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

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.