Religious hypocrisy isn’t just for fundies
Jul 23rd, 2008 by Butter
A few weeks ago, this lady was on Colbert:
The combination of faith in revealed knowledge and a lack of evangelical zeal struck me as damned odd. It’s a combination that I’ve seen in other religious moderates, and it’s always puzzled me. So indulge me while I piss and moan about it a bit.
Look, how can you believe that you have a special conduit that gives you knowledge of the secret metaphysical nature of the universe—a conduit that ostensibly makes you happy and fulfilled and is a significant part of your identity—and not want to share it, as you presumably would any other important, enlightening fact? With what justification do you wall off spiritual “knowledge” and not elucidate and justify the methods for finding it for the rest of us?
Essentially what non-proselytizing religionists want us to accept is this:
1. I know supernatural assertions about the nature of the universe. The assertions are true, just as any other correct assertion about the nature of the world (e.g., that the sky is blue) is true.
2. Belief in the truth of these assertions improves one’s life in some way.
3. I don’t care whether you believe or not.
4. I am acting in a morally good manner.
These can’t all be true simultaneously (assuming, as a premise, that being good means sharing good things, such as, say, the fulfilling, life-changing spiritual secrets of reality). With Christianity in particular, it gets worse, because they add the assertion that unbelief carries some eternal consequence—be it torture, or just separation from God and your loved ones in Heaven or whatever.
They have to be lying about at least one of these. Sometimes they’ll back off of (1) and say it’s all metaphors, but then they have to use secular reasoning to justify the significance of the metaphors, and they’re back to living in reality, just like the rest of us. In the case of Christianity, often those metaphors don’t stand up to such moral scrutiny (the entire book of Joshua, for example), and the scales fall completely from the eyes and we’re well on the way to atheism, which is always heartening.
Lying about (2) would be strange, since it would tend to imply a believer who would rather not be a believer but is constrained from wandering. (The action of remaining in an organized religion is no big surprise, especially in, say, a theocracy or a totalitarian society, or even in a civil society with strict social pressures. But I’m assuming a believer who’s making these assertions freely and ostensibly in good faith.) They would think, perhaps, that the evidence actually does support their particular belief. That’s a level of ignorance I’d expect from a medieval European serf or a homeschooled Pentecostal American kid, but not from a modern, educated adult.
If number (4) is a lie, then the whole exercise reduces to the trivial case of a deluded sociopath who doesn’t care if the rest of us burn, though they may very well believe that it’ll happen. Good for movie villains, but given what we know about the cross-cultural prevalence of altruism, probably not that common. That leaves (3). For the moderate to be lying about this is, I think, the scariest. It would imply that though hey say they aren’t interested in converting you, give them a little power and opportunity and that might change in a hurry.
There’s also the possibilities that they simply don’t know that much about their religion and therefore aren’t making much of a coherent assertion anyway. My guess is that this kind of ignorance, or lying about whether you actually believe in the parts you do know about (i.e., possibility (1)), are the most common resolutions of this mess.
So, although some Hindu mysticism started this off, let me summarize my thoughts on it by switching to the Christian myth: If you believe you know how to save my soul and get Jesus into my heart, then fuckin’ do your proselytizing already. “Tolerating” my selfish unbelief makes you a liar, a coward, or wicked.
I think you’re forgetting something that’s required for moderate religious folk to proselytize:
“I have the courage to challenge other people about their beliefs, even those who intimidate me intellectually.”
Evangelists are both more convinced their beliefs are true AND have a much easier set of beliefs to grasp (by way of containing more literal claims than their moderate counterparts). They are also taught to be openly distrustful of intellectualism–science, philosophy, etc.–because they’ve been taught it’s trickery.
Religious moderates want to use truth and reason to support their claims (sometimes, anyway), but obviously have a much harder time doing so. And so unless they’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, they avoid the debates they can’t win, unlike the evangelist who sprays his bullshit all over your street corner, hoping to engage everyone and eager for a rabid opponent.
What I think you or I don’t see are the weaker, low-hanging fruit of those who are proselytized. A friend who’s curious, those who are milder in opinion, probably haven’t honestly thought about religion too much (being raised in a household that simply ignores religion altogether I think puts one at risk for this), or are just too simple-minded to avoid the mental “gotcha” moments that seem insightful or profound but are, ironically, intellectual tricks.
This, of course, does nothing to solve numbers 3 and 4 in your post. Honestly though I think those are ambiguous–why is it the only moral option, when confronted with a non-believer, to proselytize? Yes, you may believe the other person is going to hell, but unless this is a personal friend or family member, why should they be so concerned with your spiritual fitness? To follow your moral reasoning, every religious person should dedicate their lives to proselytizing everyone else. It doesn’t seem practical, and might even be morally repugnant to those moderates who value personal freedom, privacy, and dislike harassment.
They should certainly feel compelled to spread the word, but in the spirit of free will, something most Christians hold as a sacred gift from God, once they’ve given you the option, and you’ve turned it down, what moral imperative do they have to try any more?
Finally, I think you’re applying a butterfly net to a school of fish and trying to catch ‘em all. Moderates are famous for tailoring their beliefs to fit whatever world view and moral outlook they’ve been brought up to believe, or even suits their fancy. The biggest example I can see is that a number of them don’t believe in hell, and therefore aren’t condemning you to burn by not buggering you about their beliefs. You did address this earlier in your post but used hell when evaluating the moral consequences of numbers 3 and 4. Being just separated from God or your loved ones, while shitty, is not the same as burning for eternity. Plus, I’ve found more moderates who talk about their beliefs enriching their lives right here and now; they speak less of eternal consequences for anything and consider them more the embarrassing loud-mouthed cousin of their religious beliefs.
I do think that when it comes to holding moderates’ feet to the fire about the whether they believe in the literal claims that their more zealous religious cousins believe in, we’re losing ground. They’ve already bastardized their religion in the first place, and perhaps in front of family members or their old church; they’ve turned off their hypocrisy meters so that they might roam freely through whatever belief system suits them, like pigs in mud. And bonus: they get to apply the evangelist claim to atheists when we scrutinize their piggish rolling.
It’s sickening, but the ambiguous, slimy moderates can survive any criticism or any scandal that beleaguers the religious. They just shift and scatter like cockroaches when the light of scrutiny is flicked on, disavowing whatever version of their religion is unpopular or disdainful for the moment, and then come right back when the lights are turned off again. They may even get to bask in the soft glow of religious positives, like Christmas, or Mother Teresa (perceived positive), or religious charity, or claiming divine help–however ambiguous–when something goes right in their life or in others.
And that sort of faith, with its versatility in regards to political beliefs, morality, worship commitments (or lack thereof), and positive feelings for no reason other than positivity, that sort of faith is dangerously attractive and, I think, growing. As we’ve talked about before, and many others have pointed out, that’s also the sort of faith that necessarily has to allow all other faiths, including the evangelist’s, to prosper, and even intrude on public life. Not because they can’t disagree–they can and do–but because they can’t appear to dismiss the other’s claims entirely, because their own beliefs are so vulnerable to that.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Nice post.
The idea that believers in eternal consequences in an afterlife have a neverending obligation to the rest of us is something that keeps biting at my brain, and I think it’s because of the very notion of eternity. When people keep braying that I’m going to suffer consequences for an infinite duration of time, I expect, as a matter of logical consistency, their behavior to actually reflect the enormity of what they’re proposing. A knock on the door and a brochure just doesn’t seem to cut it, somehow.
Of course, doing the right thing and calling any deity who would consign anyone to eternal torture a right bastard would also be logically consistent. This seems not to happen much among moderate believers, though, so I think those categories of liar, coward, or wicked hold up.
At any rate, I think a big part of the solution to the attractiveness of feel-good woo of all types, including watered-down versions of the major faiths, is, naturally, more and better education in science and critical thinking. Actual investigation and real answers to the wonders of nature should be held up for the awesomeness and just plain fun that they are. Seriously, healing-touch chi energy or what-the-fuck-ever loses its appeal once you actually understand, say, what Maxwell’s Equations are getting at, and real anthropology and history of religion are likewise more interesting and rewarding than childish Biblical narratives of history. (Did you know, for example, that Yahweh used to have a consort named Asherah?) Non-biologists are constantly praising PZ for his beginner’s-level explanations of evolutionary topics (the recent one on snake segmentation was particularly lucid and fascinating, I thought) and remarking how much more interesting they are than Goddidit-style intellectual complacency.
Which highlights the necessity of that “education” to comprise more than just secondary and post-secondary schooling. Popularizers like Sagan, Tyson, PZ, Greene, and Feynman are critical, as are more active woo criticizers like Randi and Penn and Teller (though the latter duo go far afield of the charlatan-busting that they actually know something about and sometimes get things wrong, like global warming skepticism, for example). These people create and maintain a cultural point of reference for people questioning the malarkey they’ve been brought up in, facilitating the possibility of them achieving intellectual fulfillment without them either having to become a professional scientist or drifting to the pop pseudoscience or bland religiosity that surrounds them. Then those people can become little beacons for those around them, as you did for me, and on down the line.
In short, we fight this sort of muddleheadedness by satisfying the intellectual and social impulses which, unfulfilled, give rise to it.