On the question of conviviality

> It's not the doctrine. It's the way the doctrine is held

Hi Bal,

I think that's an interesting point, well made. However, I guess I'm just not seeing all these deliberately hurtful diatribes that you're arguing against. Are we atheists really that strident and intellectually dishonest, as a group? I hope not.

At the moment I'm having an email discussion with a proponent of (or more accurately an apologist for) Intelligent Design, as a contribution to a book. I think my correspondent (a physics professor) means well and he is pretty good mannered compared to many of his kind (ID exponents, not physics professors!). Certainly a prominent ID-er who's also in the conversation thinks this guy is far too "moderate". And yet he still uses all sorts of dirty tricks (aka fallacies of argument) to make his case for teaching ID in schools seem more plausible to those not smart enough to see the flaws. Arguments from Authority; Arguments from Ignorance; Non Sequiturs; you name it, he uses it. No matter how well-meaning he is, it's hard to keep one's cool when someone so intelligent and educated resorts to methods that he must surely be capable of knowing are a deceit.

Retalitating in the same way would be unforgivable, so I hope none of my fellow unbelievers act like that. But it's rare to find oneself in circumstances where patient and thoughtful analysis of the errors can be successful, so it doesn't surprise me if we get a bit tetchy now and again. In fact my correspondent had the admirable guts to publicly climb down on a crucial misapprehension about Darwinism, once I'd had the luxury of three attempts to explain it to him (his primary claim was the common one, that evolution is nothing more than random chance, whereas in reality it's a very non-random process and a very efficient search algorithm), but that was a rare opportunity. So we are bound to get a bit hot under the collar when trying to counter endless dirty tricks under less than ideal debating conditions. Sometimes when someone is raging at you, you can't help raging back. Calm conversation just isn't possible until the other party shuts up. I know from personal experience that this is not the best way to deal with rage, but heck, we're all only human.

Anyway, that aside, I take your point that a magical removal of the dogma (on either side) would not in itself change anything, because the things that led to that point of view in the first plance would still be there. But I don't imagine any of us DO want to effect that sort of superficial change. I think we want to change the things that led to the dogma, but attacking the dogma itself is sometimes the only way we have to influence things. It's certainly a huge barrier to progress elsewhere.

One of the serious dangers of religious dogma, for instance, is the way it permits people to justify the most awful behaviour. Before you say anything, I realize that incompetent or wilful misuse of scientific ideas can do that too - viz the eugenics movement in the Thirties - but religions are far more prone to this kind of cheap vindication. I was listening to a guy on NPR yesterday who became an evangelist preacher because he felt Christianity was the answer to his worries about the world's suffering. Twenty years later he'd become agnostic because he realised that the bible's explanations of why people suffer just don't stand up to scrutiny. But it took him (a professor of religious studies) two decades to work his way through the minefield of contradictions that clearly allows people to believe pretty much whatever they like. In the end he decided (only partly in jest) that the only part of the bible he believed was Ecclesiates, which apparently just says "life is all there is: live it well". Good for him. Tell that to the suicide bombers or all the others who use the promises of heavenly riches as a way to manipulate people.

Religions allow people to do bad things; they permit people to be morally lazy; they mislead people about the way the world works. In short, they aid and abet the tribalism, irrationality, stupidity, selfishness, laziness and other failings that cause real suffering and prevent us from living in harmony together. They aren't the cause but they are a manifestation that creates a feedback loop, which in turn maintains the primary causes. By SHOWING people what's wrong (and I do mean demonstrably wrong; I have no truck with postmodern relativism about how science is just an alternative story) with their metaphysical underpinnings we can hope to open people's eyes to better ways of looking at the world that presently they're prevented from seeing. By attacking the conclusions we can affect the causes, don't you think? I'm pretty sure that we can't successfully attack the causes directly whilst religious dogma and the acceptability of unsupported faith still exist to undo everything again. "Why should we stop waging war on them? We're God's chosen people and they're infidels - it says so in the Book. I believe that because I have faith, and that's good enough for me. Stop bleating and get out of the way of my gun."

But (as I think you're saying generally) we should take a selective leaf out of Jesus's book and try to overcome the false logic of religious dogma, just like the one he himself was fighting against, not by demanding an eye for an eye or fighting fire with fire; but by turning the other cheek and meeting anger with calmness. That is, if the lying, cheating swines don't wind us up too much...

- Steve

Hi Bal,

Great post. I've never heard of the green/red feather hat story before, but that's great. And there's plenty of empirical evidence to support what you're saying in terms of all the various forms of christianity, along with plenty of other examples of splintering among other religious groups.

I believe that this basic impulse to separate is rooted in tribalism, or the psychological need to identify with one group and clash with others. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, has made the argument that war and conflict have been the main drivers of human evolution throughout history. So tribalism, according to this view, has been selected in an evolutionary sense. (e.g., two competing tribes enter into an arms race of technical advancement that gives each tribe the ability to dominate surrounding tribes that have not.)

In other words, we're wired for it. It shapes us in ways we're not conscious of. You see this when you get defensive about something - you're clearly invested in a point of view and you feel threatened if it's challenged. This is why we "aim [our] conversation in ways calculated to hurt". I'm saying that there's a hidden psychological need to distance ourselves from those who might challenge our core beliefs, and this is the human equivalent of growling and barking.

We'd all like to believe we have chosen what we believe (especially those of us who consider ourselves as rational), but the fact is that most of our beliefs were given to us, and when these beliefs are challenged, it can bring out the worst in us, because we know nothing else. We should all have the great, painful blessing of having one of our cherished beliefs demolished, so that we can enter with humility into a new dynamic with the world in which we are not defined by what we believe.