who live in the real world and don’t contrive elaborate theories to explain away what is plain as day, people can and do speak for themselves.
Since the terrorist responsible for the New Orleans vehicle attack on New Year’s Day flew an ISIS flag, the organization seems newly relevant again. In an issue of Dabiq, a magazine published by the Islamic State a decade ago, spokesmen for the organization explained, “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You.” By “you,” they include all of us in the West, as they make explicit. It is worth reading their explanation in full, because it isn’t very long, and it is well-written and quite clear.
“We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah – whether you realize it or not – by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4).”
“We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power…your secularism and nationalism, your perverted liberal values, your Christianity and atheism – and all the depravity and corruption they entail. You’ve made it your mission to “liberate” Muslim societies; we’ve made it our mission to fight off your influence and protect mankind from your misguided concepts and your deviant way of life.”
They call especial attention to atheists, who merit extra condemnation for their disbelief. And towards the end, they say this:
“What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you.
No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.”
While the entire case is worth reading, readers will by now have read enough to draw conclusions. To some, none of this will be new. But it is worth emphasizing that here the authors are making their worldview as explicit as possible. This isn’t right-wing politicians saying that this is what ISIS believes. These are the words of authors deputized to speak on behalf of the caliphate. These are not the words of madmen, or of desperate people. They are the words of intelligent, rational adults, who understand what they are saying and who have put a great deal of work into trying to convey their message.
Those who still insist that religion is a mental delusion will no doubt have rationalized all of this away already. Some will explain away the Quran quotations the ISIS authors cite (instructing them to hate and murder unbelievers) by claiming that all religions instruct their followers similarly, or that the Old Testament contains similar quotations. But all religions don’t make such instruction,10 and unlike anyone who would make such a statement, I’ve read the Old Testament, and it doesn’t.
Again, I am not claiming that ISIS speaks for all, or even a majority of Muslims. But I choose them to illustrate a point. It is because they are so extreme in their beliefs and actions that they illustrate it well, but I could have picked any number of examples. I will conclude with this point.
Because It Concerns the Final Things and the Higher Things, Religion Can Motivate People To Take Extreme Actions More Than Material Considerations Can:
If we take religious believers at their word, and if we pay attention to their actions,11 we will see that true belief in a world beyond this one – one which makes ours a mere shadow – will move people in ways which ordinary considerations (food, sex, money, entertainment, social status, drugs, heat, cold etc.) simply can’t. Such belief will lead people to do things which they otherwise would not. It will take people literally to the ends of the earth.
It is impossible to look at the world and not see that religious belief has altered the course of human history. It would be blind to look at the world today and not see that it still alters the course of history. The majority of human beings believe in some form of transcendence. Perhaps the atheists are right and that is simply some biological need cooked up by evolution to help us pass our genes on (or whatever). Or perhaps it is because there really is something beyond this world, and deep down in human consciousness lies the desire to know it.
Admittedly, the non-denominational trend tends to cut against this in some ways, however even most non-denominational churches do emphasize the importance of leaving behind various sins and worldly pleasures.
At the club level. Which is comparable to Division III – our club team used to occasionally race and win against Division III teams.
Also, for the record, my background is relatively “high church” and my denomination places heavy emphasis on liturgy and sacraments. So I am by no means denigrating ritualism.
For the record, almost every political group has at some point argued that "Jesus was the first X" and in every case they were practicing idolatry, not Christianity. This is true for those who tell you that Jesus was the first socialist or communist as it was for those who would have told you a century ago that Jesus was the first fascist. The parable of the laborers who are given the same reward for working different lengths of time is about conversion to Christianity and the kingdom of heaven - a deathbed conversion counts as much as a lifetime of faith. The parable of the talents (from which we get "to those who have more will be given... but from him who has not, even more will be taken away.") praises the earning of interest on money (but it, too, is not about economics).
For instance, He didn’t say, “Organize your social relations around the central goal of abolishing personal property,” but instead “Love the Lord thy God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your strength and all of your mind.”
Let me clarify something, though, at least in the Chrisian context, because these things become complicated very quickly. I’m not suggesting that Gnosticism (i.e., that matter and life in the world and the body don’t matter and that only the mind and spirit are “truly real”) is correct. I’m saying that what is important about material, physical things is not what happens in this life, but what happens in the next, and all three Abrahamic religions agree that what happen in this world can have great bearing on what happens in the next.
An understatement. In The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis’s beloved protagonists discover that Narnia and Earth were but shadows, reflections of the true Narnia and true Earth. Only when they see the true Earth for themselves do they realize how pale a reflection theirs really was. When balanced against the Final Things with a capital F and a capital T, not much in the here and now really makes much of an impact.
There are eastern religions and pagan, premodern religions which aren’t exclusive.
I recognize that not all Christians are supersessionists (there are some Christians who believe that God will still honor the original covenant made with Israel). I am currently agnostic on the subject, having seen compelling arguments for both positions. However, it is true that Jesus can’t both be the messiah and not be the messiah.
Harris points out in the aforementioned interview that there hasn’t been an assassination attempt on an abortionist in the United States in forty years or so, despite the claims that fundamentalist Christianity inspires widespread violence.
But don’t many Christians live like pagans or secularists? Fair. You have me there. Jesus himself explained this, saying that, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” There is a reason that the faith places such an emphasis on the constant battle with sin and temptation and the constant need for forgiveness and repentance.