Marco Randazza says it’s not bigotry to think less of someone because of their religious beliefs. He says, no, it’s rational:
… [T]here is no way I want someone leading my country if they believe that some snake oil salesman found magic gold tablets, that only he could see, and read some magic words from it, and discovered that people should wear magic underwear. Mormonism is stupid, and anyone who believes in it is too irrational to hold the remote control at my house, let alone the nuclear launch codes.
* * *
If you believe in a magic space zombie Jew, you’re not rational enough to be president either. At least not in my eyes. Islam? It doesn’t have any edge over Mormonism or Christianity. [¶] The analysis gets a little tricky with Jews (sigh, doesn’t it always). You have to figure out if you’re dealing with a secular Jew or a religious one. Sammy Davis Jr. would have been unqualified to be President in my eyes, not because he was black, but because he believed that there is a magic space man who, after creating heaven and earth, decided that he didn’t want people to eat bacon, but he did want people to cut the tips off of little boys’ penises.
I wish he’d been a little more generous with that equivocation that he gave our friends from The Tribe. It’s one thing to say “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m Mormon” or “I’m Muslim.” It’s something else to allow the weird beliefs underlying those religions to actively cause someone to make a decision on a non-rational basis. Randazza distingusihes religion from an “immutable characteristic” like race. I’m not so sure religion isn’t at least partially like an immutable characteristic:
A Mormon can wake up, smell the reality, and stop believing in bullshit. That day, the Mormon magically stops being a Mormon, and he starts being a normal rational human. [¶] Marco Rubio can’t wake up tomorrow and say “y’know, I’m sick of being Cuban. I think I’ll be Irish now.” Hating on him for being Cuban — that’s bigotry.
That isn’t quite right. I don’t think a theist can choose to stop believing. I doubt that I could choose to start. That sort of thing happens on a sub-conscious level. It might be accurate to say one can choose to behave as though one believes (or not), but what happens inside the mind is a different story. I can’t choose to begin belief in the supernatural any more than I can choose to start liking pickle relish on my hot dogs. I just don’t like pickle relish and I just don’t believe in God. I could certainly eat pickle relish if I chose, but I would not enjoy it. Don’t think that I’m saying belief is preference here (although that may well be the case) — what I’m saying is we don’t consciously choose why we have particular preferences.
So to comment on someone’s religious faith is to comment on something that they really aren’t in a position to change — assuming that they are being sincere in their public statements about their inner lives in the first place.
I know lots of people of faith, some of whom have very active faith lives. They’re as smart, they make good decision — or at least as good as mine and those of my fellow nonbelievers — and they are as worthy of trust (in terms of honesty as well as in terms of decision-making ability) as non-believers. Some non-believers I know are rather irrational about things, some are even irrational about their non-belief.
The real question for me is not whether someone says that they adhere to a particular religion, it’s whether they believe in the fairy tales. It’s not so bad to buy in to not just the moral teachings of a holy book, but also all the ancient cultural window dressing that comes with them. Serious practicioners of religion, the ones I respect and in some cases admire, do not seem to believe that their religion is magic, and they possess the ability to segregate out the stuff that is to be taken figuratively from the stuff that has vitality.
Neither Mitt Romney nor Jon Huntsman seem to be particularly literalist about the Book of Mormon. Most of the more mainstream Christian candidates for President — Obama, Paul, Johnson, Gingrich — seem to possess the ability to intellectually segregate magic from morality as well. I don’t know much about Cain, but I have my doubts about Bachmann, Santorum, and Perry in this field.
Randazza is half right, because someone who really does believe, and really acts on, the bizarre stories found in ancient holy books (or, in the case of the Mormons, a modern huckster’s concoction intentionally drafted to seem like an ancient holy book) is not rational enough to be trusted with great political power. Someone who adheres to a religion for cultural and personal reasons, who may well be attracted to it on the basis of sub-conscious stuff that they can’t even particularly articulate, but who acts and governs themselves in such a manner that they do not appear to have allowed the patently bizarre and often cruel ancient fables of the bronze age middle east to influence their life choices should not be considered disqualified from a position for which the ability to make sound and intelligent decisions is a critical qualification.
Thanks very much for this.
Honestly, I couldn’t explain why I still have lingering religious beliefs no matter how hard I tried. I don’t know why I still hold them while my brother, raised in the same churches, does not. One of the many reasons I could never be an evangelical is that I can barely understand why I believe, and could never expect anyone to adopt a belief system based upon the same vague, evanescent and emotive reasons I have.
About the myths themselves, I have nothing to add to what you have written.
My personal philosophy about religion is a sort of half-paraphrase, half-ripoff of a dialogue from Gaiman’s Sandman.
“Hey DensityDuck, do you believe in God?”
“Yes, but that’s not what you’re asking me.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. What you’re asking me is whether I believe in a magic sky ghost. And of course I don’t. But I do believe that moral systems more advanced than eat-kill-hump-crap are valid, and those systems require a basis in unprovable statements, which is another way of saying ‘I believe in God’.”
I endorse this system of belief.
Hear, hear.
+1
“Maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up. But I have a great life and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the Church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.”
Well cited, Mr. Schilling.
I think many discussions about religion are hampered by the idea that religion is merely about belief statements (and the blame for this can be assigned both to certain believers and to certain unbelievers). It makes more sense to talk about religious practices, cultures, and conventions, since these are all part of the typical overall religious experience. People at our church go there for any number of reasons — for God, for the kids, for the community, for the music, for the focus on social justice, etc. Some people have simplistic ideas about God, some have studied theology for decades, some don’t really think much about the metaphysical stuff one way or the other. Yet pretty much all of us self-identify as Christians.
Yes; the notion that religion is just a set of dogmatic beliefs–like it’s a D&D character class or something–is a huge problem. And it’s one that, unfortunately, religious people have yet to come up with a very good response for.
oh, I don’t know, the Deists and the Reform Jews seem to be doing a good job of “religion as what you can stand to believe in”
I agree with much of what Mr. Likko and the others here say. But I wouldn’t discount someone who believes in “magic.”
I should want to know more what is meant by “belief in magic.” Are we saying that a Christian who believes that god really indeed incarnated himself as Jesus, that Jesus died on the cross and then really rose again believes thereby in magic? By magic do we mean any belief that there is such a thing as transcendence beyond the natural world? Or that one can hear the voice of “god” inside their hearts, as?
I wouldn’t want to demand that believers are okay just as long as they have a polite, watered down version of whatever religious tradition they subscribe to. Some religious traditions–I would wager most of them, but I’m too ignorant of the others–demand commitments beyond, for example, saying that “Jesus was a good man.”
However, I would demand mutual acceptance and mutual respect and a refuse to impose their beliefs on others. I would also draw the line at people who claim that they know the will of god, which I believe to be different, for what it’s worth, from claiming that “god” has spoken to them. I’m also wary of people who claim they can invoke the miraculous.
We’re having a nice love-fest here, PC; let’s not ruin it by soliciting an atheist’s opinion about the veracity of the resurrection as described in the Gospels.
He does raise a good question, though. Is any belief in the miraculous a disqualifier? I think I can guess with reasonable accuracy your opinion of the resurrection’s veracity, but is a belief in it on the part of someone else enough to make them unfit for high office? There are lots of myths in the Bible (or other the scriptures of other major religions), and I’d wager that many regular church attenders probably don’t really believe an old man wrangled two of every living thing onto a boat if you put the question to them. But some myths are more central to the theology of the religion than others, most particularly the doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection. (For me personally, the former.) Is belief in those tenets of the religion sufficient to lump those who hold them into the Bachmann category?
I’d wager that many regular church attenders probably don’t really believe an old man wrangled two of every living thing onto a boat
Would Jesus lie?
,
I think it’s much cooler to understand how some canny priest pulled off a miracle, rather than say “God Did It”.
Is that just me?
Perhaps an example can illustrate what I’m talking about.
1. A man discusses with me a significant disagreement in his church group over some issue. He blames “the Devil” for causing the discord. Alarm bells go off in my head and I seek escape from the conversation.
2. A man discusses with me a significant disagreement in his church group over some issue. He blames a fellow parishioner for bullheadedly refusing to compromise. I nod my head in sympathy.
If I were to put the question, “Do you think the Devil is real?” to the second man (a churchgoer by definition), I suspect that he would say “Yes.” Nevertheless, his assignment of the blame to a human being rather than a supernatural entity indicates that he has segregated doctrinal belief in Satan from the manner in which he approaches real-world problems.
I dig.
For the most part, I see such things as indicative of vocabulary limitations.
In the same way that “god” fills cracks in knowledge, “satan” does a good job of doing the same.
Mr. Likko,
I think I share your view. Mostly.
Jaybird,
but note the externalization of Satan.
In Judaism, you have the “evil inclination” and the “good inclination” present in all of us. And Satan’s merely the Accuser — the guy who prosecutes you in front of G-d on Judgment Day.
Translation: I’m okay with religion, so long as it isn’t right wing religion (NB: not right wingers having religion. I’s got specific criteria here, and political disposition is not in my deck).
I don’t know (I assume you’re responding to my caveats about where I’d draw the line and what I “demand”). I think there might be a “left wing religion” that also has its dangers, although I’m more sympathetic with leftish goals than not. I have trouble finding uncontroversial examples, but I think it’s at least possible for a left of center advocate to claim that god is on his or her side and to try to impose that vision on unwilling others.
PC, no, see, at the point where one tries to impose that vision on unwilling others, one is squarely in the realm of right wing religion. It’s one of those nearly definitional things, like thinking that everyone else is wrong, or creating “evil people” that can be hated (*cough* gays *cough*).
Leftwing religion tends to be Unitarian, Taoist, Deist, Mennonite, Quaker — all the big fuzzy places where you get to choose your own course. It’s REALLY hard to impose that on other people — because, when you get down to it, it’s about giving people free will.
[Again, for the benefit of any conservatives out there, if your religion is not like this, then it’s not a right wing religion. This is not about political parties.]
Maybe. As I said, I haven’t any uncontroversial examples to support my claim.
I think part of my disagreement with you is on how we define “right-wing religion,” by which I think I meant “religion put to the purposes of the ‘right wing’ (however that is defined)” as opposed to “religion that imposes itself on others.” In my view, the latter definition doesn’t capture fully the historical (since c. the 1970s), albeit often uneasy, alliance between evangelicals and the Republican party.
Still, Kimmi originally stated what he or she meant (which seems close to what you mean), and I guess I should have gone by that definition when addressing Kimmi’s comment.
PC,
Reverend Wright was an Evangelical too. 😉
Right wing Religions share:
1) Intolerance of others
2) A will to use civic forces to impose their religion on others
3) A need to demagogue against others
4) A willingness to resort to violence against others in order to prevail.
5) Hard-line literalist attitudes towards their holy books (and addenda).
6) Authoritarian attitudes (that sometimes, but not always, cross the line into being a cult).
[and yes, in case anyone’s wondering, I can cite sources for all of these, from Christianity, Judaism and Islam.]
… there’s probably more. I don’t call evangelism an absolute must for right wing religion, although it’s close.
I would guess that 5&6 (maybe 2) are what most people would call definitional as to “right wing religion”, but the others come along for the ride.
You got me there, and I should know better!
The features of your definition seem pretty good to me.
PC,
psh. I only know it cause I hung out on Street Prophets, and pastordan knows Rev. Wright.
The divine spark is present in all men and it is what constitutes man and requires that man respect his fellow. The secularists, God bless ’em, try mightily to copy this phenomenon (steal the symbol, as it were) predicated on diviersity, tolerance, and other contemporarily acceptable themes but always and inevitably fail (modernity’s inclination to destroy institutions) because of politics and other forms of state coercion. The Christian word would be: homonia.
Man is nothing but an evolved animal, who spends most of his time trying to pretend otherwise, and warping himself mightily in the process.
Of course, those who didn’t warp themselves died out due to overpopulation…