I saw Bill Maher on the Daily Show tonight. Great interview. He was promoting his new documentary, Religulous. A little bitter for my taste (who am I kidding?), but it really got me thinking about the question of God. If you know me, it won't surprise you to learn that I don't believe in God. Here's what BM had to say on the subject (I'm paraphrasing here): "I don't consider myself an atheist because atheism is a mirror of the same certainty that makes religious belief ridiculous." Listen, Bill. Can I personally prove the non-existence of God beyond all doubt? No. Does that make atheism as stupid as theism? No. Here's why:
Our epistemology isn't based on proving what doesn't exist. How can you even disprove something that doesn't exist? The proof of its non-existence is, as they say, in the pudding. The absence of any convincing argument for the proof of God is itself proof--or more safely, a strong suggestion--that there is simply no such thing.
Moreover, the idea of God's incomprehensibility can't save literal religious doctrine from the rational black holes haunting it. If you claim there's a ribbon inside of a book and the ribbon has the property of disappearing every time you leaf through the pages looking for it, how many times do you open the book before giving up in hopeless frustration? A holy man would say this hypothetically quantifiable dedication--or, faith--is what separates the righteous from the base. I would suggest that it separates the rational from the delusional, the independent from the meek and the intellectually curious from the blindly submissive. But perhaps most importantly, it alienates man from himself. The relationship between God and man is simply a guise for the power relationship that "holy" men exercise over the masses. Priests and politicians paint the comfort-giving God concept as unequivocal truth, exploiting its message in order to superficially relate to citizens and remain in power.
I'm all for comfort in a world largely defined by aimlessness. That's why we have culture. It's an expression of everything beyond our immediate biosocial needs. However, I think it's critical that dominant cultural concepts provide some social advantage. They must also be ethically sound in their conception, transmission and interpretation. I think that religion passes the first test and fails the second. The ethical function of religion is well known. But people rarely question whether religion is the best vehicle for developing their own moral nature. Unfortunately, God is an invention propagated by humans who, as is our nature, don't always make decisions from an altruistic vantage point. The Man Upstairs is inoffensive as a concept, but it doesn't do any real work. It's like the fifth wheel on a four wheel truck: present, comforting, but serving no role in the operation of the vehicle. Our ethical dilemmas must therefore be solved by means relevant to our actual social experience, not to the fantasies of religious men. It's time for a new ethics freed from the transcendent. Believe me: We can still coexist in a world where God has been reduced to his origins as myth and symbol. Once we realize the danger of blind faith, we can approach the dilemma of social harmony from a humanistic, natural-pragmatic perspective. And many social groups--women, scientists/intellectuals, homosexuals, gender benders, &c (any group that threatens the traditional elite's manipulative value system)--will benefit.
Amen!
4 comments:
Sam Harris, Karl Marx, John Brunner, I see all these influences in your writing on this subject.
Hopefully I wasn't the one who turned you into a godless commie!
Anyway, it's good to have a blog. I have two of them, one for river stuff the other for politics, although the political topics inevitably seep into the river blog. Check them out (links below). I suggest changing your blog description to something that doesn't refer to excrement.
"It's like the fifth wheel on a four wheel truck: present, comforting, but serving no role in the operation of the vehicle."
Hey, that 5th wheel MIGHT be needed if the 3rd wheel blows out. Besides, a truck doesn't experience emotion and it doesn't know faith. People don't need to have evidence of anything to believe in God. They only need faith, which is like a 5th wheel that they turn to during blowouts. And people seem to need ritual, but that's another topic altogether.
http://delawareriverjournal-rivergeek.blogspot.com/
http://crumblingempire.wordpress.com/
I agree. I don't think personal faith is bad. It can be comforting in times of crisis. But when God is taken as unquestionable truth, and God's decrees taken for the words of a transcendent power and not men, the concept can be dangerously co-opted to precscribe ethical maxims which may not actually promote social harmony and the moral good. Rather, it becomes a tool used to dupe the masses, keeping certain people in power while suppressing others.
You ARE channeling Marx. Didn't he also say something about religion being the mopiate of the asses?
Pascal said it this way:
-- Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Pascal
Here are a few more of my fave quotes on the topic:
-- "If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it."
William Jennings Bryan
"I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose."
Clarence Darrow
-- "I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring"
William Archer, Theology and War
(1667-1735)
-- History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. ----- Thomas Jefferson
-- ³Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.² B. Franklin
-- "The first priest was the first rogue who met the first fool." [Voltaire]
--
A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a loaded .45
-- America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
Bill McKibben
-- ³I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.² Thomas Jefferson
-- ³This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there was no religion in it.² John Adams
--
Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.
-- Geez if you believe in Honkus.
Great quotes. I am definitely channeling Marx. "In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly." This is what I'm getting at when I say "Our ethical dilemmas must therefore be solved by means relevant to our actual social experience, not to the fantasies of religious men. It's time for a new ethics freed from the transcendent." God's way is not necessarily the right way. We run the risk of being ethically blind when we follow God's law without question. It's especially risky when religious politicians cast votes based on what's right for the institution of Christianity as opposed to what's right for the country.
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