“why don’t you believe in God? He’s not religion. Religion is man made.” - forgiven+free (3/4/2009 11:45:36 PM)

There are certain claims and arguments that theists put forth over and over again no matter how many times we atheists point out their fatal flaws.

The claims that gOd and religion are two different things and that gOd is true and good and real while religion is false and bad and man-made are good examples.

These particular claims were recently repeated by a nationally syndicated columnist:

—– Religion Is Driving People Away From God (Leonard Pitts Jr/The Miami Herald/The Dallas Morning News; March 13)

We are losing our religion.

That, with apologies to R.E.M., is the startling conclusion of a new study, the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, Conn. The poll of more than 54,000 American adults found a sharp erosion in the number of people claiming religious affiliation.

A few highlights: The number of people who call themselves Christian is 76 percent, down 10 points since 1990.

Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious ceremony.

Better than one in four Americans do not expect a religious funeral.

It is important to reiterate that we are talking about overall percentages. In raw numbers, there are actually about 22 million “more” Christians now than in 1990. Still, the trend is clear, particularly as illustrated in one telling statistic: In 1990, 8.2 percent (about 14 million) of us said “none” when asked to specify their religion. Last year, 15 percent (34 million) did.

Some have suggested our loss of faith is due to increased diversity, mobility and immigration. I’m sure there’s something to that, but I tend to think the most important cause is simpler: Religion has become an ugly thing.

People of faith usually respond to that ugliness – by which I mean a seemingly endless cycle of scandal, controversy, hypocrisy, violence and TV preachers saying idiot things – in one of two ways. Either they defend it (making them part of the problem) or they regard it as a series of isolated, albeit unfortunate, episodes. But irreligious people do neither.

And people of faith should ask themselves: What is the cumulative effect upon outside observers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like lords on the largesse of the poor, multiplied by Jimmy Swaggart’s pornography addiction, plus Eric Rudolph bombing Olympians and gays in the name of God, plus Muslims hijacking airplanes in the name of God, multiplied by the church that kicked out some members because they voted Democratic, multiplied by the square root of Catholic priests preying on little boys while the church looked on and did nothing, multiplied by Muslims rioting over cartoons? Then subtract selflessness, service, sacrifice, holiness and hope.

Do the math, and I bet you’ll draw the same conclusion the researchers did.

Who can be surprised if the sheer absurdity, fundamentalist cruelty and ungodly hypocrisy that have characterized so much “religion” in the last 30 years have driven people away?

So far, so good. (I’d just add that religion has always had its ugly side and that it amounts to unsupported goofiness even at its best.)

But then Pitts’s train of thought goes off the tracks in an all-too-familiar way:

If all I knew of God was what I had seen in the headlines, I would not be eager to make his acquaintance. I am thankful I know more.

Including that God and religion are not synonymous. God is, for the faithful at least, the sovereign creator of all creation. Religion is what men and women put in place, ostensibly to worship and serve him. Too often, though, religion worships and serves that which has nothing to do with him, worships money and serves politics, worships charisma and serves ego, worships intolerance and serves self.

The ARIS survey should serve as a wakeup call to organized religion. It continues in this manner at the risk of irrelevance. I am reminded of a line from the movie Oh God, with George Burns as the deity and John Denver as the grocery store manager reluctantly recruited to spread The Word.

“I don’t even go to church,” says the manager.

And God says, “Neither do I.”

Although Pitts says that he’s thankful he knows more, he doesn’t say exactly how he knows more. Did gOd send him a personal revelation? (If so, why should we find that revelation any more credible than those claimed to have been received by Mohammad, Joseph Smith, or asylum inmates?) Has he gleaned his superior knowledge from exposure to “true” religion? (Exactly how does one separate “true” religion from the vastly greater number of false ones?) As near as I can tell from the little he tells us here, Pitts’s “knowledge” seems to be based on faith – which is the unjustly respectable way of saying that he “knows” what he knows because he wants to. Quoting a couple lines from an old movie comedy that might more or less share his point of view does little to support his claims. If anything, it seems to me to underscore just how painfully unsophisticated debates about gOd and religion tend to be in the American press. It’s like seeing a national columnist quoting Homer Simpson on how to solve the economic crisis….

Here’s a brief review of my own thinking on these issues:

I define theism as belief in the existence of gOd.

I define religion as the belief in supernatural forces or entities (such as gOd) coupled with the belief that our behavior (e.g., prayers, rituals, the way we live our lives) can influence how those forces or entities treat us.

While it’s true that theism and religion aren’t synonymous, that seems to me to be a rather trivial truth that cannot support the weight of the implications and conclusions people like Pitts try to pile on top of it.

Pure theism – belief in gOd without any belief in religion – is vanishing rare in my experience. At best it inspires a kind of Deism that says gOd exists but has no influence on the universe today and we have no influence on him/her/it. For all practical purposes, it’s hard to see how belief in such a gOd differs from my belief in no gOd at all. I suppose it may serve as a kind of security blanket for some people, but it’s a terribly thin blanket. One might just as easily interpret it as a hairshirt instead – a psychologically torturous thing woven from the view that an incompetent or malicious gOd first created a world full of pain for us, then utterly abandoned us to it.

Religion without gOd has also been vanishingly rare in my experience. The best example I can think of involves those Buddhist claims about karma and how the way we live this life determines the sort of life we’ll enjoy when we’re reincarnated. Other examples involve primitive tribes that seem to have practiced religion as a kind of gOd-free magic. (Note that my definition of religion excludes things like cultural Judaism, humanism, and love of sports.)

So: Theism without religion and religion without theism *do* exist, but at the extreme margins of life. They involve very few people – people who seem to have virtually zero impact on our national debates or how I live my life. Far more common are people like Pitts who seem reduced to squawking about how gOd isn’t religion and religion isn’t gOd when confronted with some uncomfortable facts they apparently can’t deal with any other way.

As near as I can tell, such squawkers don’t really mean what they’re saying. Although they may deny it when it serves their purposes to do so, it seems to me that they in fact *do* have a religion – that is, a belief in a deity that can be influenced by what they do and who will one day judge them. They just think that this religion of theirs and its rules are better and truer than those of others or that they themselves do a better job of living up to those rules.

Now maybe Pitts *does* do a better job living up to those rules than the Bakkers and the Swaggarts of the world. But that’s not the issue we need to analyze or debate when someone says gOd isn’t religion or that what they embrace is good and true theism, not bad and false religion. The question isn’t whether or not there are good and bad religious adherents; the question is whether theists are significantly different from and/or better than religious adherents. And I think the answer to that question is “No!”

Theism and religion are both rooted in absurdity and lack of empirical evidence. Both (as numerous noters have already pointed out) are human inventions. Much of what theists claim to know about theism comes from religion and religious institutions; conversely, individual versions of theism seem to have often inspired religions. The psychological, philosophical, and historical connections are too many and too numerous to mention here today. Suffice it to say that those who claim theism and religion are two very different things that inspire two very different sets of behaviors are being disingenuous and perhaps self-deceptive at best. At worst, they’re simply engaging in the same tired old game of “My imaginary friend in the sky is truer and better than YOUR imaginary friend in the sky! My friend LOVES me ’cause I’m on his side – and boy, is he gonna whack YOUR ass someday!” Ho hum…. Please get back to me when you have something new and convincing to say instead.

That’s a short review of my thinking on this subject.

For a more detailed version, see the entry I posted on July 24, 2007.

Now, tell me what YOU think. :-)