A journal of musings, ramblings, and iconoclastic far-flung freedom-seeking thoughts
DEC. 26
We live in a natural world, not a super-natural one. What is more self-evident than the notion that the natural world has natural origins, not super-natural ones?
Fill up a glass with water. If you takes this glass of water and pour part of it out, what is more natural to assume than what remains in the first glass is more water?
“Nature from nature” and “living from living”: nothing less and nothing more. The laws of nature and of science are all around us and discoverable.
Nothing less and nothing more!
PART 1: ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGIOUS FERVOR
THE CHILDHOOD FALLACY – TO A FUTURE GENERATION AS YET UNBORN
One of my favorite arguments offered in favor of religion is the following: children believe and grow up to believe, so there you have it. Parents teaching their children to believe in god no doubt think they are doing them a great moral good for it is generally beyond the intellectual capacity of the previous generation to see the matter otherwise.
Imagine if one could start over with a large sample of parents, perhaps a group of 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 or larger! and you could engage them all in a great experiment.
Instead of the current practice of parents inculcating in their children from the earliest age possible the notion that there is a God and this belief should never be doubted, the alternative parenting technique will be for all these grown-ups to let their children grow up free and unhindered by doctrine and catechism. They would be free to decide the nature of their theological beliefs, if any, later. (Great zounds, shades of the Anabaptists!)
THE NUCLEUS OF FEAR
What is there for parents to fear? Obviously, the fear is the child may not become religious. No matter how “sure” the parents are of their own religious convictions, they are not quite so sure what would happen if they ever gave their children this kind of wide-roaming freedom.
Since people who believe in a Divine Being think it is “obvious” and “unavoidable” to conclude nothing else, one would think they would feel a greater degree of certainty that their own children, left to their own devices, would in due time become religious.
Wouldn’t their children come to believe in a Divine Being just as their parents do?
Indeed, what could be more obvious—at least from the point of view of a committed believer—than the simple fact all roads lead to God, so to speak? Nonetheless, there remains the slim chance that a few children might not become religious.
Indeed, the chances of this happening might increase rapidly without the blanketing and insulating effect of “blind faith”: taught, as it were, from birth. Parents aren’t fools. They might claim every person knows instinctively there is a God but in reality they would hardly wish to risk putting it to the test: human nature being so full of surprises. Without babyhood, infanthood, and toddler indoctrination, the odds would grow that at least some of the children would not become as religious as their parents.
WHAT IF THE CHILD IS NOT RELIGIOUS?
Thus, the chances of diminished religious fervor in the next generation could very well be the result, especially if the children had access to a set of alternative secular and humanistic values–such as human reason determining human conduct. Without religious preconceptions already drilled into them they might become more open to scientific theories, such as the theory of evolution, factually presented, in which all higher life forms are explained as having evolved from simpler life forms.
A child taught from his or her youngest years that God exists, that God created the world, and that God created mankind (Adam and Eve) no doubt will be fairly well-protected from scientific notions to the contrary when finally introduced to such concepts in high school or college.
The child’s religious indoctrination will have served its purpose well if no scientific facts can penetrate the wall of theological constructs or dislodge firmly-held religious concepts: hold tight against the onslaught of scientific perniciousness!!
No doubt religious God-fearing parents feel this is as it should be and they are doing their children aught but good by teaching them that faith in a Divine Being trumps all.
INDOCTRINATION
In a very real sense, this story–repeated from generation to generation down through the ages–is also part of the story of mankind writ large: over many generations and through the centuries, the same habits of mind and blind faith are handed down from parent to child through endless repetition.
Such mental habits become so firmly established that they appear absolutely impervious to all new scientific discoveries or conceptual paradigms that in the least wise threaten their iron-clad hold on these and other theological precepts. The story of Adam and Eve, once believed, must always exist.
Belief without the willingness to hear a different point of view; belief without a willingness to modify itself given new circumstances, facts, and discoveries; belief that is absolute, unbending, and unyielding lacks grounding in reality. Such belief defines itself as “pure” but often the believer is intolerant and ignorant and must rely on arguments that are fallacious and illogical.
When Galileo understood Earth and the other known planets to be in orbit around the sun, he collided head-on with religious beliefs, sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, that the Earth was the center of the Universe: i.e., Galileo must be wrong and therefore guilty of heresy, especially if he persisted in promulgating such nonsense.
That “nonsense” has since become established fact beyond dispute the world over yet it is this religious habit of belief–arrived at through mind-numbing repetition and uncritical acceptance–that allows utterly false notions to persist alongside scientific truth.
This devotion to outdated precepts typically characterizes closed-mindedness at its most extreme: to hold to a set of ideas that cannot allow the least change or criticism of any sort; that does not seek dialogue with others holding differing points of view; that does not allow for the possibility of being in error; that does not recognize the need to amend or adjust such views in the slightest . . . is the very antithesis of creative, humane, logical, ethical, and compassionate thinking.
ABSOLUTISM LEADS TO OPPRESSION
Absolutism is part and parcel of theological orientation—it is as key a piece of religion’s fundamental nature as any other. Not surprisingly, over the centuries this unyielding absolutism produced the arrogance of unchecked power from the highest church officials, infecting the masses of the faithful as well.
In due time people took to slaughtering one another out of “absolute certainty” that their religious views were divinely inspired and much better than those institutions, practices, and forms of spirituality found anywhere else.
Their own beliefs were necessarily seen as beyond reproach, even after their beliefs led to the most brutal actions of aggression and repression against people holding differing views. It did not seem to matter much that these savage acts of violence frequently contradicted the very tenets of that faith they were so intent on protecting.
Illogical thinking invariably produces acts that become exact opposite of the original theological postulates. God is good, god is great; god created everything; god created life and so life is precious and sacred.
The religious absolutists don’t stop there: we understand this much of divine history and if we have to engage in the mass slaughter of Jews, heretics, infidels, witches, and other non-conformists, so be it.
The bloody murders seem to flow so naturally from one zealot’s religious exuberance to the next. How did the zealots get from peace, good will, and love to murder and mayhem? They never seem sure other than to insist it was necessary.
They were so busy patting themselves on the back for their religious purity that they failed to recognize that they themselves—in the full blindness of their absolutist religious beliefs—were the ones introducing much of this corrupting violence, persecution, and oppression.
The true believer may rationalize the story of human bloodshed and violence by saying all of it was “in the past”; they might claim the violence can be explained by factors other than their own religious bigotry and intolerance.
Absolutism is the Achilles Heel of religious orthodoxy through which the doors are flung wide open to campaigns of lethal violence. Every page of the historical record is soaked with the blood flowing from the violent acts of the religious purists and theological absolutists.
Christians and Jews may feign shock at such a statement but if they know anything of their own history, they know it is true: fanaticism–religious fervor taken to the highest levels of delusional thought and action–inevitably turns toward reckless and unrestrained violence against those who disagree with them. One need only look at the current campaigns of terror being waged by the absolutist fanatics of Islam today to understand this historical phenomenon is as common as it is ancient.
Most atheists do not have a hard time distancing themselves from these religious traditions of bigotry, intolerance, and violent antipathy to all groups who do not tow the theological line. We are not adrift in a sea of uncertainty when we cut ties to organized churches and dogma. To the contrary, it is only by doing so that atheists give themselves a chance to find a stronger more consistent moral rudder by which to steer their lives.
THE HISTORICAL RECORD
The historical record demonstrates the unmistakable links between narrow-minded dogmatists and subsequent campaigns of violence toward those who disagreed with them.
Yes, “back then” there were frenzied campaigns of forced conversions and slaughter and brutalities galore: including torture, disembowelment, burning at the stake, and genocidal rampages of utter madness against “inferior” groups.
Was all of that bloody violence, resulting in tens of thousands of victims, merely an “unfortunate excess” or an “unintended mistake” and not truly reflective of “good Christian principles”, as some Christians would argue today?
There is as much sense in arguing this as saying a band of robbers-and-cutthroats, caught red-handed robbing and murdering, should be able to rationalize their crimes by claiming that their violence was really just “excess”, “mistaken”, “accidental”, or “incidental”—because their real motives were much humbler.
They intended only a clean and quick robbery without violence! The Christian conquerors of the New World only “intended” to find gold and impose a light form of servitude (i.e., enslavement) upon the native populations because they were obviously so inferior to Spaniards. It was practically all done for their own good!
And the debate began: were indigenous populations human? Did they have a human soul? The Spaniards called themselves “people of reason”. It was obvious the indigenous people could never equal them in that sense—but were they little more than savage beasts or were they partly human in some sense?
The excesses of absolutist religious conviction happened to dovetail rather nicely with the Church’s and Crown’s need to find and transport precious minerals like gold and silver back to the Iberian Peninsula. Whatever amount of coercive force it took to see the Indians enslaved as workers, so be it.
One cannot separate these violent acts of conquest and oppression from the religious mind-set that helped gave rise to them, whether as crime or religious folly.
ILLUSION AND SELF-DECEPTION
If one believes that one’s religion is absolutely true and divinely inspired, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid certain other “logical” conclusions: it soon follows that unrestrained zealots must come to believe that all other religions are false—an attitude, with murderous consequences, often made quite palpable throughout human history.
This story of “absolute faith” giving rise to horrendous acts of violence has been with us for millennia and shows no sign of abatement. People today may talk about “toleration” but religious people have yet to reconcile the difference between idealistic hopes and the actual bloody record on the ground.
They have not developed a philosophy to direct their moral decisions when they are tugged in two different directions—absolutism in faith versus toleration of other peoples’ religions—and perhaps they never can, beyond short-term expediency.
Unfortunately, religious arrogance has corrupted priestly castes, rulers, armies, and entire societies for generation after generation, century after century, and there is no reason to believe that there will be a significant let-up any time sooner.
Too many people are addicted to the warring cycles of superiority versus inferiority, dogma versus dissent, and violent conquest versus friendly persuasion.
THE PAST AND PRESENT
For all those people today who have convinced themselves that there is a world of difference between the past and the present, we merely ask them to take a look at the Middle East where Jews, Muslims, and Christians remain embroiled in a centuries-old struggle of conflict and warfare in all its gory hideousness without relief or cessation in sight. They have been killing one another for centuries!
With modern weapons of war, today’s nations can kill many times the number of people put to death through the medieval practices of torture and the auto-da-fé. In just a few days a “successful” military-religious campaign can leave hundreds or even thousands of people maimed, homeless, and starving in dismally overcrowded refugee camps with women and children at the mercy of brutal soldiers.
The various leaders of the fighting nations and factions no doubt are certain that they have very clear religious convictions to guide them, but in the end it is same old story of blood, death, and destruction. The leaders can never see past their own cultural biases and beliefs to seek new ways of compromising and cooperating to end the strife.
It is ordinary people, the unnamed and “faceless” others who continue to suffer and die in large numbers, just as in the most intolerant of times past—only now it is happening in our world and during our lifetimes.
The braying of arrogance over-the-top religious belief leads to fighting, to war, to death. That is the unvarnished historical record. Absolutism in faith leads to destruction and catastrophe. The one person who needs to experience this insight—the fervent zealot—is by nature the one person forever incapable of understanding the link.
PART 2: RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Teaching children “to believe” in an omnipotent deity initially appears to reinforce the correctness of the parents’ own views, of course—the problem being that most children will accept as true whatever their parents try to teach them.
Today, racist notions of the inferiority of Black people are roundly repudiated by every American not totally miseducated as a child to be a bigot. During the period of slavery, however–and its grotesque step-child Segregation—bigoted white parents routinely indoctrinated their children with racist hatred toward Blacks.
Most of these children came to accept their parents’ views because they had little alternative—a corollary phenomenon to that of religious indoctrination. The child being fed the stale bread of racism is not allowed to reach the age of reason, of independent maturity, where they might wish to question whether what their parents tell them is right. Long before then, the parents are quick to pass their own prejudices on to their children by showing them the way to treat Black people with racist contempt.
Just as white racists in this country taught their children to hate Blacks, the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s taught German children to hate Jews. Parents in both countries could watch that seed of hatred sprout.
Given that the Third Reich lasted only about twelve years before it was crushed, we might not think this example as serious as white racism in America—yet the world saw German society succumb to a tidal wave of maniacal anti-Semitism.
Had Nazism triumphed, this insane hatred of Jews would have been transmitted from parent to child until all Jews everywhere had been exterminated.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND RACISM
Anti-Semitism and racism still exist today. They are handed down from one generation to the next, though thankfully not to the same degree of intense bigotry that occurred under American chattel slavery and under the Nazi regime.
This parental indoctrination of hatred and prejudice may shock our sensibilities. Such an approach no longer seems natural or right to modern thinkers today, but it is proof of a recognizable social phenomenon.
It is a commonly accepted sociological principle that parents can teach their children to hate targeted groups, especially when social conditions offer context and opportunity to do so. Parental influence is no less deadly than peer pressure when it comes to assessing how young minds are molded.
One might counter there’s a world of difference between promulgating racism and anti-Semitism–hatred of Blacks and Jews–when we compare them to teaching children to believe in a Divine Power, but the parallel is two-fold:
first, there is the parallel between the “absolutism” of racial bigots and religious zealots to consider, to say nothing of the way in which the two groups often cross-fertilize one another; and, second, there is a parallel to be found in the method by which both American and German parents imbued their child with their own prejudices: Nazism, racism, religious absolutism.
NARROW-MINDED PARENTS
A narrow-minded parent can poison their children’s minds psychologically, whether dealing with race or religion. The strong role parental authority plays in molding the child’s mind must be remembered–the child is expected to accept in an unquestioning manner whatever the parents teach: what is good, what is bad; what is moral, what is immoral; what is right, what is wrong.
We do not expect children to have the innate strength to withstand parental pressure to conform to “family norms”, even though the parents’ views may be heavily laden with the poisons of bigotry and intolerance.
Many white children in the South subsequently ended up with feelings of hatred and contempt toward Blacks; many German children likewise developed intense feelings of hatred and contempt toward Jews. It was what they were taught.
WHAT THE PARENTS BELIEVE, THE CHILD ALSO BELIEVES
Thus, the mere fact that the child believes what the parents believe is a dubious sort of argument when meant to validate the parents’ belief system. The beliefs of children– particularly when shaped and hammered into their heads by adults–is hardly independent evidence of the validity of the parents’ religious beliefs. It is evidence for the successful methodology of indoctrination and enforced conformity, but little more.
To tackle that thorny issue, one must turn to other criteria and other ways of measuring the validity—or falsehood—of any given religious proposition. Parental indoctrination of children into family religious values can hardly serve as an ultimate vindication of such beliefs.
To the contrary, it shows that if parents taught their children a different set of beliefs, the child would just as readily accept those values to be true: Hinduism instead of Christianity, Buddhism instead of Catholicism, etc.
It is illogical to take children’s adoption of their parent’s beliefs as proof of God’s existence. This approach supposes that the beliefs of the children were spontaneously conceived, when in fact what the child believes is clearly dependent upon and derived from the parent.
The outcome of this generational transmission of beliefs only reflects what the parents choose to teach the child. That the parents invariably start this process before the child has acquired sufficient ability to think independently, is more an argument for the success of parental indoctrination than it is for the moral or logical supremacy of the theological views themselves.
AN OLD PUZZLE
An old enigma is found in this question: what would happen if an infant from a Christian family was raised in a Hindu household? At one time the argument was made that the child would become a Christian—that its religious instincts were inbred in his or her genes, as it were.
It took a while for anyone to advance the notion that the child, if raised as a Hindu, would likely grow up to believe in Hinduism: that it is the nurturing environment that exerts the decisive influence and is greater than heredity, “genes”, or the birth-parents’ religious beliefs.
In that hypothetical sample of a thousand children raised without religious indoctrination, how many might learn a new way of looking at society and the world? No one can tell: perhaps only a few (the social instincts of generations will not be easily overcome)—but parental religious indoctrination prevents all of them from ever having a chance to achieve intellectual independence, to explore their soaring and unbounded imaginations in countless new ways!
It is too fearsome a thought for the religiously-minded parent to even consider—lest their child fails to conform to the religious expectations of the persons who brought them into this world. For those parents of some social standing, it could even lead to a potentially embarrassing form of social ostracism since religious neighbors might think less of them.
Yet, in meaning well, religious parents frequently deal their own offspring a crippling blow to the right of every human being to develop true freedom of mind and imagination!
