Untangling religion from issues with christianity

[sqbr]

EDIT: HMMMMM. So it would appear my framing of this question is flawed thanks to my simplistic understanding of religion and other such ineffable philosophical things my non-arts-major brain gets very confused by. I may take a while responding to comments while I have a serious think about what I really mean.

So most arguments I've seen for being religious use some very flawed arguments. Unfortunately, so do most arguments against being religious, and this bugs me (I'm always more annoyed at the flaws of "my side"). One of the main flaws in both(*) is an assumption that either you're christian or you're an atheist: thus if you can poke holes in atheism people must automatically convert to christianity, and if you can poke holes in Christianity you've proven atheism is the best choice.

And a lot of the time the "Christianity" people are criticising is a straw man anyway, based either on fairly extreme denominations or just particular annoying individuals.

So I thought I'd go through all the things atheists tend to say "all religions" do and see how many are actually true of all religions.

Where I can think of specific counterexamples which prove my point I've included them. To avoid the sense that I'm cheating, I've tried to avoid religions like Deism and Wicca since they were to some extent deliberately designed to avoid the "annoying" bits of christianity , and I'm sticking to large organised religions which are fairly active nowadays.

Also: these "flaws" are not all actually flaws per se, they're just things atheists tend to complain about :)

Many members of any large group of people, including atheists

• Have prats, weirdoes, kooks and extremists
  
• Are smug against those outside the group
  
• Are hypocritical
  
• Use straw man arguments
  
• Teach their children to agree with them
  
• Make overgeneralisations (Yes, this is a generalisation :D)
  

All religions

• supernatural beliefs
  
• a certain amount of reliance on faith (I've become convinced that "faith", like "superstition", too easily turns into a weasel word meaning "Strong belief held by people I think are irrational". It can have positive meanings, but they don't apply to all religions)
  

Most denominations of christianity (with counterexamples from other religions)
And to make it extra clear: these are COUNTERexamples.

• immaterial (probably immortal) soul ()
  
• belief in a god or gods (Jainism, Taoism)
  
• personal God communicated with through worship and prayer (Deism)
  
• interventionist God (Deism)
  
• Afterlife (Taoism)
  
• One size fits all spirituality (Wicca, Mahayana Buddhism)
  
• evangelize (Judaism, Hinduism)
  
• disbelief is immoral (Baha'i)
  
• Faith trumps reason when deciding on spiritual matters ( (religious) Theravada buddhism)
  
• fairly rigid ideas about what sex is and is not allowed (Wicca)
  
• Holy book advocates violence, sexism, racism, etc (Sikhism, plus all the ones with no holy book)
  

Some christians

• nonbelievers automatically go to hell
  
• anti-science
  
• anti-sex/fun
  
• literalistic adherence to dogma
  
• The world is fair and just
  

A LOT of this is probably wrong. I'm as blinded by my limited religious upbringing as anyone else, I'm more trying to get people to think about it than educate anyone, but will fix any errors people point out.

So, what have I missed or gotten wrong? I can see this being something that bugs atheists, christians, and non-christian-religious-types so I expect you all to contribute :D Please note: I'm not interested in issues people have with particular religions that aren't ever claimed to hold for all religions, which is why there's no "Most denominations of Islam" etc section. And I know some non-christian religions do some of the stuff in the christian sections, but not all of them. I single out christianity not because it's particularly bad, but because it so dominates our culture that people have trouble seeing past it.

Also: No taking potshots at other people's belief systems! There is a difference between saying "A common criticism of religion is that it's evangelical" and "I HATE EVANGELISM FOR THESE REASONS...". Do not do the second, take it to your own lj :P (And this includes ranting about how much atheists suck)

(*)Which I have encountered in western, christian-dominated society. I'm sure these arguments take on a very different flavour in, say, India. This post totally doesn't address that.

Comments

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty certain there are religions which don't believe in an immaterial soul; Frederick Buechner was a prominent non-dualist Christian theologian, for example.

In fact, I'm going to go further and be didactic: "not based on science" is also an incorrect qualifier, since religions have formed from scientific discovery, so the only actual qualifying trait of religion is that it involves unprovable/supernatural beliefs. Or, to put it another way:

Religion implies Faith; Faith is belief in the absence of proof.

Similarly, the only common trait of all atheists is that they believe themselves to not take important ideas on Faith (frequently they are wrong).

Christianity, other common religions, and the specific issues that surround them are cultural, not ethical or psychological.

Codicil A

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

Here are counterexamples for the dogmas you didn't list-

Afterlife (Taoism, arguably Zen)
Disbelief is immoral (Baha'i)
Fairly rigid ideas about what sex is and is not allowed (a thousand cults, frequently formed for specifically sexual purposes!)
Holy book advocates violence, sexism, racism, etc (Sikhism; the Guru Granth Sahib is a book of love poems)

Re: Codicil A

[alias_sqbr]

a thousand cults, frequently formed for specifically sexual purposes!

Heh, true. Though it would be nice to have a more mainstream example too :)

Re: Codicil A

[seaya.livejournal.com]

A book of love poems? What? No it isn't. I think you missed a few metaphors.

Also, you list zen here, but really there is an afterlife in all Buddhism, but it's not essential to be Buddhist as such. Also, individual Buddhists might believe in some supernatural elements, but there is no god in Buddhism. Some people actually argue that it's not a religion.

Re: your earlier post, "faith" is a Christian term.

Re: Codicil A

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, buddhism is difficult, since there's lots of different forms which vary in how religious they are etc. Perhaps I should try to find less ambiguous examples.

Hmm. If "faith" is christian, is there another term for belief without proof? Or would you say that's not a universal feature of religion anyway? *reads wikipedia page on religion and confuses self*

*is reminded to add "belief in a god or gods"*

Codicil B

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

Also, I definitely agree with you about the christian-atheist 'dichotomy' being wrong, though I'd go further - there's no religious-atheist dichotomy either, that people can be moved between via argument, because the first involves belief of some undefined sort and the second is just a default position.

(Atheists who specifically assert that all religious beliefs are false are, of course, doing so in the absence of evidence themselves, and it might be fair to describe this as a religious belief!)

Re: Codicil B

[fallimar.livejournal.com]

agreed on the last point here - though I myself don't believe it, I can't say with any kind of credibility that such view is definitely False.
I can say that I believe that it's much more -probable- that it is false, and that I myself believe it is false as I have -more- evidence to the contrary than to the affirmative... though any assertations of absolute factual truth from either side is laughable, as spiritualism and religion are undisprovable by their very definition.

Re: Codicil B

[firvulag.livejournal.com]

atheism is most certainly a 'belief'. It requires you to believe there is no God(s), without proof of this. This means you have to take it on faith.

Re: Codicil B

[dr-jekyl.livejournal.com]

It takes faith to disbelieve only when there is a substantial volume of evidence to the contrary. Disbelief in the absence of proof of a positive assertation is *not* faith, merely the logical response. Again we come back to Russell's Teapot. If I say that it's out there, but don't provide proof to the positive that you can verify, is your lack of belief in it faith?

Re: Codicil B

[firvulag.livejournal.com]

Indeed, but the opposite is also true.

If you believe that there isn't anything out there but provide no proof to verify that, is your belief in it faith?

It takes faith to believe in an absence of something just as much as an existence of something, given no substantial proof either way.

Re: Codicil B

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

What if the out there is proof of the lack of anything out there? e.g. while one could say there is a family of grey kangaroos happily living and occasionally playing Gaelic football at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, there - to most people - quite obviously isn't. Is faith necessary then?

Re: Codicil B

[alias_sqbr]

If you believe that there isn't anything out there but provide no proof to verify that, is your belief in it faith?

Well obviously this depends on how you define "faith", and the beliefs if the individual atheist. I would say that some of them do have faith in the non-existence of gods.

But I would say most atheists (myself included) are agnostic atheists and think it's an insult to religious people to imply that all there is to their belief is "being quite certain".

I think that a strong belief shows itself to be faith when you take an action based on this belief even when logic says it's a bad idea, or you keep the belief even when evidence (as you perceive it) points against it. (It was still faith before then, but your actions would be indistinguishable from someone with the same beliefs but no faith)

For example, I tend to believe that alternative medicine is bunk. But I do not have faith that it is bunk, so when someone I trust said a particular acupuncturist helped their cfs, I gave it a go. If it had worked I would have been a bit irritated to be proven wrong but I wouldn't have had a "crisis of faith".

Similarly, if I encountered sufficiently unambiguous proof that a god or gods exist I'd be very surprised and have to re-evaluate how I see the world etc (since I see it being about as likely as the existence of dragons) If it turned out those signs had always been there and I'd missed them I would have a lot of angst about my "faith" in my own perceptions I guess, but I'm not sure that's equivalent. There are things I sort-of have faith in, but the non-existence of gods isn't one of them.

Also, there are theists who don't have faith, ie agnostic theists, Deists etc.

Anyway, this is all a bit off topic! That and I've had this argument like a million times, as have most atheists I imagine :P

Re: Codicil B

[dr-jekyl.livejournal.com]

No, it's not true, because the default position of the existence of something is disbelief. It did not take me any faith to *not* believe that there is an invisible fairy who gives people with my name a million dollars once a week before some else suggested that they exist. It does not take faith to continue to remain highly skeptical because I've never seen any verifiable proof that such a being exists.

It is not belief in the a absence of something. It is a disbelief in the presence of something whose exisitance has yet to be shown to be truly plausible. These are actually two different things.

Re: Codicil B

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

That's not true, sorry. I don't need to specifically believe "there is no God" to be an atheist; I'm perfectly fine with "as far as I can tell, there's no god, and the claims offered about one don't convince me".

Further, I *can* state positively that specific religions are false, based on contradictions, things that have disproved their dogmas, etc; this requires no taking of anything on faith. For example, any form of Christianity that claims the earth to be 6000 years old I'm happy to say is wrong, and there's no unreasoning belief involved in that.

Re: Codicil B

[melberon.livejournal.com]

Your second point misrepresents the common atheist position - namely that there is probably no God, in much the same way that I believe there is probably no China teapot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot) sitting in orbit between Earth and Mars. It's not an absolute faith, because atheists (claim to be) willing to revise their position on either issue should there be material evidence to the contrary of their beliefs.

Some variants of agnosticism (including my personal beliefs), on the other hand, do require faith: faith that issue of whether or not there is a God or other supernatural / spiritual realm beyond the physical universe is necessarily unknowable.

Re: Codicil B

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

You have a different Atheist belief to most people I know who describe themselves as Atheist. Or at least strongly atheist.

The claim to be willing to revise, doesn't mean much when someone strongly believes (or knows) they will never have to revise... in my opinion anyway

Re: Codicil B

[alias_sqbr]

I think the most "common" atheist belief is that ones own POV is the norm when in fact we all vary pretty wildly on these sorts of issues :) (And as always, the people who speak the most loudly often have the most extreme beliefs)

The claim to be willing to revise, doesn't mean much when someone strongly believes (or knows) they will never have to revise... in my opinion anyway

That's not the atheists fault, and come the Rapture or whatever we can see who really meant it :)

Re: Codicil B

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

But a claim that all atheists have the same opinion on something is just as unfair to them as it would be to say "all Christians believe ____"...

This is just because "probably no God" arguments bug me a bit...

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

But probability arguments in this kinds of way really aren't much more than shorthand for "no reasonable person believes [improbable idea]," for three reasons:
1) It's not really calculable. Unless, of course, you happen to have surveyed all possible worlds with the exception of ours, and happen to have found, on balance, that there is definitely not a god in most of them.
2) It's not strictly a disprovable claim, nor is it strictly strongly linked to atheism. The statement "there probably isn't a god" doesn't necessarily have a truth value that changes if there happens to be a god. (Which is why you'll find avowed theists like Kierkegaard who seem to presuppose that god's existence is, by nature, improbable and that's why you believe). Similarly, an atheist could be perfectly happy with the claim that "there probably is a god, but it's actually the case that there isn't one." In the same sense that we can be generally happy with the claim that "human evolution is fundamentally improbable but nonetheless something that occured."
3) The entire question is weighted towards whatever conceptual framework you happen to be working in (which will most commonly rely on some kind of belief somewhere). The teapot example, for instance, works because most people don't really believe that space is populated by teapots. But if you happened to have a (perfectly functional) physical theory that included having a space rich in floating teapots, which works well enough to let you build a working anti-gravity generator or something, then chances are good that you will be inclined to believe that a person who thinks the existence of your teapots improbable is mad, regardless of whether such teapots "actually" exist or not.

Re: This is just because "probably no God" arguments bug me a bit...

[melberon.livejournal.com]

1. Well, it is if you believe in Bayesian probability, but then the results depend on your choice of prior - so computing a probability doesn't tell you anything other than what your preconceptions are. So then it comes back to your point #3.

2. Sure. (Although as per the anthropic principle, the conditional probability of the universe producing humans given that we are sitting here talking on livejournal is 1.)

3. This is the important point. It seems likely that most atheists have a mostly empiricist conceptual framework which doesn't consider deities at all (but does not necessarily rule out their existence). Since I've never been religious, nor able to understand what spiritual/religious feelings might be like for others, I'm not really in a position to speculate about the kind of conceptual framework that religious people have. I will say, though, that I'm far more attached to my rational empiricist mindset than I am to any specific position on whether or not there is a God.

(N.B. using terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist' as vague colloquial terms here, not in their meanings as philosophical jargon.)

Re: This is just because "probably no God" arguments bug me a bit...

[alias_sqbr]

Very nice, I absolutely agree. I think the teapot argument is fine as description of ones own point of view (including a teapot-less model of the universe), but not for convincing others to agree. It's equivalent to apologetics from the religious side like Pascall's wager or the "What are the chances that the universe just happens to allow life?" argument.

Re: Codicil B

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, perhaps religious/not religious is a better (if tautological) dichotomy, with christians etc and atheistic religions like Jainism on one side and non-religious atheists and "I think there's probably something up there but don't care about it" agnostic theists on the other.

Atheists who specifically assert that all religious beliefs are false are, of course, doing so in the absence of evidence themselves

See my reply to firvulag below on the difference between having a strong opinion and faith. But given how ignorant most atheists (myself included) are about the full range of religious and spiritual beliefs out there I agree that probably the best we can say for certain is "I have yet to encounter any religions I think are plausible, and as far as I can tell anything which fits my definition of "religion" is likely false"

Re: Codicil B

[alias_sqbr]

there's no religious-atheist dichotomy either

Yes, perhaps religious/not religious would be better (if a bit tautological)

Atheists who specifically assert that all religious beliefs are false are, of course, doing so in the absence of evidence themselves, and it might be fair to describe this as a religious belief!

I don't think "religious belief" is the right term: I mean, "murder is wrong" is a religious belief. There's some discussion below about whether or not it's a point of faith but I won't reproduce that here apart from saying I think: for some people, but not necessarily.

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, "not based on science" was the wrong wording. "Believed in due to faith, not just science" is probably closer. But "Faith" covers that better :) *edits*

I was a bit unsure of the soul thing but wasn't aware of any counter examples.

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the soul is a very very common concept; religion and dualism probably spring from the same impulses (or misconceptions) most of the time.