On Wednesday I shared a very interesting essay by Phil Zuckerman. It included lots of statistics that reveal the many ways non-religious countries are better off than religious countries. (I’ve shared similar statistics from numerous other sources many times before. You can find one notable example with links to others here.)

As Pam pointed out in a note on my diary, however, Zuckerman is careful to also say this: “The information presented in this discussion in no way proves that high levels of organic atheism cause societal health or that low levels of organic atheism cause societal ills such as poverty or illiteracy. The wealth, poverty, well-being, and suffering in various nations are caused by numerous political, historical, economic, and sociological factors that are far more determinant than people’s personal belief systems. Rather, the conclusion to be drawn from the data provided above is simply that high levels of irreligion do not automatically result in a breakdown of civilisation, a rise in immoral behaviour, or in ’sick societies’.”

I strongly disagree with both the thrust and the tone of these comments.

After 10+ years of intense investigation of theism and related issues, I want to scream “OF COURSE an increase in intrinsically absurd religious beliefs results in many more problems than does an increase in rational thought and the atheism it gives rise to! The many correlations Zuckerman details are NOT merely coincidental and they are NOT merely the result of political, historical, economic, and sociological factors acting independent of religion!” This is so painfully obvious to me that the burden of proof long ago shifted in my mind to those who disagree. As far as I am aware of, they have failed to meet that burden. Zuckerman certainly doesn’t meet it in his essay (where he simply inserts his little proviso without even trying to defend it). Unfortunately, so many people seem to share his belief (or have been primed to accept it or remain silent) that actual evidence to support that belief is rarely ever asked for, let alone provided. This is most unfortunate.

For my part, I think my diary has provided a virtual mountain of evidence over many years in support of my own contrary conclusion. I hope long-time readers over there have at least some inkling of this and can recall at least some of the details (either from my 4600+ Theist Files - which I perhaps most explicitly explained here - or from entries like the one based on James A. Haight’s eye-opening book, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the ’90s).

Here is a very brief summary for newbies and for those who might like a list of talking points to bring up when discussing these issues with theists and others who are inclined to all too readily let religion off the hook for the many ills that it’s either responsible for or makes much worse:

1) As I said in the entry about these issues that I posted back on Feb 3, 2007, “Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington seems to strongly support my basic point of view in his famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Here’s just one of many passages I could quote: ‘[R]eligion… is the principle defining characteristics of civilizations [and] fault line wars are almost always between peoples of different religions. Some analysts downplay the significance of this factor. They point, for instance, to the shared ethnicity and language, past peaceful coexistence, and extensive intermarriage of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and dismiss the religious factor with references to Freud’s “narcissism of small differences.” That judgment, however, is rooted in secular myopia. Millennia of human history have shown that religion is not a “small difference” but possibly the most profound difference that can exist between people. The frequency, intensity, and violence of fault line wars are greatly enhanced by beliefs in different gods’(pp. 253-254).”

2) As I discussed at length in the entry I posted on June 9, 2004, Daniel J. Boorstin’s book, The Discoverers, reveals in great detail the tremendously harmful impact religion has had on scientific progress and the free inquiry it depends upon. As I state in that entry, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that virtually everything we believe and do today as modern people we believe and do because of scientists and thinkers whom the religious authorities of the past would have exterminated had they had the power to do so.” In addition to revealing the sins of Christianity, Boorstin reveals the less well known sins of Islam – sins which continue to have a terribly negative impact in many Islamic countries today. The lack of literacy and scientific progress in those countries is NO accident of history. It is a direct result of denying women the right to an education, the severe restrictions that exist on the flow of information, the enormous amounts of time and energy wasted on religious studies and arguments, and other things that spring directly from the Koran, the alleged sayings of Muhammad, or the pronouncements of Islamic clerics. And of course religion’s ability to throw sand in the gears of progress extends far beyond the Islamic countries. The increasing Christianization of Africa seems to have intensified rather than eliminated the witch hunts that are unfolding there, retarded the effort to combat AIDS (as the Pope inadvertently reminded us), and had a major a role in the Rwanda genocide (among other things). We also see the damage it does here in the US when we read about restrictions on stem cell research, attempts to have creationism taught and/or evolution suppressed, attempts to limit sex ed to failed abstinence-only programs, and attempts to minimize or dismiss the role human activity plays in global warming. It is NOT a coincidence that the most religious areas of the world are those least likely to take a scientific approach to problem solving and the most likely to be mired in superstitious nonsense, endless conflict, and economic stagnation. It is NOT a coincidence that we see the same pattern in the US when we compare the less religious areas of the country with the Bible Belt. It is NOT a coincidence that the centuries when religion was at its strongest in the West are known as The Dark Ages and the Age of Religious Wars. Many additional relevant details can be found in books such as Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason that show what a disaster the rise of Christianity was for those who valued objective truth more than sectarian dogma. If religion was actually good for progress and atheism bad, we’d be reading about places like Somalia and Afghanistan becoming great economic powerhouses – not officially atheistic mainland China.

3) Religion quite naturally inspires pointless conflict. We see this today in the US in the battle over gay marriage – just one aspect of a Bible-based war on homosexuality that has led to such things as the Pentagon’s discharging gay personnel it spent millions to train and whose translation skills (among others) could be playing a critical role in maintaining our national security. Religion, you might recall, helped bring about the American Civil War by first sanctioning the slave trade, then offering a “respectable” defense of slavery, and then it super-charged emotions of both sides during that war and led it to being one of the bloodiest ever. Even that is just one small example of the incredible damage religion has done over the centuries as it’s turned family member against family member (as Jesus promised in Matt. 10:34-37), sect against sect, Orthodox believers against heretics, men against women, and country against country. The hatred that I find in my newspaper everyday is most often religiously-motivated hatred, whether expressed in the latest news story from the Middle East or in the Letters to the Editor section. Indeed, it was the extreme animosity towards atheists that was being expressed by “good” Christians in their letters to the newspaper as they tried to defend Ohio’s theistic motto that played a huge role in my starting this diary in the first place. That animosity continues today (as the extreme emotions generated by the John Freshwatercase indicates).

4) Religious conflicts are deeper, longer-lasting, and more dangerous than other kinds. As I pointed out in the entry I posted on Feb 5, 2007, the internal and external conflicts and horrors unleashed by the likes of Stalin and Communism were relatively short-lived (there being only about 70 years between the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union). The conflicts between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Sunnis and Shiites, and Hindus and Muslims, in sharp contrast, have gone on for centuries. In many cases, NO resolution is yet in sight. Indeed, one could argue that things have gotten worse and in some ways much more dangerous in recent decades. As authors such as Charles B. Strozier, Jonathan Kirsch, and Mark Juergensmeyer have discussed in great detail, the religious mindset naturally inspires and lends itself to absolutist ways of thinking that intensify arrogance, dehumanizes the Other, and casts compromise as an unholy deal with the devil and a betrayal of gOd. (Go here for elaboration and links. Or just spend a few minutes pondering this immortal quote from Pat Robertson: “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”) As Noam Chomsky said at a 2004 conference on terrorism, “If you’re getting messages from God, you don’t need to argue…. The message is from God to eradicate evil. What’s to discuss?” And as Jared Diamond and Kirsch have pointed out, monotheism seems an especially dangerous promoter and intensifier of violence. It’s NOT a coincidence that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated by Muslims backed by a 1300-year-old theology and a belief in a wonderful afterlife rather than by Communist Vietnamese seeking vengeance for years of American napalming or relatively secular African governments trying to avenge centuries of (predominantly Christian) enslavement. It’s also important to keep in mind that theists and religious adherents are the only ones I’ve ever encountered who not only believe in an inevitable Doomsday but look forward to it – and in some cases are actually working to bring it about! You can learn much more in the long series of entries I posted about the history of apocalyptic thought and End Times theology; the entry I posted here is perhaps the one that’s most relevant to this discussion. If you can stand to ponder this sort of insanity at length, Gershom Gorenberg’s book, 
The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, is must-read material.

5) Religion often inspires unhelpful forms of thought and behavior. Even when it isn’t actively inspiring Crusades and jihads, Inquisitions and witch hunts, it has a way of mucking things up in a host of somewhat subtler ways. Think of Jehovah’s Witnesses and their Bible-based rejection of transfusions and how many lives that’s cost. Think of the parents who turn to faith healers and exorcists instead of modern medicine – or who sanction the marriage of their very young daughters to much older polygamist males. Think of those who spend their time praying for peace and change rather than actively working to bring them about. Think about the ways Mormonism, Catholicism, Quiverfull, and Hindu/Muslim baby races work to worsen the human overpopulation problem and all that means for other species, pollution, resource depletion, etc. Think about the tens of billions of dollars wasted every year on buildings and statues and pipe organs and all the other items of relevance only to religious adherents while the basic needs of billions of people go unmet. Think of the fatalism inspired by Hindu/Buddhist ideas about Karma or the mandates of caste, Taoism’s “Everything is an illusion” approach, and the Christian’s “God has a plan” claim. Think about the countless hours you’ve wasted in YOUR life having to deal with the absurd religious assertions and rituals of friends and relatives and other theists when there’s so much more to the world and life to enjoy and so much yet to be discovered – then try not to cry over the stupendous stupidity of it all….

That’s *some* of my response to Zuckerman and others who are inclined to give religion a pass despite all the awful things it clearly correlates with (and, I would say, has caused or made worse). In my mind, the question isn’t whether or not theism and religion are good things (or even neutral things) but “Why isn’t the damage being done by theism and religion as obvious to others as it is to me?”

I wish I knew the answer. Part of it is, I believe, simply a matter of ignorance. Many Christians simply haven’t read their own Bible, let alone the statistics compiled by people like Zuckerman, or any of the books I’ve referenced – or even today’s newspaper. But that hardly explains the almost willful blindness and disingenuous approach of Zuckerman and those like him. What does?

I wish I knew.

Here are a few of the possibilities that come to mind:

—– They’re actually right and I’m wrong. (Perhaps – but I have no reason to think so given all the evidence I’ve presented in support of my views in this entry and elsewhere and Zuckerman’s mere assertion of the contrary in his entry. If YOU know of any evidence that refutes what I’ve presented here, please share it.)

—– Politeness. Some atheists don’t like to argue. Others don’t want to rile theists because they hate conflict or don’t think they can win. Many don’t want to become known as “The Angry Atheist” or as an atheist in the same obnoxious mold as Madalyn Murray O’Hair. (I think we need to get over this and let the evidence take us where it will – and then share it. As it is, it seems to me that far too many atheists are willing to fold even when they have the winning hand.)

—– Cultural conditioning. Growing up in a strongly Christian or Jewish or Islamic or Hindu culture can result in even atheists having an emotional soft spot for theism. It also seems to channel our ways of thinking down certain pro-religion pathways – and the ruts of those pathways can be very difficult to break free of even after we consider ourselves to be free of belief in gOd. Blind spots are natural in such a situation. Similar blind spots can make it very difficult for us to objectively evaluate our own ethnic group, our own families, and our own countries (among other things). (Perhaps we need to try harder and finally break the habit of giving religion the benefit of a doubt long after it’s proven itself undeserving of any break.)

—– Liberal disbelief in the power of religion coupled with a misguided over-emphasis on tolerance. I sometimes get the sense that atheists who have broken free of the power of religion (or never felt that power to begin with) simply cannot imagine religion really having much power over anyone else, so they automatically substitute other motive forces (such as lust, greed, desire for power, etc.). I also often get the sense that some liberals (perhaps including Obama) have a terribly exaggerated respect for the power of acceptance and “reaching out” and a “live and let live” philosophy. (I think these faults – if they exist – can be remedied by a closer study of religion and religious people – and by empirical testing/future events. If Obama’s change in tone and policy towards the Islamic world leads to peace and understanding and greater freedom for women, etc., great! I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong to doubt the power of liberalism to change the minds of our enemies for the better. If his changes fail to prevent a worsening of religious-inspired wars or devastating new religion-inspired terrorist attacks, I hope he and others will be as willing to revise their beliefs accordingly.)

—– Religion and the many ills it seems to spawn actually have some other common cause. (What might that cause be? Ignorance? Poverty? I’m not convinced. At best, it seems to me that religion inspires certain situations that, in turn, reinforce religious ideas and tendencies and a self-perpetuating downward spiral ensues.)

Are there other possibilities? What are they? And what evidence can you muster for them?

For now, two final points:

—– Imagine a world in which hundreds of millions of people asserted that Mother Goose was the beginning and end of true wisdom and morality. And imagine that people in that world acted on that belief and set up special buildings for the propagation of Goosism, and devoted one day a week to Goose worship, and wrote and sold and read countless books about the true meaning of Mother Goose’s stories, and set up radio and TV stations that sent a steady stream of Goose logic into every home and car, and missionaries regularly went door-to-door to bring the words of the Goose to anyone who may have somehow failed to get the message. And suppose after many decades of this, sociologists studied countries that embraced Goosism and compared them to countries that didn’t and they found what Zuckerman found – that in almost every area of life, the countries that embraced Goosism were worse off than those that didn’t. Would anyone shrug those findings off as being nothing more than a coincidence?

—– If the statistics Zuckerman presents us with actually indicated the exact opposite of what they do, how many people do you think would say, “Oh, the correlation between theism and social health is merely an illusion – atheism might still be the healthiest philosophy for nations to embrace”? Theists would laugh our asses right out of court! And they’d be justified in doing so (though it still wouldn’t prove the truth of theism, which is an entirely different question). Why shouldn’t we return the favor?