I have some problems with him as an individual. Saying that Rabbi Shmuley Boteach shrieks like Hitler is inexcusable. His behaviour in the Elevatorgate tumult last year was also unconscionable. However, my main concerns with his approach lie in his views on religion, primarily as a social vehicle for many people to find meaning in their lives. God may not exist, but to dismiss religion without paying sufficient attention to its social role and benefits is to simply miss the point.
For all his hysterics about honour killings and suicide bombers, does he address the role religion plays in social life? Does he address the fact that religions have been around for a long time, and that they have done a lot to organize people into cultural groups? Humans are social animals, and as a social construct I find it hard to knock religion. Sure, it’s not perfect, but then what is? Saying “there is no God” is irrelevant to the question of religion’s social utility, and saying religion is evil is a claim that he has attempted valiantly to make in the book, and it is an argument that I think he has failed at.
His book
starts off with a number of arguments against God’s existence. Garden fairy,
teapot, blah blah blah. I have nothing against philosophical arguments for or
against God, but I didn’t read the book for these. I read it for his arguments
against religion as a social reality and about morality and the evils of
religion. I find that he has failed on most of these counts. He barely
addresses the social value of religion, and his discussion of the evils of
religion is just unfair, overblown, and simplistic. He has some insight on
morality (with his zeitgeist), but that too is far from earth-shattering, and
his discussion of the evils of childhood indoctrination is, you guessed it,
exaggerated.
He gets off
to a roaring start:
Imagine,
with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no
9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian
partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no
persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no
'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible
people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). Imagine no
Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no
flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. (p. 1)
I get it. Religion
is the root of all evil. Let’s all go torch a bunch of churches now. I bet they’re
all just a bunch of child molesters, anyway.
I
want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as 'Catholic child' or
'Muslim child'. Speak of a 'child of Catholic parents' if you like; but if you
hear anybody speak of a 'Catholic child', stop them and politely point out that
children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they
are too young to know where they stand on economics or politics... I'll say it
again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is
too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a
Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child. (p.3)
Good grief. I
bet there’s no such thing as a rich kid, either.
I
am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively
male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of pronouns. More sophisticated
theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians
seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after
all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I
suppose that, in the ditzily unreal
intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient
attribute than gender. (p. 36, emphasis added)
I see. You hate
theology and feminism. Good thing you’re a science teacher. You wouldn’t last a
minute in the humanities.
Yes
yes, of course the troubles in Northern Ireland are political. There really has
been economic and political oppression of one group by another, and it goes
back centuries. There really are genuine grievances and injustices, and these
seem to have little to do with religion; except that - and this is important
and widely overlooked - without religion there would be no labels by which to decide
whom to oppress and whom to avenge. And the real problem in Northern Ireland is
that the labels are inherited down many generations. Catholics, whose parents,
grandparents and great-grandparents went to Catholic schools, send their
children to Catholic schools. Protestants, whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents
went to Protestant schools, send their children to Protestant schools. The two
sets of people have the same skin colour, they speak the same language, they
enjoy the same things, but they might as well belong to different species, so
deep is the historic divide. And without religion, and religiously segregated education,
the divide simply would not be there. From Kosovo to Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian
subcontinent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable
enmity and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you'll find
religions as the dominant labels for ingroups and out-groups. But it's a very
good bet. (p. 260)
So it’s about
labels now? Without religion, there would be wars but there would be no labels?
Or there would be no wars? In other news, Moshiach is here.
Even
Adolf Hitler, widely regarded as pushing the envelope of evil into uncharted
territory, would not have stood out in the time of Caligula or of Genghis Khan.
Hitler no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century technology
at his disposal. And did even Hitler gain his greatest pleasure, as
Genghis avowedly did, from seeing his victims' 'near and dear bathed in tears'?
We judge Hitler's degree of evil by the standards of today, and the moral Zeitgeist
has moved on since Caligula's time, just as the technology has. Hitler
seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time. (269)
Yeah right,
Hitler would have been quite the nice guy back in the day.
There
is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing
of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of
preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our
cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people
with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and
your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed
to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise
something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity
of human culture. A small part of me can see something in this. But the larger
part of me is made to feel very queasy indeed. (p. 331)
This is quite
unfair. As a society, we try to be tolerant and inclusive (if you, Dawkins, are
another one of those angry old white men who wants all the Muslims kicked out
of England and you can’t stand diversity one bit, please just go right ahead
and admit it). There is a thing called multiculturalism. It means we tolerate
and allow other cultures to flourish alongside us, and we generally don’t mix
into their business. Yes, this sometimes allows for excesses, where, for
instance, children are denied an education, but for the most part, it means
people are given the privacy to carry on their lives without authorities prying
their noses in. No, we don’t promote diversity because we like their “quaint
little buggies” but because we believe in tolerance and allowing various
cultures to coexist independently. We don’t allow them this freedom for our benefit, but for theirs. One does
not need a graduate degree in theology or
feminism to see that.
While I thought
some of his points were worthwhile, the majority were overshadowed with rhetoric
and nitpicking. I would have been happier with a little less attacking of religion,
and a slightly more balanced approach.
Since he
barely addressed the role religion plays in contemporary life, I thought I’d
do a little research of my own. This writer found that active involvement in
religious organizations is among the strongest predictors of both philanthropy and
volunteering, and that American religious communities spend roughly $15-20 billion
annually on social services:
Religious
involvement is an especially strong predictor of volunteering and
philanthropy. About 75-80 percent of
church members give to charity, as compared with 55-60 percent of nonmembers,
and 50-60% of church members volunteer, while only 30-35 percent of non-members
do. In part, of course, this is because churches themselves do things that
require funds and volunteers, but religious adherents are also more likely to
contribute time and money to activities beyond their own congregation. Even
excluding contributions to religious causes, active involvement in religious
organizations is among the strongest predictors of both philanthropy and
volunteering.
...Churches
have been and continue to be important institutional providers of social
services. American religious communities spend roughly $15-$20 billion annually
on social services. Nationwide in 1998 nearly 60 percent of all congregations
(and an even higher proportion of larger congregations) reported contributing
to social service, community development, or neighborhood organizing projects.
Congregations representing 33 percent of all churchgoers support food programs
for the hungry, and congregations representing 18 percent of all churchgoers
support housing programs like Habitat for Humanity. Partners for Sacred Places
found that the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of older urban congregations
provide community services, such as food pantries, self-help groups, and
recreational programs, and that 80 percent of the beneficiaries of these
programs are not members of the congregations... (pp. 67-68).
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