The Language of Religion I

"The language of religion," Atrios writes, is "something I don't understand. It's gibberish to me. When people start invoking religion in discussing issues they may as well be talking Martian. I'm not being insulting here, I'm just saying it's utterly meaningless to me personally."

And of course there's no reason such language should be meaningful to him. Sectarian language isn't much use when trying to communicate with people outside of the sect.

This is something we religious types don't always remember. Religious language is our native idiom and it plays an important, necessary role when speaking amongst ourselves. But outside the fold, outside the club, this language doesn't communicate and therefore cannot be expected to persuade. Those of us who are native speakers of religious language shouldn't expect that our peculiar way of expressing ourselves would sound like anything other than gibberish to those who do not share our peculiarities.*

This is why it's necessary for religious believers to adopt the common language of others when speaking to those outside of our particular communities. Religious language needs to be translated into intermediary terms and principles that others can understand, appreciate and engage. Language that is, to borrow a phrase from the Supreme Court, "pervasively sectarian" is only useful when talking to others within the sect. To talk to anyone else, we need to communicate in secular terms.

The word "secular," unfortunately, has been subjected to decades of deliberate distortion by sectarian partisans who pretend it is the antonym of "sacred." It's not. The opposite of "sacred" is "profane." The opposite of secular is sectarian. Secular language, thus, is necessary not just for communication between believers and nonbelievers, or between "Christians" and "secular humanists," but also for communication between sects -- between, say, the "General Baptists" and the "Regular Baptists."

Finding such secular, common language can be difficult when the subject in question involves an "ought" -- the belief or assertion that certain actions ought to be done or ought not to be done. Once we start talking about oughts we are, inescapably, in the terrain of morality and thus of metaphysics.

At this point, things can quickly deteriorate into a late-night undergrad bull-session. We can find ourselves tackling the perennial question of right and wrong in the abstract, turning to Kant or to John Rawls or some other such philosophical attempt to ground moral thinking in a shared rationality. Or we could point to the seemingly universal commonalities -- what C.S. Lewis called "The Tao" -- shared by all major religions and moral teachings.

And all of that is fascinating. I love thinking and talking and arguing about all that.** But it's not terribly practical as part of our daily routine.

And anyway, this is not how we humans tend to go about these things. Life simply demands too much of our time and attention for us to indulge in a rehashing of the perennial philosophical questions every time there's a decision to be made about our political or cultural life together.

So we tend, instead, to begin with simple assertions expressed in general terms. We may not be 100-percent in accord as to all the ramifications and/or bases of these general terms, but we share enough of their meaning for them to be useful.

For example, I might say, "X is wrong." At that point it would be perfectly legitimate for you to ask, "What do you mean by wrong?" and we could go spinning off into the clouds, but neither of us usually has time for that, so you will, instead, assume that we agree, more-or-less, as to the what and why of "wrongness" and you will simply, in the same general terms, agree or disagree about the wrongness of X.

If we do agree then we will not find it necessary to further explore the distinct logic of our particular sectarian approaches to morality. We won't need to iron out all the precise distinctions between your concept of right and wrong as a member of the United Free Will Baptist sect as opposed to my concept of right and wrong as a member of the United American Free Will Baptist sect (or between my concept as a Christian and Duncan's as an atheist and anyone else's as whatever else they may be).

If we disagree, then it gets trickier.

If we disagree, then the general, secular term "wrong" apparently isn't working as a common language for us and we'll have to find some other shared language or shared reasoning -- whether that's Rawls' veil of ignorance or Kant's categorical imperative or just some dude's "Mean People Suck" t-shirt. But I shouldn't expect my own sectarian language -- citing chapter and verse -- to be of much use in clarifying or resolving this disagreement.

The odd thing is that even though ideas of morality, of "ought," of right and wrong, seem inextricably bound up with religion and metaphysics, there's often little correlation between the two. We often find ourselves in serious disagreement with others within our own traditions while at the same time finding ourselves in close agreement with others outside of those traditions who seem, despite sharing none of our presuppositions, to share all of our conclusions.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* True story from back at Timothy Christian School:

We were studying evangelism and the teacher was going over something called the "Romans Road" -- a series of passages from St. Paul's epistle to the Romans that described humanity's sinfulness and need for salvation. Evangelism, by definition, involves talking with people who do not already share our faith. Such people, I had noticed, also tended not to regard our Bible as their Bible, so I asked the teacher what we should say to someone who tells us they don't believe in the Bible.

"You show them II Timothy 3:16," the teacher said. And then she quoted it, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."

When I suggested that someone who didn't believe in the Bible wasn't likely to believe in II Timothy any more than they believed in Romans, she responded by quoting another passage, II Peter 1:21, and then another from the 119th Psalm.

It went on like that for a bit, like something from Abbot and Costello, with both of us getting more frustrated as she quoted Bible verse after Bible verse about the authority of the Bible and me not doing a very good job of expressing that someone who doesn't believe in Bible verses won't be convinced by a Bible verse that tells them to believe in Bible verses. Until finally she said this:

"Well if they still don't believe in the Bible after you've showed them all those verses, then I guess they just can't read."

** I also find such abstractions comforting, particularly when the particulars of reality are so depressing. Atrios' comments on religious language were made in the context of religious condemnations of torture, and shortly after reading them I read these poll results, showing that American Christians are more likely than others to believe that torture can often or sometimes be justified. I want and need to address this, but I find it so disheartening/exasperating that I needed to work up to it gradually.

Comments

[Sherri]

Re: your story from Christian school - I had a similar experience with the pastor at the Southern Baptist church I was attending in my late teens. He told me that we knew the Bible was truth, because the Bible told us so, right there in John 1:1.

[pharoute]

So what part of "Jesus was tortured" don't American Christians(tm) get???? All of it apparently; they probably would've been the first to yell "Crucify him"...

[coriolis]

Fred,
I'm not sure the poll shows any statistically significant difference between the groups, and -- given that no information is presented showing the size of each subgroup and given that the methodology is proprietary -- it would be irresponsible for anyone to draw any conclusions from this research. (ref.)

[Anonymous]

Secular liberals expect religious liberals to be liberal as secular liberals are liberal, and if and when they happen not to be, condemn them for not being liberal as secular liberals think religious liberals ought to be, so the misapplication of "religious" language cuts in two directions.

[Evan]

I confess, I wasn't surprised to find that Christians were more likely than secularists to oppose torture. After all, a lot of Christians believe that God tortures people, and not just for a little while, either, but forever and ever, and for no crime other than "believing the wrong thing."

Belief in Hell should be a heresy. IMHO, no religion that believes in a literal hell can ever be truly moral.

What surprised me rather more was that Catholics apparently were more pro-torture than protestants, but that there wasn't any difference between evangelical and non-evangelical protestants. I was expecting the evangelicals to stand out.

[Evan]

Obviously I meant Christians were more likely to favor torture. Oops.

[Bugmaster]

...and shortly after reading them I read these poll results, showing that American Christians are more likely than others to believe that torture can often or sometimes be justified. I want and need to address this, but I find it so disheartening/exasperating that I needed to work up to it gradually.

Sounds about right to me. Fanatics are the same everywhere. If America was a predominantly Wiccan nations, you'd have the Wiccan fanatics demanding to burn infidels in the sacred fire. If the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism ever takes hold, we'll see FSM fanatics yelling for frying non-FSMists in the oven, or whatever. The problem is with fanaticism itself, not with its surface trappings.

[David]

Another similar experience: when I was young I had a frustrating conversation with a Sunday School teacher of mine, who was saying that people would believe in the Good News if only they would read the Bible.

"But," I said, "even though it's true, it's still just a book. Aren't there lots of people who have read the Bible, and still don't believe it?"

She insisted that there could not be any such person, and that anyone who didn't believe must therefore be lying about having really read the Bible.

An earnest discussion ensued.

A lot of my Sunday School teachers didn't like me very much...

[Doctor Science]

But outside the fold, outside the club, this language doesn't communicate and therefore cannot be expected to persuade.

I've been trying to figure out what people mean when they talk about how liberals "have taken religion out of the public square," because I see no such thing. I think you've actually pinpointed the biggest issue, Fred: that liberals (secularists, non-Christians, atheists, etc.) are no longer willing to pretend that Christian language and references are persuasive.

What they mean by "the public square" is the field of public discourse and political persuasion. And like the teacher at Timothy Christian School, many Christians have no rhetorical tools if they can't call on Christianity. If they're told "but we're not Christian! you have to use something other than the Bible to persuade us!" they will feel as if religion has been taken out of the public square, as if they are being maliciously forced not to talk about their religious beliefs.

Actually, of course, it's just that we're refusing to credit them. But saying "We'll only pay attention to you if you don't back up your points with religion" does in practice mean that they need to change the way they talk "in the public square."

[Toby]

we'll have to find some other shared language or shared reasoning -- whether that's Rawls' veil of ignorance or Kant's categorical imperative or just some dude's "Mean People Suck" t-shirt

In his Political Liberalism, one of Rawls' major themes was like in the main post: that public political discussion should not be put into sectarian terms. Of course this includes religious terms, but Rawls thought this should also include the terms specific to his own moral theory, as well as the terms specific to Kant's. (After all, if we start debating some issue exclusively in terms of the categorical imperative, we're basically barring utilitarians from the discussion.)

Talking about meanness is all right. We can expect general agreement that being mean is bad, all else being equal. We can also talk in terms of suffering, fairness, freedom, and other values that are universally accessible in contemporary democracies. It's important to note that it doesn't matter how those values are accessed (is fairness demanded by God? the categorical imperative? the maximization of utility? does it just seem good?), so long as they are in fact accessed. This means that political debates should occur in terms of these generally accessible values, without us talking about the details of whatever parochial philosophical or religious rationalizations we might have for why we value those values.

There is vanishingly little chance that American political discourse will meet this standard any time soon, and American Christendom is to blame.

[pseudolus]

I read these poll results, showing that American Christians are more likely than others to believe that torture can often or sometimes be justified.

Why the mystery? Christianity has roots in the torture of Jesus, no? Without his suffering and 'death' you wouldn't have a religion would you? Which is why I am always amazed at so-called Christians being angry with the Jews for 'killing Jesus'. Not all Christians, just the haters in the bunch. But what do I know, I am just a heathen. Apologies to any taking offense.

[Jeff]

pharoute:
So what part of "Jesus was tortured" don't American Christians(tm) get?

It wasn't anything more than our frat boys undergo, doncha know? (Some of the tortures -- the crown of thorns, lugging the cross up the hill -- sound straight out of the pledge houses of the 50's and 60's. They weren't right then, and they're not right now.)

[Alexis]

Fred, thank you for writing this. This is something that has confused me for a long time. Religious people I know will bust out some sort of argument for something based on their religion, and I just don't know what to say because it's so entirely unconvincing. Now I know to say "Sorry, I can't process that argument because it presupposes all kinds of things that make no sense to me because they're couched in a language (religion) that I don't speak. Try again later with different words."

[pharoute]

As a wise man once said "Crucifixion's a doddle." But anyway Jeff/Psuedolus, imho since so much of AC (tm) thinking is less about Jesus' actual lessons on how to achieve this thing called "The Kingdom of God" (patent pending) and more about "Woohoo I said the magic phrase! I'm in like Flynt!" torturing another child of God is no cause for concern. The truly depressing part of that survey is that only 35% +/- think torture is never acceptable. When did schools drop "torture is bad" week from the curriculum?

[Duane]

I also find such abstractions comforting, particularly when the particulars of reality are so depressing. Atrios' comments on religious language were made in the context of religious condemnations of torture, and shortly after reading them I read these poll results, showing that American Christians are more likely than others to believe that torture can often or sometimes be justified. I want and need to address this, but I find it so disheartening/exasperating that I needed to work up to it gradually.

I know it isn't polite to say and I know generalizations don't usually advance the ball but polls by their very nature generalize so we can cue from there:

American Christians - the regular churchgoing type that believes they invited Jesus and George Bush into their heart - are some of the most fucked-up people on the planet.

They start with the assumption that they are terrible people, wrought with sin and human frailty, buffetted by temptation from the a mythical monster called the devil and a goddawful carnal world that is trying to get them to have perverted sex, drink beer and skip Sunday night services.

Now, take a bunch of these warped creatures and pack them in a building called a church and feed their paranoia and fear of outsiders with twice or thrice-weekly sermons painting everyone not in the church as evil or Other and everyone in the church as alternately God's warriors for righteousness and/or martyr-like victims of persecution.

I could go on and on, having grown up in this environment. But the point is that you can't start with this base and build anything Christ-like on top of it. Which is why what generally gets built on top of this base is Republicanism.

[Noah Brand]

See, this post and the resulting discussion is my second-favorite thing about this blog. (First is Left Behind Fridays, I admit.) Here I am, a crabby atheistic SOB, and here's Fred, a devout evangelical Christian, and we arrive at the same moral points a vast majority of the time, but we arrive at them through completely different routes. I cite Fred merely 'cause it's his blog; I recognize there's a lot of other Christians on the same moral page who read and comment here.

The closest I can come to reconciliation of these points of view is based on a possibly-heretical reading of the Book of Genesis a Christian friend told me about once. See, as an atheist, I believe there's no god of any kind, no purpose to the universe, nobody gonna bail us out; all we can count on is each other. And my friend said her reading of Genesis was that when God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden, he left them alone in a world of pain and suffering and death, and commanded them to be fruitful and multiply, because in such a world all human beings had to count on was each other. Heaven might be one thing, but here in the fallen world all we can do is look out for our fellow humans. In this reading, Jesus was sent to clarify this point, since apparently a lot of us hadn't gotten it.

I'm not qualified to say if this is much like most Christians' reading of why we need to look out for each other, but as a crabby atheistic SOB it appealed to me. :)

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Sounds about right to me. Fanatics are the same everywhere. If America was a predominantly Wiccan nations, you'd have the Wiccan fanatics demanding to burn infidels in the sacred fire.

You're totally right in substance here, but the weird thing is that what you normally get in Wicca as far as violent fanatics go are people who will say that "I'm Pagan, but I'm not Wiccan, because I don't hold with the Wiccan Rede ['An it harm none, do as ye will']. It's too fluffy bunny for me." More rarely, they'll identify as Wiccan and argue that the Wiccan Rede is not universal to all Wiccans.

It's a good idea to keep an eye on such self-proclaimed non-Rede-followers to find out whether their dissent stems from a minor philosophical disagreement concerning, say, self-defense, vegetarianism, or harm-to-self... or whether they simply don't want to be bound to rules that require them to respect their fellow man.

So this one guy once joined a Pagan mailing list that I moderate. He stayed pretty quiet for awhile. But then one day--and I don't recall exactly what conversational turn inspired him to contribute this--he said something along the lines of "Christian fundies--I kill them when I can." After a flurry of posts ranging from "You're joking, right?" to "That sort of talk isn't welcome here" to "Stay the hell away from me and my children," he flounced out of the group too fast for me to ban him, his swan song being this big smarmy post about how the rest of us were all "sheeple" who were too fluffy-bunny to stand up to persecution.

So, yes, Neopaganism/Paganism has its scary fanatics, too. There are those who would happily roast unbelievers in their giant, non-canonical Wicker Men. But usually they're more likely to trumpet their dissent with Wiccan ethics than they are to claim their actions consistent with Wicca. It makes it harder to denounce them. Paganism is a huge umbrella religious category that isn't defined by one common moral code (What it IS defined by is an argument that belongs on another blog entirely), so you can't say of them "They're not REAL Pagans!" the way you can say of torture-apologizers "That's not Christ-like behavior!" You can say that violent, vigilante sentiments aren't consistent with Wiccan mores, or with the mission statement of a particular Pagan Yahoo! group (like ours), but it's hard to disown them as, at the very least, some sort of fringe Pagan sect.

[Scott]

I confess, I wasn't surprised to find that Christians were more likely than secularists to oppose torture. After all, a lot of Christians believe that God tortures people, and not just for a little while, either, but forever and ever, and for no crime other than "believing the wrong thing."

You get tortured in Hell for refusal to actively submit to your Savior, just like Iraqis get tortured as punishment for refusal to actively submit to their savior, GeeDub. If someone sheds blood to save you, he (Jesus or the US Military) owns you.

You cannot be neutral - you either actively submit or suffer the consequences:

Abu Ghraib: Hell House of the Religious Right

(No, I'm not saying this to agree w/ the evilvangelicals, just outlining what they seem to believe).

[the opoponax]

yeah, but Nicole, the nice thing about that brand of Wiccans is that they're generally about 15 years old and living paganism like it's a trendy new LARP game. give em six months and they grow out of it.

[Francis]

Once we start talking about oughts we are, inescapably, in the terrain of morality and thus of metaphysics.

I'm amazed no one has picked up on this as it's the sort of statement that really really irritates atheists. Oughts are in the terrain of morality but there is nothing that says that the terrain of morality needs to be metaphysical. Enlightened Self-Interest is a very effective moral system with no metaphysics anywhere near it. (Never mind all the systems that believe themselves to be logical and secular that have a hidden metaphysical base).

And many atheists reading that sentence would have read it as a coded attack - "You say that because we don't have a metaphysical guide we can't do morality". And in many cases they would be right that that was either a deliberate meaning or an underlying assumption.

(There are days I consider myself very lucky that I'm secular, agnostic, and better versed in Christian Religious language than most priests and ministers).

[Zzyzx]

The "The Bible is true because The Bible says its true" argument drives me up the wall too. If you want to convince an atheist leaning agnostic like me, the way to do so is not to show that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies - hey, I could write a story about a character that did that - or any other argument that uses the divinity of the text as an assumption. Rather, you have to find an external argument.

I still don't understand why if God loves us so much and he made this weird rule to separate those of us who are going to be tortured forever from those of us who will be playing with bunnies and kittens, he doesn't just every 2 or 3 years have fiery letters decend from the sky visible from anywhere in the world that translate in the language of whoever is reading it as clear instructions for salvation. That way people who don't do it would be rejecting him rather than rejecting the jerks who speak in his name or the cultural differences between the west and the rest of the world or something...

[Rasselas]

It's a bit disingenuous for Atrios to claim that he is not being insulting and then go on to call the religious language "gibberish," "talking Martian," "utterly meaningless to me personally."

I disagree with many of his hysterical pronouncements on the Lovecraftian horror of whatever he may choose to dislike from day to day, but cannot claim that the premises of modern liberalism, explicit and not, are so alien to me that -- to paraphrase Wittgenstein -- to hear them is to hear nothing like language.

Is the modern liberal so perfect a creature of his era that very old questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "What will be the last things and the things before the last?" trouble him not at all?

[Jesurgislac]

David: She insisted that there could not be any such person, and that anyone who didn't believe must therefore be lying about having really read the Bible.

Hee. It does really mess with fundie's heads when I quote the Bible chapter and verse, better than they can... and identify as an atheist. "But if you've read it, can't you see it's true?"

No: because I've read it, with plainly more attention than you have, I know it's not true. That would be why I'm an atheist.

[J]

I disagree with many of his hysterical pronouncements on the Lovecraftian horror of whatever he may choose to dislike from day to day, but cannot claim that the premises of modern liberalism...

Ugh. Stop channeling William F. Buckley.

Is the modern liberal so perfect a creature of his era that very old questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "What will be the last things and the things before the last?" trouble him not at all?

Why not? They don't trouble me. The last thing will be the novation of Earth's sun. The things before the last thing will be the depletion of the lightweight fuel gases in Earth's sun. End of story.

[J]

No: because I've read it, with plainly more attention than you have, I know it's not true. That would be why I'm an atheist.

Yes, siree. Nothing supports atheism--or at the very least, the moral superiority of atheism--better than Judges 21:12:

"The congregation sent there twelve thousand men of the most valiant, and commanded them, saying, "Go and strike the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the little ones.

This is the thing that you shall do: you shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman who has lain with a man." They found among the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead four hundred young virgins, who had not known man by lying with him; and they brought them to the camp to Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan."

[Jesurgislac]

J: Nothing supports atheism--or at the very least, the moral superiority of atheism--better than Judges 21:12:

No, actually. At least, I see no reason to believe in the moral superiority of atheism. Atheism simply means I believe there is no god/there are no gods: and like any other belief, it's good or bad depending what you do with it.

The point at which I began to be an atheist was after reading through all four gospels in my read-the-Bible-all-the-way-through-project, and realising that the story as recounted in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20/21 was just flat unbelievable. Indeed, without the ability to look at a physical impossibility and say "God did it!" I don't see how anyone could believe it - and I don't have that ability. Yet this was - so outside reading told me - supposed to be something Christians believed as literally true. I think I went on vaguely trying to believe for a while, but by the time I was 20, I had got to the point where I was just not prepared to pretend that I did believe.

I acknowledge as a logical possibility that I could be wrong: there is no way to prove a negative. But that's kind of beside the point: no one can prove their god exists, no one can prove a god doesn't exist. In the end, it comes down to what you yourself really believe - and then, what you do with what you believe.

[the opoponax]

i don't mean to insult you or to demean your spiritual underpinnings at all, but i fail to see how the realization that you don't believe in the main tenet of one religion therefore leads to a realization that God does not exist.

i came to a similar realization in a similar way. i just up and realized one day, after a lot of study and thought, that i simply didn't believe christ was the son of God, died for our sins, etc. which led me to realize not that i didn't believe in God, but that i didn't believe in Christianity.

there are MANY religions that don't dole out the miracles in as dramatically 'illogical' a way as they're presented in the New Testament. there are also many faiths (and plenty of Christian denominations) which have much more nuanced readings of the more 'unbelievable' beliefs that come with their faith. i'm not saying you should stop being an atheist, or that you're wrong in that decision for your life, but that there are MANY other approaches besides 'Jesus is the savior and risen son of God' or 'there is no God'.

just something that's always squicked me about atheists in a predominantly Christian society. sorry.

[Bugmaster]

@Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

I picked Wiccans as an example precisely because they're so "fluffy-bunny". And yet, I bet Wiccan fanatics would act in the same exact way as Christian and Muslim fanatics do. That was my only point... I personally kinda like the run-of-the-mill Wiccans, more than I like run-of-the-mill Christians. Wiccans have a better sense of fashion :-)

[Jesurgislac]

opoponax: but i fail to see how the realization that you don't believe in the main tenet of one religion therefore leads to a realization that God does not exist.

It was a bit longer and more complicated than that, opoponax. It took me around five or six years to work it all out for myself, and summarising that process into one readable comment on someone else's blog is probably not possible. But it was more that just realizing I certainly wasn't a Christian. (In fact, for a while I used to say "I don't think I'm a Christian but I'm still a Quaker", which is probably only possible in Quakerism.)

What I was trying to do, merely, was to say that for me it didn't begin with (as J suggests) the realization that believers have used their God to justify monstrous acts. When I was a believer, I merely thought (in a priggish, Quakerly kind of way) how horrified God must be at his believers doing that kind of thing.

[JMiller]

In organizational communication, we call this "Trained Communication Incapacity" -- you get so used to talking to your base (or other people in your sect) that you forget any of the rational arguments that form the underpinning of what you're talking about. What you say is no less true, it just is a few steps beyond logical for anybody who hasn't been following your (pun alert!) train of thought. The real problem is that folks who have been raised in a church -- and the more visi-sect-ed the worse it is -- may have missed out on the original thinking altogether and therefore missed that there's a massive world of morality outside of simply trading acceptance of a creed for eternal life on streets paved with gold (or missed that mass rioting about a blasphemous cartoon merely freakin' proves the point that the cartoon was making).

Ultimately, without the thought processes that support the conclusions of the religion engaged and supporting the mind, the religion becomes more of an emotional process. And, as Harlan Ellison put it, we are little more than naked apes when our emotions are aroused -- and the future cannot be trusted to naked apes. This also highlights the "I'm going to ignore you now" fallacy, however, in that an enraged ape is still able to pound an enlightened liberal and an incoherent values voter is still able to negate the progressive vote of the enlightened liberal (even if they survive ignoring the ape). Disengagement from the non-thinking isn't going to bring progress -- it is the easy way out of an annoying situation, but it merely maintains the status quo. Which is exactly what the hateful status quo really wants to do.

And point for J -- belief systems are not the same as morality. You can have violent Buddhists, evil Christians, and sociopathic athiests. How good of a person you are is not fixed and bound to how you believe the universe works. (But you are more frequently regarded as scary when you believe that the workings of the universe justify your violent and hateful behaviors and trumpet your belief system as a harbinger of doom for any who would oppose you. "Inquisition!" came the baleful howl in the night. "Inquisition!" they shouted as they marched over the field, torches aloft and sickles and pitchforks at the ready. "Inquisition!" cried the peasant army of Chairman Mao, searching for the Christians who would not subscribe to the party's focused atheism...)

[the opoponax]

understood, Jesu. i had a feeling it was more like that. makes perfect sense to me. it's only that i HAVE met many atheists (mostly living in the Bible Belt) who seem to have made that ideological leap.

@ JMiller:

"an incoherent values voter is still able to negate the progressive vote of the enlightened liberal"

i have NEVER understood this concept, the 'negating' of votes. could someone please explain? i fail to see how my political opinions somehow inherently 'negate' (or are 'negated') simply because someone of opposing beliefs exists out there somewhere, or god forbid, even within my voting district.

the interesting thing is that this is how the husbands of the so-called "prairie muffins" con their wives into surrendering the vote. because if they disagreed politically, their votes would cancel each other out, and then what's the point?

[kristina]

I had a similar experience once with sunday school teachers using the bible to prove that the bible was true by showing that it was internally consistent (which, actually, it isn't).

I didn't challenge them on it. They were so excited about figuring it out that I didn't have the guts to break it to them that their little plan was completely useless.

[GailVortex]

I used to say "I don't think I'm a Christian but I'm still a Quaker", which is probably only possible in Quakerism.

Whereas the analogous statement from a Unitarian is almost the norm...

[walden]

I had a similar experience once with sunday school teachers using the bible to prove that the bible was true by showing that it was internally consistent (which, actually, it isn't).

Actually, I'm persuaded that much of the bible is true BECAUSE it is not internally consistent. Multiple accounts with different points of view, axes to grind, and political agendas -- this makes it much more plausible than a tradition that is neatly tied up in a bow and where all the witnesses tell exactly the same story.

[LL]

Another atheist here, and thanks to Fred for addressing this.

RE poll: I'd like to know how many of the religious who think torture is OK saw The Passion of the Christ. Maybe they think that if someone isn't being flayed or nailed to a cross, they're not really being tortured. Not trying to excuse them by any means, just sayin'.

RE secular vs. sectarian: obviously, there can be awful people among the religious, the non-religious, the atheists, etc. I find that assuming most people are full of it till they demonstrate otherwise works best. I don't tell them that, of course, but I rarely find arguments from most people really compelling because I'm convinced most people, secular or not, have no idea what they're talking about most of the time. They get most of their info on any given subject from TV news or acquaintances who get their info from TV news. The rest they fill in with religion, personal anecdote, urban legend, crap they read on the Internet, etc.

I'm no longer surprised that religious people think their particular religious beliefs should be compelling evidence to the rest of us regarding whatever argument they're making. Religious "sensibilities" are so protected even in this supposedly secular country that few religious people are expected to explain why they believe what they do, which keeps them from thinking about why they believe it in the first place. If religion were held to the same scrutiny as, say, Bill Clinton's sex life, none of it would hold up. But people don't want to scrutinize religion, they just want to believe, no pesky facts or lack thereof to get in the way. Doesn't help that apparently people believe that all opinions are/should be equally useful, so the opinion of the guy at Jiffy Lube is supposed to be as compelling to me as the opinion of a college professor on the subject of Islam or cloning or whatever. I've never understood why I'm supposed to care what a majority of Americans think about anything that involves facts (for example, whether the use of torture is justified) that most of them haven't a clue about. Most Americans are not at all familiar with intelligence gathering, asymmetrical warfare, etc., so why does it matter what they think? The people actually in charge of intelligence gathering don't care what we think about it, so why does Pew or anyone else bother asking? I mean, I guess it is nice to be asked, but as far as usefulness, I'd say it's not all that useful... I could have guessed that lots of religious people think anything Bushco does/wants to do is A-OK, they're a large segment of the people who voted for him, twice. As far as many of them are concerned, he's God's right-hand man, so anything George does is therefore stamped with the Almighty's seal of approval. Sad, but not surprising. To me, anyway, but I'm a cranky atheist.

[eyelessgame]

We can expect general agreement that being mean is bad, all else being equal.

Only because Scott isn't commenting today. Atheists and Christians and Jews and Wiccans can agree with a bunch of stuff that libertarians think is plain wrong. Mean people are perfectly dandy, so long as the government doesn't take away anyone's property.

Great post. I love the Abbott and Costello. Just as Aristotle proved that celestial motion is circular while terrestrial motion is linear, so circular logic -- a fallacy in secular thought -- is the valid and proper approach to matters divine.

[Jesurgislac]

Walden: Actually, I'm persuaded that much of the bible is true BECAUSE it is not internally consistent. Multiple accounts with different points of view, axes to grind, and political agendas -- this makes it much more plausible than a tradition that is neatly tied up in a bow and where all the witnesses tell exactly the same story.

Well, that applies to the mythology of practically every religion I can think of: do you think they're all true because none of them are internally consistent?

[bulbul]

Actually, I'm persuaded that much of the bible is true BECAUSE it is not internally consistent.
There are man stupid reasons for believing that the Bible is true. This one makes it into the top three.

[Jeff]

I grew up Jewish and refused to believe that a Supreme Being could be so spiteful, mean and petulant as the God of the Old Testament. By time I was 13, I had retranslated "mitzvah" from "Commandment" to "Good Deed" -- something you do because it makes the world a nicer place, not because something or someone outside yourself said you Have To. I had my Bar Mitzvah to please my grandfathers, to whom it meant a great deal, and I haven't been back to a synagogue for a regular service since.

--------

I want to come back to the subjecty of "ought to" for a minute. To me, this ties in with the (brief) discussion we had on "allowed" when talking about "You're not allowed to kill civilians". The one who says what we "ought" to do is the same one who "allows" us to do an act.

For the religious, this is their Moral Authority, whether embodied in a person (priest, rabbi, shaman, whatever) or one or more Texts (or some combination of the two). For the non-religious, this is more likely to be an constructed ethical system -- no one book or person has all the answers so we must pick those values that make sense to us.

[sophia8]

See, this post and the resulting discussion is my second-favorite thing about this blog. (First is Left Behind Fridays, I admit.) Here I am, a crabby atheistic SOB, and here's Fred, a devout evangelical Christian, and we arrive at the same moral points a vast majority of the time, but we arrive at them through completely different routes. I cite Fred merely 'cause it's his blog; I recognize there's a lot of other Christians on the same moral page who read and comment here.
Replace "crabby atheistic SOB" with "crabby old Pagan", and that could have been written by me.

[walden]

jesurgislac -- yes. Traditions that are robust enough to have a lot of points of view, but surrounding the same general set of events, ...particularly when there are contemporaneous accounts that differ in particulars...I tend to find have credibility. Thus, it is far more believable that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died and did and said various things than that his entire existence was some hoax. Also that a significant number of folks with differing points of view even in the first century CE regarded him as being in some meaningful way a/the Messiah. Similarly, that King David was a murderer and usurper who nonetheless managed to perpetuate and popularize worship in Jerusalem and whose reign become regarded as the golden age when things went badly for the Isreaelites later on. Also that there really was an Exodus from Egypt. And that betraying widows and orphans and faithlessness was pretty common behavior (then as now) that deserved censure by the prophets.

The great thing about the bible is that it portrays human folly, sin, wickedness, manipulation, goodness, charity, courage, love, and perseverance. It's not like a good-guys bad-guys story -- but a flawed story of a search for God and meaning.

This is far from saying that every incident happened the way it is described (and frequently the same incident ends up being described in 3-4 different ways, and happening to 2 or more different people). But it does suggest a living, vital tradition from which we can learn a lot.

bulbul -- glad to make it into the top three.

[Lucia]

I've had similar circular arguments with fundagelicals (some but not all of them right-wingers), trying to explain why I'm not a Christian. I say it doesn't make sense to me. They tell me to let God into my heart, to believe with my heart. It doesn't make sense to my heart, doesn't resonate, doesn't speak to me, I say. Read the Bible, they say. [Insert biblical-authority verse(s) here.] I've read it, I say, and it doesn't make sense to me. And so on.

Some (maybe many) Christians seem genuinely to believe that people don't embrace Christianity because churchgoing would cut into their carousing time. Speaking only for myself, would that it were true. It may be for some people, but virtually all of the agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists I've discussed it with don't believe because they can't, not because they're having too much fun. Most of them in fact are pretty sternly moral.

There's some part of me that keeps looking for God and seeing occasional glimpses of God, hearing snatches of music. I can never decide if that's because God is there or because I don't want to believe that what I can see and touch and measure is all there is. As long as I keep seeing and hearing things, though, I'll count myself a semi-agnostic Pagan. (Wicca, which I keep company with if not exactly espouse, seems to me to go to great lengths to avoid having a belief system or a rule book in which fanaticism can take root, although I suppose a determined enough fanatic could use Wicca, or the Betty Crocker Cookbook for that matter, as a base. [Thou shalt measure precisely two teaspoons of sugar...] Lots of religions offer much more fertile ground, however.)

When I fell away from Christianity I didn't start with the illogic of the Bible, although it is illogical, not to mention downright nasty in spots. It was more a sort of "this doesn't add up" uneasiness -- mainly, if God is omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent, and everything is part of His plan, how come roughly 90 percent of us are going to end up on spits?

[pablo]

The most frustrating thing i've experienced as an atheist arguing with christians is their refusal to accept that i don't believe in god. They're convinced that we believe there is a god but reject or hate him. I can't hate jehovah anymore than i can hate zeus.

[LL]

Yeah, I love that "you don't not believe in God, you just hate him" line. They assume that no one can NOT believe in a deity, so it's because we're all bitter and disillusioned by life (probably because TV and movies usually portray agnostics and atheists this way, not as people who decided on something like adults but as people who were horribly disappointed by some tragedy and decided to punish God by not believing in him; if Christians think they're misrepresented by the popular culture, try being an atheist). I get the sense that many (most?) people think all atheists are basically perpetual teenagers who hate Daddy God because he let our dog die or let grandma get cancer or we didn't get into our first-choice college or whatever. I don't even bother explaining it to most people because they're often so unpleasant about it (usually smug, occasionally hostile), it's just not worth it. If people are determined not to understand or can't at least agree to disagree and be adults about it, the tedious back-and-forth accomplishes nothing but making them believe they've done their good cosmic Christian deed for the day by trying to make someone "see the light." They can check that off on their daily list, right under "Send e-mail to FCC about that episode on that show about the teenage orgy."

[Scorpio]

Yeah, that's me all right -- can't read worth a damn.

Does she wear mixed fibers? Eat shellfish? Cook kids in their mother's milk? Feed the hungry and clothe the naked?

What was that about reading?

[Scott]

Only because Scott isn't commenting today. Atheists and Christians and Jews and Wiccans can agree with a bunch of stuff that libertarians think is plain wrong. Mean people are perfectly dandy, so long as the government doesn't take away anyone's property.

If you're expecting to stop people from being 'mean' via the power of your real god, the govt, you're going to live a life of bitter disappointment.

[Scott]

If you're expecting to stop people from being 'mean' via the power of your real god, the govt, you're going to live a life of bitter disappointment.

The fun part is that, when it suits them, the left does the same thing. "Look, the Constitution says right here, 'We The People'", so it can take anything it wants (except when there's something in the Consititution that's in their way, then it turns out to have been created by "Property Owning White Males, Many Of Whom Owned Slaves" instead of the people in general). You have to support your god by ignoring the fact that just because someone wrote it doesn't make it so.

[madjoey]

Fred writes: And all of that [undergrad late-night bull session philosophizing] is fascinating. I love thinking and talking and arguing about all that.** But it's not terribly practical as part of our daily routine.

Not true. How you apply it in your daily routine is to ask yourself, and/or your debate partner, "OK, so who in your life is going to benefit from your newfound wisdom? Who will be the beneficiary of your largesse, your compassion, your kindness, your generosity?" Then you go out in life and translate your talk into action.

The problem in America (and in Islam) is, to borrow an idea from Reza Aslan, that Christianity and Islam are orthodox religions -- you are defined by what you believe -- whereas Judaism (and Buddhism, inasfar as it's a religion) are orthoprax -- you are defined by your actions. That's how a churchful of Baptists can support state-sanctioned torture and execution; their souls are already pure, washed in the blood of the lamb. In the meanwhile, Jews are currently in the midst of Rosh Hashanah, reflecting on their actions over the past year and righting who they've wronged. So who's a better follower of Jesus?

I for one would welcome our Jewish overlords (Leiberman excepted, of course) -- Kinky Friedman for governor!

[bulbul]

The problem in America (and in Islam) is, to borrow an idea from Reza Aslan, that Christianity and Islam are orthodox religions -- you are defined by what you believe -- whereas Judaism (and Buddhism, inasfar as it's a religion) are orthoprax
Aaah, what a wonderful example of a false dichotomy. Not only this does not apply to Christians (the Baptists in question are just another example of what can be an ugly face of Protestantism), but it is quite wrong in case of both Judaism (consider the Karaites) and Buddhism (consider the bloody and messy religious warfare between competing orders 8, 6 and 2 years ago in Thailand).

[madjoey]

Curses! Smoted by the encyclopedic knowledge of the one called bulbul! I shoulda learned from last time about trying to represent anything about Islam from our esteemed colleague...

/lurker mode ON