One Utah

PZ Myers reports receiving:

somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims.

Sam Harris, in The End of Faith argues that once you accept as possible, even probable, an inherently irrational premise (for instance that an old woman can use magic to transform into a cat and curse her neighbors crops) it’s no leap to inherently irrational actions (torturing her then burning her a the stake). Consider this statement from the head of the ludicrously moralistic head of the American Life League concerning PZ Myers:

What Myers posted was profoundly hateful toward the person of Christ, who is truly present in the Eucharist>

Despite the absolute confidence behind that statement, it is in fact little more than an utterance of opinion. Once you’ve accepted that saying a magic invocation over a cracker turns it into the literal flesh and blood of Christ (who is a theological assertion not an historical person), suddenly 12,000 people sending hate emails to someone, trying to get him fired, issuing a variety of vague and not so vague threats against him and his family are relatively rational acts. If you believe that the communion wafer is actually the literal flesh of God, if you believe that harming said communion wafer literally causes God physical pain then, well, doing irrational things to protect God from pain (like accosting a college student) seems relatively reasonable.

The head of the American Life League is asserting as fact that harming a communion wafer (consecrated or not) is the same as harming a person. I for one would love to see the results of scientific tests performed on communion wafers; you’d have to have a control sample of unconsecrated wafers from a variety of sources. Then, you test some of them (weight, volume, chemical composition etc). Have them blessed, then redo the same set of tests. If there were changes in weight, volume or chemical composition then you’d have something worth talking about. By the same token, the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth is utterly unbelievable. On a daily basis, we have evidence of where children come from and it’s not virgins. Beliefs that Christ is literally present in the consecrated wafer or that Jesus was born to a virgin are not rational beliefs, they unsupported by the available facts. That they are deeply and passionately held does not make them rational.

Which speaks to both the extent and the limits of religious freedom. Many deeply religious persons assert that their right to the practice of their faith must be unabridged - that no matter the irrationality of their faith system, they must have the right to practice it without interference or criticism. In attacking PZ Myers, the Catholic church’s Cofraternity of Catholic Clergy declare:

The freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance.

But, in my view, the previous passage is even less rational and more inflammatory:

The same Bill of Rights which protect freedom of speech also protect freedom of religion. The Founding Fathers did not envision a freedom FROM religion, rather a freedom OF religion. In other words, our nation’s constitution protects the rights of ALL religions, not one and not just a few. Attacking the most sacred elements of a religion is not free speech anymore than would be perjury in a court or libel in a newspaper.

Lies and hate speech which incite contempt or violence are not protected under the law. Hence, inscribing Swastikas on Jewish synagogues or publicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional.

Sorry but given the Catholic church’s history of burning actual people I’d say burning a book is small potatoes. And while I find book burning noxious and unsuited to a civilized society, at the end of the day, the bible is just a book - words printed on a page. If I choose to take a piss on the bible, I’ve harmed no one. If I burn my copy of Koran, I’ve harmed no one. If I take a communion wafer and do horrific things to it, I’ve harmed no one.

The statements from the Cofraternity are nothing more than an attempt to place religion outside of the realm of rational inquiry, to say, “This subject is so special it may not be openly discussed, analyzed, critiqued or questioned by anyone.” That’s a form of special pleading so desperate as to deserve the scorn of any thinking person. I also find it a bit depressing; the Catholic priests I’ve known were intellectually fearless, unafraid of science, of analysis, of critical thinking.

It is an attempt, bald-faced and blatant, to place matters of religion beyond the pale of rational, intellectual inquiry. It’s difficult to read such a statement and not think of Richard Dawkins powerful and damning critique of religion - namely that even the most liberal faiths provide cover fire for the irrational, for the most virulently hate filled and violent versions of faith.

The freedom to practice your religion does not come with a guarantee that anyone else will agree with, refrain from mocking, or even downright maligning your religion. Freedom of religion means that we are free to practice our faith relatively unmolested. The relatively unmolested part addresses the question of harm and coercion - so long as the practice of one’s faith doesn’t involving harming others or using coercion to convert the unconverted, so long as one is not using the official force of the government to convert people or to coerce religious practice, one is free to practice one’s faith. I can’t hold a gun to someone’s head and convert them. I can’t sacrifice virgins as part of my faith. I can believe such things are okay, I just can’t act on that particular belief for all the obvious reasons.

On the other side of the coin, laughable though I may find certain religious beliefs, I may not interfere with their free practice. I cannot run into a church and disrupt communion. I cannot paint anti-semitic slogans on a Synagogue. There’s also a key distinction between arguing, to take a local example, that the evidence that the President of the Mormon church speaks directly to God is lacking and unpersuasive in the extreme and declaring that such belief is irrational and actually interfering with someone’s freedom to believe it is true. Making the case in public that the evidence for such claim is lacking is NOT a violation of the religious freeom of Mormons to believe it. I may believe Mormon worship is horrifically boring and lacking in intellectual depth and rigor; that does not give me the right to go into a Mormon church and disrupt said services. If, however, some Mormon missionary gives me a copy of the Book of Mormon and I choose to take a piss on it, walk on it, scrawl swear words in the margins, and denounce it as a badly written work of fiction, the Mormon church has no right to stop me. They freely gave me the book, they can’t tell me what to do with it.

Teachers and principals and other school system employees can often abuse their official positions with regard to matters of faith - for instance lecturing students that they must accept Christ has no valid place in any public school curriculum. No matter how earnestly an authority figure believes that statement, they have no right to abuse their position to convert students to a particular religion. The restriction is not on the teacher/principal/school employee as an individual believer, it is on them in their role as agents of the state. (For an interesting case in which a principal clearly did not understand these boundaries see this post at Ed Brayton’s place). If I am devout pentecostal Christian, I can in my free time speak in tongues, handle snakes, engage in ecstatic trances. If I am also a teacher, I may not include such activities as part of my educational curriculum and I may not use my position to convert students, nor may I allow my personal faith to influence my grades (by giving pentecostal students better grades than non-pentecostal students).

When various forms of fundagelicals claim that teaching evolution is a violation of their religious freedom, however, they are making a version of the Cofraternity’s argument - that because they are making a religious claim, it should not in any way shape or form be contradicted by anyone at any time in any setting. Such claims of religious freedom are overly broad. Teaching that evolutionary theory holds that humans evolved over the course of millions of years from earlier forms of primates and that modern science has proved with some certainty that the earth is billions of years old may contradict Biblical teachings, but that doesn’t make it an inherently religious argument; evolution is not, as some Christians claim, an atheistic religion. No one has the right to not be contradicted. Even bad ideas need to be effectively critiqued on a regular basis.

I’m not sure that I agree wholly with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others who have argued that for our well being as a species, we should completely abandon religion. But I do agree with Carl Sagan; his book The Demon Haunted World was subtitled Science as a Candle in the Dark. In the essays, Sagan and Ann Druyan argue passionately that life is more meaningful when we understand the vast and awe inspiring universe around us, that science alone casts light on the world in a way that truly illuminates, that allows us to see past superstition and ignorance. One doesn’t hear about secular humanist suicide bombers and being too rational has never led one to commit murder. We have far more to fear from religious fundamentalists than we do from rationalist fundamentalists. Science, for instance, has demonstrated (contrary to long held beliefs) that men and women have equal intellectual abilities, that differences in race are only skin deep. Yes, in the past, demagogues and average people have misused and misunderstood science. Science has made mistakes and has offered bad theories but as time goes on, better science replaces the bad science. There are deep mysteries of the universe that we do not comprehend. A rational response doesn’t say, “Anything we can’t explain is God’s work,” a rational response says, “We can’t understand it now but we have yet to find anything that violates the laws of the natural world.”

Most of the so-called religious mysteries have alternate, far simpler, natural explanations. Aural and visual hallucinations are common. Certain fungi that grow on rye are known to have hallucinogenic effects on people when consumed. The brain misfires often and mishearing, misremembering and tricks of the eye are everyday occurrences. I woke up the other morning with my grandmother’s voice in my ears; she’s been dead for years now and no matter how much I want to hear her voice again, I know I won’t. To put it another way, virgins don’t have babies, people don’t fly to heaven on winged horses, crackers aren’t the body of God to be ritaully and cannibalistically consumed by worshippers, old women don’t make pacts with devil then fly across the night sky cursing their neighbors and it seems damned unlikely that God even exists to talk to the head of the Mormon church. You as are free to believe in all those things as I am free to state they are false. Neither of us is free to demand the other agree with us.

This entry was posted Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Bigotry, Homophobia, Privacy, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.