God-awful Religion

Reading from an address by Bill Moyer to the Union Theological Seminary on September 9, 2005

Let's go back to 9/11 four years ago. The ruins were still smoldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went on television to proclaim that the terrorist attacks were God's punishment of a corrupted America. They said the government had adopted the agenda of the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way (The God of the Bible apparently holds liberals in the same low esteem as Hittites and Gergushites and Jebusites and all the other pagans of holy writ.)

Just as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a corrupted world, now disgusted with a decadent America, God almighty is lifting his protection from us. Critics said such comments were deranged. But millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn't think so. They thought Robertson and Falwell were being perfectly consistent with the logic of the Bible as they read it: God withdraws favor from sinful nations. The terrorists were meant to be God's wake-up call: better get right with God. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and literally, and had called on Muslims to resist what he described as a fierce Judeo-Christian campaign against Islam, praying to Allah for guidance to exalt the people who obey Him and humiliate those who disobey Him.

Before our son was old enough to come home with questions about belief systems and God and what he heard from children in school, I had decided that religious freedom extended to the developing mind of small people. It was a somewhat inchoate notion that manifested itself in my unwillingness to tell my child just what belief he should have about a deity or what religion was the right religion. I would talk about people believing different things. This intellectual freedom of course was separated from his behavioral freedom which was constrained by my sense of civilized behavior. My thinking has become more nuanced in this over the years.

I still believe that one should strive to keep a child's mind open to a pluralism of worldviews, but that there are worldviews that are far better for the well being of humanity. Our way of seeing and knowing the world is shaped by our thinking and thinking is molded by our culture, our language and our experience in a very closely coupled and fed back manner.

The human mind interprets experience in terms that it has previously experienced and/or been taught and is constantly wiring and rewiring itself. The understanding that we as parents impart along with the wider community and mass communications shapes the growing child's perception of reality and it does this by wiring the brain. Once the brain is wired to certain understandings of reality it becomes self-reinforcing in that the mind rejects information that does not easily sort into known categories or it sort it inappropriately. The movers and shakers on the religious right know this. As the twig is bent so grows the tree is an old adage.

They have encouraged their followers to remove their children from the public education system and have attacked the public schools. Public education for all is an outgrowth of the enlightenment, which since the last century has given children a very necessary secular education with the understanding that religious education was a family matter. The problem to the religious right is that this secular education is very powerful in shaping an open and broad mind that is self-reinforcing. The emerging adult then becomes someone who can potentially escape the orthodox religious worldview and chose his or her own religious path. Removing these children from public education and subjecting them to an ever more doctrinaire and selective education has become, in my view, a danger to civilization. This has occurred simultaneously with the rise of Wahabbist education in the Islamic world so that we have two major fundamentalist worldviews, both doctrinaire and antagonistic to each other with an increasing number of adherents and both antagonistic to liberal religious and secular worldviews.

I am increasingly alarmed by the ever more pervasive intrusion of conservative orthodox religion into our public discourse on issues as diverse as family planning and evolutionary science. The political success of the religious right through persistent attention to person to person organizing and stealth political candidacies along with their attack on public education has brought about a revolution in public policy that to my mind threatens in the United States three hundred years of human progress in many social endeavors. The economic and political power of the United States is so great that this reactionary world-view is seriously impeding important international undertakings within the United Nations as well. In the last century, the United States was a leading mover and inspiration for population planning and control.

The Christian Right, through their Republican surrogates, has forced the United States to abandon this long-term commitment to solving an absolutely critical problem. The United Nations Family planning efforts are hamstrung and torpedoed by US led reactionary religious views. The political alliance between fundamentalist Christians and right wing Jews has lead to serious disengagement of the US government from the Middle East peace process and a reckless military adventurism in Iraq. This has been brought home forcefully over the past month by a totally disproportionate and counter- productive Israeli response to the adventurism of Hezbollah and Hamas with near client state in action by the United States.

Is this government so in thrall to a religious right wing agenda that sees the world verging on an end of times scenario that it is unwilling to act to bring about a lasting peace in the Middle East because that would be counterproductive to a world-view based on biblical catastrophism? This government is saturated with religious ideologues at all levels and I am convinced that they present a clear a present danger to our civilization.

The Modesto Bee carried an article in the Faith and Values section titled "Expediting the End" discussing apocalyptic movements across history and the current versions manifested in American Christians, Iranian Muslims and Israeli Jews. The most frightening aspect of the article to me was the claim that recent polls found that an estimated 40% of Americans believe that "a sequence of events presaging the end of times is under way. It went on to say that among these believers are some of the pastors of America's largest evangelical churches. Have I been totally naïve to believe that there has been progress in the human understanding of reality over that past several centuries? What ever happened to the enlightenment and modernity? What is transpiring in the world that the clock of human intellectual progress is running backwards?

I certainly appreciate that there is an ebb and flow over time of human commitment to various worldviews and that there has never been a time when the entire world shared the same worldview. I have though had a commitment to the idea that in the twentieth century there was a direction to human progress that grew up from western culture that would somehow permeate the entire world as people gained access to education and modern communications. It never occurred to me that in the United States the commitment to social progress and a rational worldview would dramatically change and certainly not in my lifetime.

It was reported in one of my sources for this presentation that the Gallup poll found that 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal word of the Creator of the universe and another 48 percent believe it is the "inspired" word of god, though it must be interpreted symbolically before its truth is brought to light. Only 17 percent of us doubt that a personal God is likely to have inspired the bible. Some 46 percent take a literalist view of creation while 40 percent believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years. These are the results of polls taken in the past five years. Of course many people who believe in a personal interactive God are neither fundamentalists nor reactionary, and I do not mean to include them in my preceding polemic.

The United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the major economic, military and political power in the world. How its citizenry perceive reality and how that interacts with what seems to be a more hostile and differently informed larger world will shape this century. Satellite Television is providing much of the world with continuous news and it is not necessarily the same news we see in the US. Television has come to the Islamic World right along with a growing Islamic fundamentalism which when mixed with US Christian fundamentalism seems a prescription for escalating disaster.

I find the rise of Wahabism in the Sunni world; a fundamentalist Shiite dominated Iran and Iraq, and rising Christian Fundamentalism in the United States frightening from at least two aspects. The first is that if these movements continue to grow and escalate their antagonism, we may return to the days of counter crusading religions with modern armaments. This is a prescription for the Armageddon that fundamentalist Christians are predicting. The second is that they will see each other as I see them with so much in common in worldview that they join forces against the rest of us before turning on each other.

I think dogmatic religions and what they do to the minds of their adherents should disturb us all. Believing one knows the mind of God and that revelation is sealed has lead to the rationalization of outrageous and autocratic behavior. I see suicide bombers and the murder of abortion providing doctors as springing from this mind-set. From the Crusades through the Inquisition to genocide in Bosnia, history is replete with the horrors brought about by religious zealots.

What I am calling "god-awful" religion are all the forms of irrational dogmatic belief systems based in unchallengeable faith that claim to have a direct line to the mind of God and a lock on human meaning and salvation. These belief systems lack humility when faced with the mysteries, wonders and intricacies of creation. In his book "The End of Faith", Sam Harris presents a rather complete polemic against all faith based religion but in particular dwells on the most egregious manifestations of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His basic precept is that faith based religions, as manifest in today's world are irrational belief systems founded in archaic and outdated understandings of the human condition and the physical world. On top of that, "while all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best dangerously incomplete. Harris believes that intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.

Once a person believes - really believes - that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he can not tolerate the possibility that people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." Harris continues "that criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing ideas about physics or history are not. We are then disabled from discussing the role of faith when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street or crashes an airplane into the World Trade Center. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

Harris worries that modern war making technology changed the world and should change the social dialogue. Our religious beliefs may well be antithetical to our survival. How can we ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, when they are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? As Harris says "there is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo and "Baal" or they will unmake our world." He is particularly critical of the notion that the Bible and the Koran are ambiguous or moderate in their teaching about heresy and how to treat it. If all Christians and Jews knew the bible as well as most Muslims know the Koran freedom of conscience would be as rare in the West as it is in the Muslim world. He quotes Deuteronomy 13.7-11

If your brother, the son of your father or your mother or your son or daughter or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you saying, " Let us go and serve other Gods", unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the people surrounding you, whether near to you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must listen to him, you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him; your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.

Harris is no less generous with the Koran than with the Bible. He recites 75 verses on seven running pages of text that tell the believers how to treat with the unbeliever and most of them amount to putting them to death one way or another. He also sites over 60 massacres and pogroms carried out against the Jews in Muslim countries over a period of 300 years, which as he says puts the lie to the notion of religious tolerance in the Islamic world.

Sam Harris's thesis is that all religion is fundamentally outmoded and belongs on the scrap heap of history. While this makes for great wisecracks for left wing secularist and provides some emotional solace for committed atheists it is terribly ill advised and seriously misinformed.

I must say I read this book with great relish cheering, his every attack on mindless Faith based traditions. I certainly agree with many of his comments. Only 500 years ago doctors were drilling holes in people's heads to allow evil spirits to escape. What was people's understanding of the reality of their lives and how it integrated into the rest of existence 2000 years ago? We certainly have a very different understanding of disease, agriculture and conception. These are things that ancient people firmly placed in the hands of their God.

Today when a couple can not conceive a child they go to a fertility clinic; only 100 years ago they were stilling going to their priest.

The advance of human understanding has moved things once in the religious domain into the scientific domain. This does not mean that our fundamental religious needs go away. From Paul Rasor in "Faith without Certainty", "Fundamentally, religion has to do with the problem of finding meaning and orientation in life, one of the most basic humans needs." Sam Harris actually recognizes this but wants to scrap the entire collection of all faith based religions and start completely over, discarding God as completely meaningless along with the rest of the baggage. I don't agree with this agenda in that there is much to be appreciated and salvaged in many faith based religious communities and we should realize that our modern worldview is in good part a result of religious tradition.

For most of us, including many secular people, our fundamental awe and wonder at the sheer complexity of existence is really no less and maybe even greater than it ever was. Scientific understanding does not decrease wonder at all. It enhances it. We must recognize this basic human need for understanding and wonder and make it empowering to civilization thru individuals to their communities, helping to establishing a just and peaceful world. The conflict brought about by fundamentalist religion has been and continues to be enormously wasteful of human effort and dissipative of creativity that is so needed in finding urgent solutions to the real problems facing our species and all of life on Earth. We must help foster a countervailing religious community to the religious right and we must clearly find a way to bring a liberal theology to the Muslim community.

What is this liberal theology and what characterizes it. We have so often in recent years heard liberalism attacked and yet not very often defined. I have taken a Theological perspective from Paul Rasor's book "Faith without Certainty". According to Rasor liberal theology (and I believe liberalism in general) has four underlying themes or tenets, which he calls mediation, flow, autonomy and ethics. Mediation refers to the process of cultural adaptation or staying abreast of evolving human thought and understanding. Quoting theologian Sallie McFague "theology should aim for coherence and compatibility between the scientific view and the interpretation of its basic doctrines. That is the bottom line: a theology that avoids this task and settles for an outmoded view is irresponsible and will eventually be seen to be incredible."

I say Amen! The concept of "flow " is talking about perpetual mutability. Reality involves movement. Ideas, life situations, society, the natural world or even the Universe all involve change, nothing is static. Everything is part of a larger dynamic process; nothing is ever finished. This includes the relational nature of reality. Things flow together in ways that affect each other. The past influences the present, and what we do and fail to do in the present influences the future. This kind of interdependence is part of the reality of nature, culture, and society. This also sees the world as an organic whole; nothing can be fully understood or experienced in isolation.

The third tenet of Liberal theology is Autonomy. The autonomous self has been a central theme in western thought since the beginning of the Enlightenment. Most of us probably have encounter Descartes' conclusion "I think therefore I am". Importantly it was thinking, not feeling or acting that convinced him of his existence and even more significant he reached this conclusion himself without looking to an outer world. This autonomous and independent nature of self is so essential to liberal thinking and I believe with many others, one of the more problematic features of Modernism as it evolved from the enlightenment. (This is an entire topic for a sermon and maybe I am brave enough to take it on next year.)

The fourth theme is "ethics" as opposed to doctrine. There is a liberal tendency to see truth as opened-ended and changing. Liberals try not to waste much time on doctrine and devote time to understanding right behavior and what it should be. This is the basis for so much of the right-wing cant about liberal "situational ethics" which seems such a bug-a-boo for orthodox thinkers.

I would contend that the vast majority of liberals whether they see themselves as purely secular, or humanist, or liberal religionist would find themselves comfortable with these four underlying tenets of liberal thought. I would also contend that all these liberals have far more in common in their philosophical view of the world than many secular liberals seem to understand. I know that for myself I tend to associate God talk with doctrinaire religion and it makes me very edgy. In an article in 'The Nation' magazine from April of this year, Rabbi Michael Lerner talks of meeting a supporter of his attempts to counter the growing influence of the right in this country. This clearly secular liberal was disturbed by Lerner's continual references to God in his literature. Lerner then uses this conversation as a starting point for reasoning that the left has to become more comfortable with God language in public discourse so that it can engage its natural allies within the liberal religious community. While I think we must find a common language for our share commitments, I am not comfortable with this notion. Commonality of purpose and a very closely related worldview cut both ways. Appealing to God as the source of my inspiration is one thing, appealing to God as the reason for my beliefs is another. The above list of common tenets does not include God telling me what to believe nor dictating mine or societies behavior. Talk of God in church and in the home is appropriate. Speaking for God in any context particularly in politics is totally inappropriate.

While I am worrying about the entire world it is essential that we find a way to change the public discourse in the United States. Clearly the message of the religious right has found resonance with a large and growing number of people and I don't think it is simply that it is pervasively or persuasively sold. It is filling a void that people perceive in their lives. For many it is a need for a deeper understanding of their place in the world and a rational for their individual life experience.

People often need to reach this understanding within a shared community. Human beings desire a purposeful life outside rampant consumerism and the pursuit of wealth. There are many questions surrounding our existence that a secular society doesn't get around to. How do we describe our fundamental relationship to the universe and how does God fit into to this if at all? These questions extend to the society in which we live and to the planet that we inhabit. What should my relationship to other human beings be? We all seek for a satisfying place in the general scheme of things. We recognize these as religious questions. Even though the answers might bump up against scientific inquiry, they are fundamentally existential questions. In the words of Paul Rasor "while religious meaning is different from the meaning offered by science and other cultural contexts, our religious understanding of the world and our place in it must also make sense in light of our contemporary scientific understanding of the universe. Our religious meaning-making structures should not be isolated from the other cultural currents that flow alongside them."

I am calling for is a wider, stronger, more accessible and more openly aggressive liberal religious voice in the United States and hopefully from there once again into the wider world. I don't think that this voice needs to be or in fact should be monolithic in the sense that it will be we Unitarians Universalist standing alone against the tide of growing fundamentalist ideologues. We must take shared and joint action reaching out to our brethren within the liberal religious tradition and as religious liberals, all sharing in traditions that have grown out of the Enlightenment and modernity, understand what values join us in this battle for hearts and minds. And as distasteful as it might initially sound, we must also understand that it is truly a battle we are engaged in, and, we have to find a way to get ourselves onto to the real battlefield. We must also bring the secular left into this engagement and find a way to make common cause with all of us. For me that is almost a funny thing to be saying in that I have through most of my life considered myself a secularist rather than a religionist. Because of a changing and growing appreciation of my concerns I am willing to place my worldview in a liberal religious context.

The goals I think must be accomplished are simple. There are really only three.

One; in order to meet the dangerous and freedom destroying theocratic agenda of the religious right I want to find a way to attract larger numbers of American's seeking a religious home into churches with liberal theologies. By churches I mean all forms of places of liberal religious worship. Our liberal churches must find a way to increase their outreach.

Two; I want to engage the liberal churches and the secular left jointly in the battle to keep religion out of science.

Three; I want to strengthen secular public education in the US keeping religion out of the classroom and bringing more children back into the system. There are many other social goals for which a united left could also push but they are not part of this manifesto. As part of this project I would like to increase the understanding of the secular left and we UU's of the many values that are shared with theologically liberal Christian, Jewish and other traditions. It is really important to understand the commonality of values which are sometimes lost because of the differences in vocabulary and the sometimes over stated centrality of dogma.

If I were king I would direct all in the world with the desire for religious meaning into liberal religious societies to satisfy that need. It is my belief that we would have a far more peaceful and productive world. My more conservative friends tell me that we liberals kid ourselves if we don't understand that for many this simply will never satisfy their needs. They tell me that large numbers of people require the strictures and discipline of doctrinaire religion. I do not believe this. To me liberal religion is a desperately needed antidote to a poisonous ideology that threatens the existence of our open and democratic society. We must take the threat seriously and act accordingly. This is very important work that we cannot do alone. We need each other and all people who believe in the liberal view of reality.

[David Simons is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1974. His doctoral thesis concerned the energization mechanisms of electrons in the Aurora Borealis. He led the atmospheric sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980's, working on a diverse set of physics and chemistry problems related to nuclear explosions, radio propagation, radiations transport, lightning physics, near earth space plasma dynamics and complex terrain atmospheric circulation. He has worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2001.]

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