A sincere young man said to me the other day that people with no religious faith ‘forget’ that those with religious faith actually believe in god. How can you forget something that was never more than a dubious claim in the first place? I conclude only that this young man may be quite gullible. And casually discourteous to rational humanists in presuming that they need to collude in accepting dubious claims on zero evidence.
Meanwhile, it’s that time again when we are all supposed to respect and even participate vicariously in another religious festival in this nominally secular society. Why?
Religion is in itself an irrational commitment, but more than that, it is an abstract practice, not a living creature, nor even a distinct ‘community’ rather than an indeterminate number of sects with intra, inter-sect and inter-denominational disputes (or even open hostilities). It cannot be respected, because respect is a human attitude about the qualities of other humans. (Must it be stated that ‘respect’ for inanimate objects, forces, or animals is always only a simile or metaphor?)
More fundamentally, however, the people, in aggregate, who profess a religious faith cannot be respected in aggregate while any part of their chosen faith acts as a tyrannical, bigoted, criminal cartel.
What does that mean?
Let’s take tyranny. And let’s pick an Australian example. The recent push for ‘freedom of religion’ legislation was an unashamed attempt to provide legal protections for bigotry (including especially hatespeech), employment discrimination, and overt political campaigning on such issues as abortion, censorship, and health services for non-heterosexuals. That’s tyranny. The overt ambition to impose authoritarian constraints on people who don’t share the faith or faiths in whose names such tyrannies are pursued. This example also teaches us that religion is almost always also politics, and that some politics is religion (all the isms that rely on faith in unprovable outcomes, like fascism or communism).
Explaining bigotry to a bigot is always difficult. But it is self-evident that pushing as ‘public policy’ or ‘personal choice’ an irrational prejudice that directly harms other people is not just bigotry, but outright chicanery. Whether it’s hatespeech, violence, or the restriction of other people’s liberties doesn’t really matter. Nor is there any excuse for all those ‘good’ people claimed for all religions, who may say they don’t openly practice such bigotry. If they tacitly support others in their sects who do, they are not ‘good’ people of faith at all. There are no ‘good’ people of faith who don’t speak out against perversions of their faiths for worldly political reasons, or just to pursue sociopathic crimes in the name of whatever deity the criminals may call upon.
When I talk criminality, I mean by it all the acts of intimidation, sabotage, rape, violence, murder, and theft not permitted by common law, but committed under cover of religion, or sought to be exempt from law by reason of religion. (In this context, the USA may be regarded as more theocracy and/or tyranny than democracy.)
So, for example, the support for ‘dominionism’, or Christian theocracy, is in fact fascism, defined simply as any movement allied to the cause of imposing doctrine/ideology as state policy. This applies equally to Hindufascism, Islamofascism, Judaeofascism, and so on. Yes, such ‘extremist’ sects may be sub-sets of wider denominations, but they couldn’t very well exist without those denominations. Not as religious movements, with all the exemptions from rationality we are all supposed to grant to people who tell us they have religious faith. And here lies another conundrum for rational people: we have only the word of the faithful that they actually have faith, rather than, say, claiming faith for other reasons and purposes.
If religion is by its nature an irrational undertaking, requiring faith without proof, people of different faiths and none at all must always be concerned that the faithful of one sect will find ways to justify the most irrational of acts, including horrendous violence, against other sects or people of no religious convictions at all. It requires little effort to find endless historical and present examples of exactly that.
This is particularly the case since no faithful persons are guided by their nominal deities; they all listen to clerics telling them what their faith should mean, and how they should think, speak, and act. Or they have no real faith at all, but use the cloak of religion for purposes of social, economic, and political power over others. One must particularly suspect people who claim god speaks to them directly of being the most egregious charlatans in this latter category. That, or clinically insane.
Why would anyone still argue that the faithful deserve to be treated as sincere and virtuous after so many centuries of internecine warfare, tyranny, and pogroms in the name of religion? Weren’t we forced to end all of this ‘sincerity’ and ‘virtue’ with the notion of the secular state? In a desperate attempt to prevent the horrific bloodshed and destructiveness caused by all these sincere and virtuous people of faith?
Not quite. We still permit special status in our democracies for, predominantly, Christian churches and sects, but extending today to all the other major religions, and to almost any kind of social behaviour describing itself as religious, even if some such sects are plainly for-profit, tax evading, predatory ventures.
It occurs because millions of people support baleful undertakings by directly or tacitly supporting their chosen denominations. Tacit support is the cowardice or malice of not speaking against their fellows’ hypocrisies and crimes. Such people might as well wear their own versions of the swastika lapel pin.
And that’s why it’s impossible to respect the faithful merely on the basis of claimed faith.
One can respect only individuals who talk and act in ways that are worthy of respect. People who do this consistently and longitudinally, not merely when it suits, or when the spotlight is on them. And definitely not people who argue virtue is necessary only because of the threat of punishment in some imagined afterlife.
The genuinely virtuous few, if they exist at all, are such a small minority that they have almost no effect on their sects, denominations, or world affairs. How do we know this? Because all the world’s major religions profess to be comprised of peace-loving, fraternal, and well-intentioned people. Yet, in all the known history of the world, there has never been an outbreak of peace and fraternity congruent with such claims. Today, of eight billion people, it is estimated almost seven billion profess one of the major faiths. That’s quite a large majority of the world’s population choosing in everyday words and deeds not to pursue their professed virtues. How else could there be staggering poverty, disadvantage, wars, preventable famines, and avalanches of discrimination and heinous crimes?
There is another point often overlooked by the ignorant and the deliberately devious. If we are sincere about religious freedom—the freedom not to be persecuted for one’s religion—then there must also be a freedom from religion. Christians must be free from Islamic doctrines (or those arising in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on), and vice versa for every non-Christian denomination. By extension, Australia’s largest ‘denominational’ group—those who subscribe to no denomination at all—must be free from religion altogether. And that’s plainly not the case right now. But it’s a coming legal conundrum, and a nexus for a renewed and bitter struggle to push back against irrationality, bigotry, hatred, violence, anti-democratic and anti-civilization movements.
The very question in the Australian census that makes of rational humanism or atheism a ‘religious affiliation’ sheds light on the power of religionists to define reality according to their own doctrines: people are not rational humanists or atheists, but those who do not believe irrational nonsense. It is the ultimate stigmatization to be defined by what you do not believe rather than by who and what you are. Why would anyone in that outcast pariah group be inclined to respect those who make of them outcast pariahs? Is this like a demand by slaveholders that their slaves respect them? By criminals and tyrants that their victims respect them?
Let’s have no more talk of respecting people’s religions. Let’s have some talk about forcing religionists to be respectful of others.
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