Atheism? Why bother?

An article in New York Magazine, If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?, reminds me of why I'm so much more comfortable outside the U.S., a land where non-belief is considered so odd it has to be defended. Here in Spain, non-belief isn't a movement, it's simply a very common reaction to the excesses of the Church (or of any church, mosque, synagogue, etc.). Which doesn't prevent Spanish nonbelievers from participating in Church ritual sometimes (weddings, processions), as community and folkloric events. That is, your neighbors may expect you to participate, but they don't really expect you to believe all that stuff and probably don't themselves. Maybe if I were a Spaniard I would feel more oppressed by the wild pronouncements and silly costumes of the Spanish clergy. But I'm not, and their shenanigans strike me as just strange, distant and sometimes amusing. I suppose each of us is most vulnerable to criticism from his/her own native community. It's the pervasive belief in spirits in the U.S. that gets me spooked.

The rose and the cross

To understand the rage of the Catholic bishops against the "radical laicism"of the Socialist government of Spain, you have to look at their precipitous fall from the power they exercised only 40 years ago. To understand the pusillanimity of the Socialist response, you have to look at the continuing erosion of what used to be the Party's base.

Spanish habits, desires and world-views, like those everywhere else in the world today, are changing too rapidly for the old institutions -- churches, parties, trade unions, etc. -- to contain them. The new organizational forms are multiplying as suddenly as the windmills of La Mancha in the 17th century, and the priests and politicos of today, like Don Quijote then, see them as monsters.

In the Spain governed by Francisco Franco, when there was only one Church and the schools taught that patriotism, religion and obedience to the caudillo were all the same thing, something like 98% of the people declared themselves to be Catholics. It was almost impossible to get married outside of the church -- to do so, a couple would have to demonstrate that they were not Catholics, or if they had been baptised, make a formal declaration of apostasy, and you can imagine how that would be seen. There was no divorce, of course. And no right to abortion, or even contraception, or even sex instruction.

As recently as 1998, 83.5% of Spaniards still said they considered themselves Catholic -- a huge drop from just 10 years before. By 2007, the figure had fallen to 77%. And vocations are way down. A cheery Catholic statistician pointed out that the news wasn't all bad, that there are still 10 million who go to mass at least once in a while. "In Spain there's no other social phenomenon as big as this, not even football!" he declared. (I'm not making this up. See Crisis de vocaciones en España.) Maybe. But fans of fútbol are a lot more enthusiastic. More than half (56.2%) of those self-declared Spanish Catholics tell researchers they never go to mass, and only 17% say they go only occasionally. So I don't know where they get that 10 million figure.

Most significant: 46% of Spaniards between 15 and 24 years old describe themselves as agnostics, atheists or indifferent to religion, only 10% say they are practicing Catholics and 39% nonpracticing Catholics.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Partido Socialista Obrero have nothing to do with this phenomenon, except that they are trying (weakly) to catch up with it. And as the Church decays, the PSOE has no attractive alternative. The old discipline of the socialist trade unions, fighting for workers' dignity, are barely a memory. It's globalization, stupid! It's the Internet and all the other communications with a wider world, the shifting (and in some areas disapppearing) job market, a turmoil where priests offer no certainties and your family, church and school connections offer you no job security. Those 15-24 year olds know that they're on their own.

The PSOE at least seems to be aware of the problem, and some of its people are trying to redefine their socialism as increasing opportunities for youth. But the government has made such drastic concessions to the vociferous church hierarchy -- continuing to finance religous education in public schools and even increasing the state contribution to financing the church itself, failing to follow through on defense of the right of abortion -- that it is having difficulty keeping any youth loyalty. The Cardinals, meanwhile, egged on by the German pope, are howling in the rhetoric of the by-gone fascist era, but nobody but the PSOE (in their own time warp) and a fraction of those ten million mass-attenders wants to pay them much attention.

España se seculariza, El País, 10 de enero de 2008
Parties & church in Spain

Coming up: Church & party in Spain

It's been a complicated week, in my life as well as in Spain's. We just got back to Carboneras and my home Internet connection on Wednesday, after 2 very busy weeks in Madrid. And meanwhile, the hierarchs of the Spanish Catholic Church launched a surprise offensive on the Socialist government, which has gone to great lengths to appease them. Excessive lengths, in my opinion. The State still subsidizes the Church, and pays the salaries of military chaplains and religion teachers in public schools who are hired and fired by the bishops. And despite all this, at a huge rally in Madrid the day before New Year's Eve, supposedly to defend "the family," Cardinal Agustín García-Gasco thundered that "Radical laicism [i.e., the threatened separation of Church and State] is leading to the dissolution of democracy!"

Democracy? What does the all-male dominated, vertically commanded Church with its infallible pope know about democracy? This cluster of cardinals is taking a stand to the right of Pope Benedict, and openly siding with the conservative Popular Party. But rather than take pot-shots at purple-clad targets, I want to investigate these serious social questions:

What is causing this sudden ecclesiastic politicization? An upcoming election within the Church for control of the Bishops Conference is one vector, intersecting with the also proximate national elections (announced for March) for civil authorities, but mere coincidence (or contemporaneity) doesn't explain what is making certain cardinals so belligerent.

A second question is: How serious is all this going to be politically? Do the cardinals really control very many votes in contemporary Spain?

And we must also ask what it is about "laicism", homosexual unions and abortion that gets Spanish clergy so much more outraged than their counterparts in other European countries. Of even whether those are the real issues, or rather the public relations front to cover a more serious fear of the Spanish clergy: the threatened loss of their privileged institutional status and financing in a Church-State concordat still in effect since the Franco years.

I don't promise to answer all these questions, but simply to reframe them as hypotheses that can be proven or disproven. They are important for understanding Spain, and Spain is important for understanding the world.

Spell-breaker

A friend lent me the latest book by Daniel Dennett, knowing that I was a fan of some of his previous work. In particular, his Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) struck me as brilliant, with the clearest and most memorable explanation I'd ever read of "the self" (or "ego" or, as some prefer, the "soul"), how it is produced and where it resides. It is produced in the brain but it doesn't really reside in any particular place there, according to Dennett, but is "the center of narrative gravity," shifting with our focus or excitement about whatever it is we are contemplating at the moment. Dennett himself so liked his phrase that he used it as the title of a later essay.

And that's the annoying tic of Dennett: he falls in love with his own formulations and repeats them endlessly, infested by his own memes. In fact, "memes" is one of those formulations (originated by Richard Dawkins but appropriated enthusiastically by Dennett) that he can't let go of, even when "memes" are not the most convincing explanation of, in the case of his newer book, religious belief.

Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Allen Lane (Penguin), 2006. By "natural phenomenon" he means one that can be investigated (researched) by natural (as opposed to supernatural) scientific methods, such as surveys, brain-scans, rigorously controlled tests with control groups (for example, of claims of the "efficacy of prayer"). And he makes several proposals of specific research topics. That's fine.

Another good thing is that he states very clearly some things that you surely already know but may have had trouble explaining. Here's one remark I especially liked:

There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than somebody who believes in "the spirit." (p. 305)

However, his jokey tone and his manifest incredulity at any religious claims (Max Weber described himself as "religiously unmusical," but Dennett is tone deaf) make it unlikely that reading this book will release any true believer from the "spell" of belief. He's smart and good company, and I agree with most of what he says, but I didn't learn anything I didn't know or think anything I hadn't thought. Most of what he has put together here was better said long ago in the book he quotes in almost every chapter, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). (Click on keyword "religion" to find other comments on the topic.)

"The sleeping giant of Christian Zionism...

has awoken!" thunders pastor John Hagee. And where is St. George the Dragon Slayer when we need him? This dreadful giant is made of mass hysteria, defending the indefensible. A few good pricks from a sharp lance should let all the venomous steam out, but so far no brave knight appears. Inside America's powerful Israel lobby | Salon News

The War Prayer

A very short story, very angry, very pertinent to today's events -- though Mark Twain was thinking about the U.S. war in the Philippines at the time.
The War Prayer

Photo from rotten.com: Mark Twain

Fashions in fanaticism: Redeker & the mullahs

The usual agitators of the Muslim masses have expressed their outrage at French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker for saying things like this:

Exaltation de la violence : chef de guerre impitoyable, pillard, massacreur de juifs et polygame, tel se révèle Mahomet à travers le Coran.

("Exalting violence: a pitiless warlord, robber, mass killer of Jews and polygamist, that is the Mohammed revealed in the Koran.") Somebody claiming to be a defender of the faith has even emailed death threats and called for attacks on him, posting a map to his house.

How fashions in fanaticism change! Tamerlane of Samarkand, who was as vociferous a Muslim as ever was, would have had no problem with Redeker's description of Mohammed or himself as a pitiless mass killer. He styled himself the "Scourge of God" as he piled up the skulls of those he had massacred in the name of Allah in Baghdad and in India. To Tamerlane and countless other Muslim warriors, from Saladdin to modern Chechen guerrillas, Mohammed's trickiness and mercilessness in war have been considered admirable.

Or maybe what really set off the European Muslims was Redeker's concluding statement:

Haine et violence habitent le livre dans lequel tout musulman est éduqué, le Coran. Comme aux temps de la guerre froide, violence et intimidation sont les voies utilisées par une idéologie à vocation hégémonique, l’islam, pour poser sa chape de plomb sur le monde.

("Hate and violence live in the book in which every Muslim is educated, the Koran. ...") That may be debatable. But if so, let's debate it. The stupidest response is to send the message, "If you call me violent, I'll kill you!"

Here's the original text: 20minutes.fr - Le texte de Robert Redeker qui fait polémique

Network of Spiritual Progressives - An Interfaith movement

Sounds good, but is there room for us nonspiritual progressives too? We support most of the same things, it's just that we don't try to palm off any of the responsibility on a Higher Being. Network of Spiritual Progressives - An Interfaith movement Religious people sometimes have trouble believing that we non-religious people can have any ethics, while we non-religious wonder if the ethics of the religious are real -- that is, a responsibility assumed by the individual as his/her own, rather than an edict from an imagined spiritual father.

Reason, God and Other Imponderables

As Cornelia Dean sums it up in Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables - New York Times,

In “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and theorist of cognition at Tufts, refers again and again to the “brave” researchers (including himself) who challenge religion. In “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins, a professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford, once again likens religious faith to a disease and sets as his goal convincing his readers that atheism is “a brave” aspiration.

But supposedly on the other side,

In “God’s Universe,” Dr. [Owen] Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard, tells how he is “personally persuaded that a superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos.”

If that's all they're arguing about, it's not about anything. That is, it's about nothing that makes any difference in the real world. Dawkins and Dennett have no problem acknowledging that there are things about how the universe works that we don't yet understand, they just don't anthropomorphize the Great Unknown. They think of it rather as Terrain to be Explored. Gingerich and the other authors Dean reviews here are happy calling it "a superintelligent Creator." Neither side can disprove the other, because they are talking about nothing -- nothing at all, except which metaphor makes them happy.

The problem with the anthropomorphic vision, that there is a "Creator" with something like what we human beings flatter ourselves by calling "intelligence," is that then people (presumably less sophisticated than Dr. Gingerich) are mighty tempted to attribute intentionality to it, as though it were a person. "Things are the way they are because God made them that way" is a formula for irrational resistance to change. "We are acting on God's will" is even more dangerous, allowing people to grant themselves divine permission to do great harm to other people. That's why I prefer the "terrain to be explored" metaphor; if and when we do meet God in our explorations, He, She or It will no doubt turn out to be nothing less (and nothing more) than a fuller understanding of the universe. Meanwhile, let's leave the hypothetical divine personality out of it.

Religion & its practical consequences

James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902. Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company.

To try to make sense of the religious fanaticism that either inspires or serves as a pretext for so much of the violence and destruction we are watching at this moment, I turned to this book, which I had long intended to read. It has been a great pleasure to be in the company of such a rational, good-willed and articulate thinker for nearly 500 pages. I was interested in the subject matter, and amazed by many of the examples he quotes of extreme religious devotion (though the quoted passages are sometimes too tediously extensive), but most of all I was interested in his method. He was working out a way to think rationally about irrational, or supra-rational, experiences.

With a very courteous acknowledgement of "[a]n American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce," he adopts Peirce's name for the method, pragmatism, and paraphrases Peirce's 1878 article laying out its principles. (For a good summary of Peirce's thought, see C.S. Peirce's Pragmatism).

I won't try to summarize the entire book here. That job's well done in the James link below. James is not at all a conventional church-going believer, and confesses that he has no gift for any mystical experience at all. However, unlike such uncompromising atheists as Richard Dawkins (scroll down to 2005/09/25) or Daniel Dennett, he respects the authentic (i.e., not play-acting) prophets and mystics as possessors of a kind of "truth," one which is irrefutably true for them: Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, George Fox, Joseph Smith, Luther, Gautama Buddha, Mohammed and many others (including the seer I took as my guide during my own, fortunately brief, adolescent religious crisis, Mary Baker Eddy). However, the felt truth of these experiences (visions of God, for example) does not mean they should be accepted as true by anyone who has not personally had them. "The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another," he writes in the 14th lecture, "The Value of Saintliness." (p. 303)

He separates the question of the source of religious vision, which may be anything from an epileptic fit (e.g., St. Paul) to herbal intoxication or simply deep inward reflection, from its "truth," by which he means something like its practical utility. He quotes extensive psychological research (in particular, the studies of a Dr. Starbuck in California) to affirm that "conversion" is an almost universal experience of adolescence, because it is psychologically necessary. By conversion he means a turning away from the chaotic and contradictory messages that assail every young person to find some "process of unification of the self" which always brings "a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift." (p. 163)

That's because the conversion need not be toward religion. "The new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic demotion." (163-164) Whatever works for you. For many of us, and apparently for James himself, the "new birth" was into incredulity, i.e., non-believing in a deity. Although James retained some doubt (see his "Conclusions"). After all, his father was a noted Swedenborgian philosopher.

But James is concerned not only about the utility of religious experience for the individual believer, but also about its social utility, its consequences for human society generally. While his language is not entirely clear here, it appears that he does not accept as pragmatic "truth" the kinds of religious sentiment that he calls extreme "Devoutness." "When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. ... The Buddha and Mohammed and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise. ... An immediate consequence of this condition is jealousy for the deity's honor." (310-311) Which leads to such absurdities as the riots over Danish cartoons, or Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's placement of the 2.6-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the state building.

I think James was right to respect the personal truth of serious religious believers, and equally right to insist that their truth need not be anybody else's and certainly should not be imposed on anyone. We all have "spiritual" needs, he thinks -- that is, we need some way to put together our otherwise fragmenting "self."(James' notion of "self" seems to anticipate Dennett's formulation of it as "the center of narrative gravity.") But we don't all need to do it the same way. A coherent atheism, or a "healthy-minded" optimism, or a born-again union with the One, are equally valid ways to achieve the "gift" of "happiness," or integration of the self. Whether they are equally good or not depends on their consequences, not only for ourselves individually but in our actions on behalf of others. Makes sense to me.


For more on James and his writings, see William James in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
And don't neglect the sad story of Alice James, which helps us understand the milieu in which her famous brothers William and Henry were working.

Religion, parasites & Danish cartoons

Thanks to buddy Don Monkerud, I just saw this article from yesterday's New York Times, by one of the NYT's most engaging essayists, Edward Rothstein. It begins:

An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose, seeking neither nourishment nor home. It persists in its futile climb, explains Daniel C. Dennett at the opening of his new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (Viking), because its brain has been taken over by a parasite, a lancet fluke, which, over the course of evolution, has found this to be a particularly efficient way to get into the stomach of a grazing sheep or cow where it can flourish and reproduce. The ant is controlled by the worm, which, equally unconscious of purpose, maneuvers the ant into place.

Mr. Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea "that has lodged in their brains." That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Islam, he points out, means "submission," and submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett's view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.

I admire Dennett, and was thrilled by his earlier book, Consciousness Explained. As for his argument here though, I think it's plain wrong. Religious belief is not analogous to the worm in the brain of the ant, forcing the ant to do things that are of no benefit to it.

Richard Dawkins' expression of a similar idea was more subtle, and also allowed more room to see it as a metaphor rather than an actual biological fact. (See my earlier blog of 2005/9/25.) What Dawkins calls a "meme" (such as "Allah is great," or any ad jingle) is not a gene, and has no physical presence in anybody, but in some ways it acts like a gene, and the metaphor can help us perceive the process of transmission. I borrowed the "meme" metaphor in Hispanic Nation, for that reason. But, like the Danish cartoons, "meme" (or "parasite") is only a metaphor: it points to some other reality, exaggerating some aspects without defining or describing it.

This is serious, this biological reductionism, when it's taken seriously. It's serious, because as a diagnosis it prescribes exactly the wrong remedy. If religious belief is a parasite in the brain, then to get rid of it you have to attack the brain in some physical way. For example, stripping men naked and putting women's underwear over their heads, chaining them and treating them like dogs, or, as Rumsfeld advocates, making them stand (preferably naked and chained) for many hours, or shocking them physically (water, electricity) or emotionally (tossing a Koran into the toilet, for example). So far, it doesn't seem as though the Guantanamo cure has worked for anybody.

Religious believers (the "hosts" of the belief) persist in believing because they do derive benefit from it. Among people I know, the benefit is often esthetic (the beautiful music, or paintings, etc., seem to glow more warmly for the believer). Usually, it's something to cling to to get you through the dark night, the bad times -- the notion that, whatever the hardships of the moment, there will be some final justice in the end. And there is also the benefit of belonging, of feeling part of the crowd, so that one's personal minuteness in the vast and confusing whirl of the cosmos joins a powerful flow. As our friend Karl put it famously, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people."

We non-addicts, and non-believers, have to find other ways to feel good, but people without our resources have a hard time getting along without their gods. If we want to free them from the addiction, the opium, the parasite (all metaphors for a kind of yearning), we need to supply them with the necessary resources for a life free of gods, demons, mullahs and priests: e.g., education, income, medical insurance, a reasonable expectation of civil justice, care for the elderly, etc.

Belief in the unbelievable

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a conversation between New Yorker editorial director Henry Finder and biologist Richard Dawkins. I first learned of Dawkins about 8 years ago and became enamored of his description of the kind of conceptual virus he called a "meme." I was myself trying to introduce a meme by the title of my book, "Hispanic Nation" (I seem to have succeeded; the phrase has now become common to describe the newly-developing sense of community among U.S. Latinos).

Dawkins is genial, quick-witted and a thoroughly rational philosophical materialist, as you surely already know. He is of course an evolutionist, since Darwin's theory is the only one that makes sense and has mountains -- or fossil-heaps -- of evidence to support it. Does belief in evolution necessarily make one an atheist? he was asked. Yes, indeed, he replies, though "I'm not supposed to say that." That's because other defenders of evolution don't want to alienate those more or less sane religious people who accept evolution as a fact. There are those who claim that religion and science are two paths to different kinds of truth, and that they can happily coexist. However, says Dawkins -- and I think he's absolutely right on this -- that's balderdash, because any religion implicitly or explicitly makes scientific claims. Specifically, that the universe was created by some divine intelligence -- a hypothesis for which there is no evidence whatsoever, and that, if true, would yield a universe utterly unlike the blindly developing, purposeless one we actually have. Purposes are made by human beings, because our brains have evolved to give us that capacity, and each of us must forge his or her own purpose.

That seems to me not only eminently sensible but liberating. There's no big Daddy in the sky, it's just us, having to take responsibility for our own lives. One of the central questions that Finder kept bringing up is why so many Americans (far more than people in the U.K. or other European countries) believe otherwise, and why religious belief -- as irrational as it obviously is -- has survived through the millennia. Since Dawkins is a biologist, not a sociologist, he could offer only a biological explanation: The human infant brain is "wired" to accept commands from elders. This childhood propensity to believe is highly adaptive (in Darwinian evolutionary terms) for the survival of the species, since in our species, the young need lots of protection from their elders for several years. Once we reach the age of reason, we begin testing those things we were taught by our elders against experience, and need retain only those that seem valid. But, for reasons Dawkins cannot explain,some people continue to honor the absurd precepts of religion even into adulthood.

A biological answer won't really work here, because of the great variation among human groups. Let's try sociology. Almost everybody gives up belief in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus by adolescence. Why don't they also abandon beliefs in miracles, virgin birth, invisible spirits and so on? A big part of the reason must be because our society has so much invested in maintaining religious belief. Whereas it is in our society's interest that kids give up believing in the Tooth Fairy and Santa as they themselves near parenting age, it is in the interest of many institutions -- the churches, of course, but also political parties that rely on religious fervor -- to keep religion alive. Thus even people who don't really believe still pretend to, because it's considered the proper thing to do. Or they try to force themselves to believe, often by repetitive mind-numbing rituals to keep their minds from asking probing questions. This kind of adherence to doctrine that is not really believed is what they call "faith."

I think there are other reasons, too. Some of my friends who may or may not really "believe" (that is, accept as scientific fact the miracles and so forth) but who retain "faith" do so because they find the religious ritual deeply moving. They do not want to sacrifice the esthetic and sensual experience. And no doubt there are other reasons, such as the appalling scientific illiteracy permitted or even encouraged by our schools. Anyway, while Dawkins' biological answer is plausible, it can't be more than part of the story.