On Religion

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
[To such heights of evil are men driven by religion]
-Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

I just finished reading the polemic “God is not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything” by literary critic, journalist, and essayist Christopher Hitchens – and am feeling quite smug and self-satisfied as is typically the case when one finds oneself agreeing with most everything contained in a serious work of non-fiction.

Mr. Hitchens is a witty and compelling writer – although his background as a literary critic makes for some tough sledding for someone who spent all too much of his time in school studying the banalities of twentieth century business and governmental management (not to mention governmental accounting) - as opposed to reading the literary classics. But while many of the literary allusions may have been lost on me; the central thrust of the book was readily understandable: god(s) are a creation of man (not the other way around) and the falsity of religion should be self-evident to any person with even the most casual understanding of the natural world as it is known and explained by modern science and reason.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort,reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children know more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule for precisely these reasons. I read, for example, of some ecumenical conference of Christians who desire to show their broad-mindedness and invite some
physicists along. But I am compelled to remember what I know – which is that there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily
explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion.

Mr. Hitchens’ personal experiences as a journalist provide compelling and disturbing first-hand accounts of the barbarity of sectarian violence in the recent past.

A week before the events of September 11,2001, I was on a panel with Dennis Prager, who is one of America’s better-known religious broadcasters. He challenged me in public to answer what he called a ‘straight yes/no question,’ and I happily agreed. Very well, he said. I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now – would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? As the reader will see, this is not a question to which a yes/no answer can be given. But I was able to answer it as if it were not hypothetical. “Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.

And Mr. Hitchens’experiences in these locales are truly not pretty…

If I have a criticism of the book as a whole, it is Mr. Hitchens placing the persistence of religion among our species as almost wholly a function of our willful ignorance and credulity without a serious discussion of how that credulity may, in fact, have biological origins. Today, there is much exciting work going on in the field of evolutionary biology and more and more suggestion that many universal human traits such as an appreciation for music, art, and religion may have a genetic basis. This is not to suggest that there is a “religion” gene per se; but rather that a belief in religion may be associated with other genetic markers relating to group cohesiveness or other social traits that proved highly beneficial to the human species.

Or perhaps not.

But as we gain more knowledge and understanding of the human genome we shall see…and that is but another example of what makes science and reason so much more satisfying to me than the dead hand of religion…

Finally, on a personal note, I must confess that I have NEVER been a believer. I have,on at least a half a dozen occasions dating back to my late teenage years attempted to read the Good Book – to understand just what it was about that tome that so excited so many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. I have tried reading it from the beginning of the Old Testament and from the beginning of the New Testament. I tried skipping around. But no matter what I tried it never once impressed me as a literary work much less as the revealed word of an omnipotent law giver - and I quickly gave up on the project every time. In point of fact, I found the book abhorrent in its violence and savagery. I’m afraid I’m just not a Bronze Age or Iron Age kind of guy…

But I have long suspected (as does Mr. Hitchens) that religion is something that is best learned as a child. Like smoking, odds are that if one has not acquired the habit by the age of reason, then it is likely not to be acquired at all.

Not that later-in-life conversions don’t happen. I’m sure death-bed conversions DO occur – for the obvious reason - and I have met a number of folks who “found god” as part of their recovery from various addictions or other personal traumas. And I didn’t start smoking until I was 21.

I am immensely grateful to my parents for protecting me from religious instruction.