Ranthropologist

Tag: atheism

  • Daily Read: Fundamentalist Atheism

    Daily Read: Fundamentalist Atheism

    Today’s Daily Read is a perfect follow-up to my post from yesterday on religion. Mary Elizabeth Williams says what a lot of atheists like me are thinking when she takes Bill Maher to task for his particular brand of fundamentalist, militant atheism. Writing in Salon, Williams points out that Maher does a grave disservice to his cause when he applies blanket generalizations to religious practices and characterizes them all as worthy of contempt. She is right to call Maher an intolerant bigot. Williams is a Christian, and she makes clear that her Christianity does not make her an extremist or an idiot – and the same is true of the followers of many religions. Maher errs by lumping all believers into the same category. I completely agree with Williams. As I said in yesterday’s post, I think it’s ideology, not religion, that is truly the root of so much sociopolitical and cultural conflict in the world; religion is just the frame that justifies the ideology. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural to believe that your way of life is the correct way. My atheism has not caused me to turn my back on the values of my culture. Most atheists are good people with strong moral codes – just like most Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Atheists like Maher only serve to make us look just as bad as the fundamentalists of any religion, and I wish he would shut up and go away.

    Bill Maher’s bigoted atheism: His arrogant shtick is just as ugly as religious intolerance

  • (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    It is no secret to my students that I am an atheist. It usually comes up early in my classes when I have to talk about cultural universals like religion, or when I have to explain why I don’t teach intelligent design (the secret code name for Christian creationism). I am also quick to reassure them that I have no interest in turning them into atheists; however, I do nurture a secret hope that by helping them become better critical thinkers, they may come to embrace agnosticism, if not outright atheism, on their own. But, I do not want to browbeat them – dare I say convert them? – into atheism. When I give my lecture on religion, I’m trying to explain it to them from an anthropological perspective. Religion is a cultural universal – every culture has one – so my students need to know the basic outlines of what constitutes religion.

    I teach the concepts mostly from a functionalist perspective. Anthropologically, religion can be simply defined as beliefs or rituals that revolve around or involve supernatural beings or forces. What is the function of religion in society? First and foremost, it serves to answer unanswerable questions: WHY are we here? WHAT happens after we die? WHERE do we go? WHY do bad things happen to good people? WHY isn’t God a Charger fan? And so on. These questions cannot be answered by science. God/the supernatural, as encompassed in the myriad religious practices of the world, serve to help people answer the unanswerable, and explain the unexplainable. Of course, in the earliest religions, many of the unanswerable questions were things that science has now explained: why does the sun rise and set? What are stars? What makes a volcano erupt? Yet, as long as we have existential questions such as why are we here, then we will still have religion.

    Religion also provides comfort during anxious times. When a person has suffered a devastating loss, they can turn to their religious beliefs for solace. I think for many people, it is much easier to believe that God has a plan for them than it is to believe that bad things happen for no reason at all. It is terrible to imagine that, say, losing your child to cancer has no greater meaning. So, people pray, or talk about God’s plan, or say that little Junior is with the angels in Heaven. Of course, suffering great pain or loss can also make people question their faith, but that anxiety-reducing function of religion keeps people returning to their supernatural or spiritual beliefs. As an atheist, I am comfortable with the knowledge that there is no greater purpose to life; it doesn’t make my life any less meaningful, and in fact in some ways makes it more meaningful, because I’m convinced that this is the only chance I’ll get and I’m going to make the most of it (the multiple fallacies that people hold about atheists, such as the idea that people who don’t believe in God eat babies because without God you can’t be moral, is a subject for another post).

    Along with the comfort and anxiety reduction functions, religion has an important role to play in educating people about correct behavior and what the consequences will be if they step out of line. Having a religion that offers rewards or threatens punishment is a very useful tool for regulating individual and group behavior. It’s even better if people believe that God is always watching them; even if you are alone, God sees you masturbating! So you’ll follow the rules even when no one else is around. Religion also provides the rules themselves. For the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – yes, I tell my often surprised students, Yahweh, God, and Allah are all the same guy), those rules are codified in holy texts such as the Talmud, Torah, Bible, and Koran. All three of these religions share the Old Testament, but their theologies are differentiated in their independent holy books. The Bible is filled with rules of conduct and stories with examples of the consequences if you don’t comply – just look at Lot’s poor wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God by looking back as she and Lot fled Sodom and Gomorrah (aside – if I was Lot, I’d be thrilled that my wife got turned into a woman-sized salt block. Salt was extremely valuable in those days!).

    One of the things I find to be the most interesting about religion is that religions always reflect the cultures from which they are derived. This is an obvious statement, but it’s not one that is often scrutinized. Religion provides an orderly model of the universe in that it gives a supernatural origin story for why the world is the way it is. Where did we come from? God made us from clay and breathed life into us. Why do we suffer? Because first Eve, then Adam, disobeyed God by eating the apple. Why do we follow the rules we follow? Because God told Moses the rules and bade him share those teachings with his followers. Think about what this does for the people following the rules of their culture, as codified in their religion: it provides a supernatural mandate for doing things a certain way. It removes from groups and individuals the burden of being responsible and puts the burden on God. It allows people to say, “Hey, I didn’t make the rules. God did.”

    I have been using mostly Christian examples here for convenience, because it is the religion with which my readers will be the most familiar, but these ideas apply to all religions, from the simplest animatism to New Age spiritualism to the most complex polytheism to the mainstream, widespread Abrahamic religions and all their different denominations and sects. And every one of these religions is a proxy for the culture they come from.

    I have heard some people argue that religion is the root of all evil. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think that’s really the problem. It makes sense to say that religion is the root cause of many of the world’s conflicts, both past and present; many people have gone to war in the name of their religion. Obviously a deeply fundamentalist interpretation of Islam drives groups like the Islamic State today, just as a particular interpretation of Christianity drove the Crusades. People fight and kill and destroy and die for their beliefs, so you could argue that if there were no religions there would be no war. But I think that is completely wrong. The fact that religion is a proxy for culture is the reason why I believe we will never be free of conflicts that people are willing to die for. Religion is just the supernatural explanation for culture. That’s why I can say I’m an atheist, yet I live by the largely Judeo-Christian morals of my culture. I don’t have to believe in God to be a good person; I’m a good person because my parents, my family, and my culture have taught me to be. If my way of life was threatened to the degree that I felt the need to take up arms to defend it, I would, but God would have nothing to do with it.

    The conflicts we are experiencing around the world may seem to be based on religion, but really, they’re based on ideology. Many people in the United States believe our way of life is the best way and the right way, and many US Christians will say it’s because we are a country based on the Bible (the fact that this is not historically accurate does not change the fact that our overall ethics and morality generally derive from Judeo-Christian principles). The terrorists of ISIS explicitly attribute their motivations to Islam, but they are also fighting for a way of life. The Sunni and Shiite conflicts that rage throughout the Middle East, or the Israel-Palestine division that seems impossible to bridge, or the Hindus in India fighting with Muslims in Pakistan; these are all fights for culture and ideology. Even if you took religion completely out of it and made all these people atheists, they would still believe that their way of life was the right way, and they would fight. Religion isn’t the root of all evil. People are.

  • Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    I had planned to post a Daily Read tonight, but then I heard the news that three young Muslims had been shot to death in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a man who has apparently referred to himself on Facebook as an “anti-theist.” This is a radical form of atheism in which the person goes beyond just not believing in god/gods/religion; instead, anti-theism is explicitly opposed to religions of any kind. According to the several articles I have read about this, the shooting is being linked to a parking dispute between the shooter and the victims, two of whom lived in the same apartment complex as the shooter. Yet, because of the shooter’s outspoken anti-theism and various remarks on his Facebook page in which he expresses extreme antipathy towards religion, and towards fundamentalist Christians and Muslims in particular, the Chapel Hill police department is investigating these murders as a possible hate crime.

    I am an atheist. My first reaction when I read that the shooter is an anti-theist was one of dismay. Atheists love to point out that no one has ever been killed in the name of atheism, while millions of people have died in the name of various religions. Already, prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins are publicly expressing their shock over the shootings and repudiating the notion that it is acceptable to kill someone because of their religious beliefs; at the same time, Dawkins is also tweeting about the parking dispute motive and blaming that instead. And parking may well be the proximate motive for these murders, but I really don’t think it’s smart to remove the shooter’s anti-theism from the equation. Instead, we should acknowledge it. If we don’t, then I fear we fall into the no true Scotsman fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone makes a proposition such as “No atheist would ever kill a Muslim simply because they are Muslim.” The rejoinder would be “The shooter in Chapel Hill is an atheist who killed Muslims.” The fallacy comes with the response that “No true atheist would kill a Muslim for being Muslim.” In other words, the person attempts to preserve their original argument by saying that this person cannot be defined as an actual atheist. In the case of these murders, atheists can also make the argument that while the shooter may be an anti-theist he is also clearly mentally ill, and that is the real reason for this tragedy. It’s not quite the no true Scotsman fallacy, but it’s the same idea; that is, it proposes that anti-theism can’t truly be the shooter’s motive.

    No true Scotsman is often used in a religious context. “No true Christian would murder an abortion doctor”; “No true Muslim would blow people up in the name of Islam”; etc. But whether we want to believe it or not, some people who identify themselves as Christian do commit violence that they attempt to justify with their version of Christianity, and some people who identify themselves as Muslim do commit acts of terror in the name of their version of Islam. They are Christian. They are Muslim. Just as atheists shouldn’t fall for the no true Scotsman fallacy in the case of this anti-theist murderer, so should Christians and Muslims not fall for it when confronted with the bad things that people will do in the name of these religions. And let’s also not get bogged down in bean-counting which religion is worse – horrible things have been done in the name of many religions throughout history and in the present, whether by individuals or entire groups.

    I think the problem is that other Christians and Muslims end up getting tarred with the same broad brush when tragedies like this happen – and now the same thing is going to happen to atheists. But just as there are Christians, Muslims, and now, apparently, atheists who commit violence in the name of their beliefs, it is equally true that not every Christian, Muslim, or atheist will commit violence in the name of their beliefs – or even that they support violence by others in the name of their beliefs. We call these people extremists for a reason – because their ideologies are extreme and, by definition, they exist on the far fringes of the overall belief systems they claim to be a part of. People tend to tack from the no true Scotsman fallacy on the one hand when the violence is done in the name of their particular religion, to the equally fallacious conclusion that if one Muslim/Christian/atheist is violent they must all be violent on the other hand.

    Personally, I think this shooter very likely is mentally ill. I also think he probably was motivated by a parking dispute – but it’s arguable that the dispute itself may not have existed had his neighbors not been clearly identifiable as Muslim based on the attire of the female victims. I also think it’s likely that mental illness is the culprit for lots of other allegedly religious-motivated crimes, particularly when they are perpetrated by individuals acting alone (and for the record, I don’t think mental illness is involved in the case of organized religious violence a la ISIS or the Lord’s Resistance Army). But let’s not dismiss the man’s anti-theism as irrelevant. If the shooter was motivated by his beliefs then it’s better to acknowledge it than to look silly by trying to deny it. Just as Muslim community leaders speak out to condemn violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, it’s smart for atheists to condemn this shooting, even if mental illness and/or a parking dispute is truly the culprit. No true atheist should do otherwise.