Burning of heretics at stakes in a marketplace during the Spanish Inquisition.
In response to my last post, the legendary American video game designer Chris Crawford wrote,
… This creates a nasty problem for society. How can society keep the dummies (his example is people who voted for Trump) from ruining everything? What’s to stop them from committing horrid crimes in their ignorance?
Society has a ready answer: religion. With all those impressive rituals, lengthy confusing bibles, and high-falutin’ terminology, society has an instrument sure to whip the hoi poloi into some sort of order. “God’ll getcha if you’re not good!” accomplishes a lot more than laws or social disapproval.
So, the mischievous question I put to readers is: Is religion useful enough in maintaining social order to justify its downsides?
Response
The first observation I’d make is that heinous crimes are committed due to a lack of intellectual virtue, to be sure, but also due to a lack of moral virtue. If the crimes are committed due to stupidity, then traditional education, technological intelligence augmentation, or some other means may provide the remedy. If the crimes are due to moral vice, then some type of moral training, behavior modification, legal deterrence, or other means would be necessary.
It is in the latter area of moral virtue where religion has been used, among other reasons, to elicit moral compliance. Whether this accomplishes more than law or social disapproval is a separate question, but my main reply would be, “Religion is just not a very good means to get people to be moral.” As far as the larger question of whether religion is, on balance, a good thing, I would say no, and here’s why.
First, we pay a hefty price for religious consolation—theocracy, fanaticism, intolerance, hatred, guilt, war, etc. Moreover, religious institutions typically are anti-scientific, anti-democratic, anti-progressive, misogynistic, authoritarian, and medieval. Religion has opposed or still opposes free speech, the eradication of slavery, sex education, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, women’s and civil rights, and the advancement of science. It also encourages credulity and blind faith, which stand as opposed to the critical thinking I so fervently revere and which we so desperately need.
Furthermore, many measures of social dysfunction strongly correlate with greater religiosity, including homicides, large prison populations, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births, political corruption, income inequality, and more. Perhaps all this is worth the comfort religious beliefs provide, or maybe this correlation doesn’t imply causation. But to the extent that religion causes much of this suffering, its consolations probably aren’t worth the price.
Just consider that the cultural domination by Christianity during the Middle Ages resulted in some of the worst conditions ever known in human history. Much the same could be said of religious hegemony in other times and places, including the present day. And, if religion causes less harm today than it once did, that’s because its power has been reduced. Were that strength regained, the result would surely be disastrous, as anyone who studies history or lives in a theocracy will confirm.
Still, I admit that many people derive social and health benefits when surrounded by like-minded believers, that religion provides a sense of community to many, especially in a culture like America with its rampant social isolation, and that religion has promoted things like education and healthcare, for which I commend it. But secularists promote many good things too, without relying on supernatural justification. (Consider that today, the best countries to live in are also the least religious, while the worst places to live are generally the most overtly religious. I doubt this is coincidental.)
In the final analysis, I’d argue that Western religions are as harmful as they are untrue. And we will be better off when we outgrow them. Put simply, religion is, in my view, an enemy of a better future, and I look forward to its extinction.
I completely agree. I have friends and family who are happy, kind and compassionate but also innocently ignorant of science, nature and the world around them
I’m in a surprising position as an atheist playing Devil’s Advocate in defense of the Catholic Church. Not all religions, just the Catholic one. And my thesis can best be summarized as “Yes, but no; nevertheless yes, while no; perhaps yes, notwithstanding no.” Moreover, I cannot say with certainty whether “yes” denotes agreement with your argument or support for religion. With this proviso, I stumblingly launch my presentation.
You observe that the happiest nations in the world are the least religious, while the unhappiest nations in the world are the unhappiest. I find that observation to be a compelling condemnation of religion, and will add that the contrast also applies to the level of violence perpetrated by countries.
I’ll point out that the Catholic church saved much of Western civilization during the Dark Ages, by pushing against the worst abuses of those anarchic times as well as preserving a goodly portion of classic literature. The West would have recovered without the church’s intervention, but it probably would have taken centuries longer.
I’ll further contest the claim that religion opposed the advance of science. Islam was the bastion of scientific inquiry during its golden age, although that golden age did not last for more than a few centuries.
You’ll think me crazy for claiming that the church was the birthplace of modern science. The Oxford Calculators (priests all) made the big leap that transformed science from its phenomenological frame to science with actual predictive power. These people mated mathematics with physical observations. That was the breakthrough moment. From there it still took several centuries, but as Europeans grew more adept at mathematical calculations, they established the foundations of modern science. Copernicus was a priest. Galileo, the first person to apply these methods to basic physical processes, opened the door for Newton.
Galileo’s case is much misunderstood. Yes, the conservatives of the Church wanted to burn Galileo for supporting the heliocentric model of the solar system, but they didn’t have the power that the Pope had. He restrained them. Galileo was not thrown into a dungeon during his trial in Rome; the Pope set him up in a mansion with servants. The Pope refused to permit subjecting Galileo to torture. Moreover, Galileo was not indicted for advocating the heliocentric model — the indictment was that he had violated a contract with the Pope promising that he would not publicly advocate the heliocentric model. This was an open-and-shut case. Galileo had signed the contract around 1615, if I recall correctly, and around 1630 he published “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” in which he loudly and blatantly advocated heliocentricity. Despite ostentatiously breaking his word to the Pope, Galileo was not burned; he was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life, and forbidden to publish any more books. Yet, somehow, he managed to continue publishing, smuggling manuscripts to Germany for publication. Golly gee, I wonder how he managed to get away with that?
Galileo was an asshole. A brilliant asshole, to be sure, but an asshole nonetheless. He deliberately poked the church in the eye, thinking that he was too famous and important to be punished for it. He got a slap on the wrist.
Despite all this, I agree with your argument that society would be better off without religion — with the proviso that the statement is confined to present and future tense. In more primitive and brutal times, religion did seem to serve as a civilizing force.
I’ll conclude with a personal experience. My wife Kathy has grown increasingly upset watching America spiral down to its future destruction. The behavior of Mr. Trump is so outrageous, so inimical to her principles of right and wrong, that she was on the verge of despair. She revived the Christianity of her youth and has been re-reading the Bible. It gives her a sense that there is some justice, some goodness in the world. Were it not for religion, she would probably have destroyed her life by now. Is that not worth respect?