BELIEVING
I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the errie certainties of the Christian right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths. Although liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they rarely question the legitimacy of raising a child to believe that she is a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. Even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world.
Most people in this country believe that mortals like ourselves cannot say, for instance, that God was wrong to drown most of humanity in the flood of Genesis, because this is merely the way it seems from our limited point of view. And yet, they feel that they are in a position to judge that Jesus is the son of God, that the golden rule is the height of moral wisdom, and that the Bible is not itself brimming with lies. They are using their own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible — and then, in the next moment, they assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world; rather, we must depend upon the prescriptions of the Bible. They are using their own moral intuitions to decide that the Bible is the appropriate guarantor of their moral intuitions. Their own intuitions are still primary, and their reasoning is circular.
Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. We need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. It is impossible to behave this way by adhering to the principles of Jainism. How, then, can one argue that the Bible provides the clearest statement of morality the world has ever seen?
We decide what is good in the Good Book. We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come accross another of God’s teachings on morality: If a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). If we are civilized, we will reject this as the vilest lunacy imaginable. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions. The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.
The choice before us is simple: We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and human well-being — a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse — or we can confine ourselves to a first-centuary conversation as it is preserved in the Bible. Why would anyone want to take the latter approach?
We have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what is used to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trival as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. The most reasonable and least odious possibility is, of course, the biblical God is a fiction, like Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom most sane human beings now ignore.
Can you prove that Zeus does not exist? Of course not. And yet just imagine if we lived in a society where people spent billions of dollars of their personal income each year propitiating the gods of Mount Olympus, where the government spent billions more in tax dollars to support institutions devoted to these gods, where untold billions more in tax subsidies were given to pagan temples, where elected officials did their best to impede medical research out of diference to The Iliad and The Odyssey, and where every debate about public policy was subverted to the whims of ancient authors who wrote well, but who didn’t know enough about the nature of reality to keep their excrement out of their food. This would be a horrific misappropriation of material, moral, and intellectual resources. And yet, that is exactly the society we are living in. This is the woefully irrational world that Christians are working so tirelessly to create.
It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intutions and spirtual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis. There are good reasons to believe that people like Jesus and the Buddha weren’t talking nonsense when they spoke about our capacity as human beings to transform our lives in rare and beautiful ways. But any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse.
Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
Therefore one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns — about ethics, spirtual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering — in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a PUBLIC DISCOURSE that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. Only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.