Refined, non-literal religion

In The Case for ‘Soft Atheism’, philosopher Gary Gutting interviews fellow philosopher and atheist, Philip Kitcher. Kitcher gives a pretty good account of atheism. His response to Gutting's pressure on why he denies the transcendental is not as good as I would like; it's a better argument, I think, to dismiss transcendentalism as incoherent, rather than as simply unevidenced.

Kitcher's account, however, of "refined religion" is terrible. According to Kitcher, New Atheist critiques of religion "have been rightly criticized for treating all religions as if they were collections of doctrines, to be understood in quite literal ways." Kitcher describes a kind of religion that escapes the New Atheist critiques. I cannot improve on Kitcher's succinct description, so I will quote it at length:

Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did.

Here's the problem: where do these "most enduring values" come from? How do we know what they are? Are love, tolerance, peace, liberty, cooperation, and happiness are the most enduring values? Perhaps these most enduring values are submission to authority, oppression of the heretic, denial of pleasure, and glorification of others' and our own suffering? Maybe pure hedonism is the most enduring value; perhaps it is absolute individual selfishness, untainted by sentimentality and the slightest concern for others?

According to Kitcher, the refined religious"

see all religions as asserting that there is more to the cosmos than is dreamed of either in our mundane thoughts or in our most advanced scientific descriptions. Different cultures gesture toward the “transcendent” facets of reality in their many alternative myths and stories. None of the myths is factually true, although they’re all true in the sense that their “fruits for life” are good. . . .

I see refined religion as a halfway house. In the end, a thoroughly secular perspective, one that doesn’t suppose there to be some “higher” aspect of reality to serve as the ground of values (or as the ground of assurance that the important values can be realized), can do everything refined religion can do, without becoming entangled in mysteries and difficult problems. Most important, this positive secular humanism focuses directly on the needs of others, treating people as valuable without supposing that the value derives from some allegedly higher source. The supposed “transcendent” toward which the world’s religions gesture is both a distraction and a detour.

I think Kitcher is oversimplifying the New Atheist critique of religion. First, there are billions of people who take their doctrines literally. Because these people create enormous social problems, we tend to focus on them. We don't talk much about "refined religion" for two reasons: there are relatively few of them, and those few don't create as many social and political problems per capita. They're not a big part of the problem, and as people trying to address a serious, substantial problem, we want to focus most of our attention on, you know, the actual problem. It is not that we believe that all religious people are doctrinaire literalists. It's that there are a metric assload of religious people who are doctrinaire literalists, and they're a big problem.

But we do understand "refined religion," and we do talk about it. I've been talking about it for at least ten years. The problem with "refined religion" is first that it's not "refined" in any meaningful sense of the word. Refined means being distilled or purified to the essence, and "refined" religion is the opposite: it's doctrinaire literalism watered down with compromise and equivocation. Religious people should be doctrinaire literalists in the same sense that soldiers should be doctrinaire literalists about their orders and that policemen and judges should be doctrinaire literalists about the law. The law is not a collection of "apt metaphors or parables for informing our understand of" social behavior. The law means exactly what it literally says, no more, no less; the only reason that judges ever have to do any substantive interpretation of the law itself is that human beings (not being gods) are lousy at writing laws. "Refined religion" commits the same sin that the Supreme Court (supposedly) committed in Lochner v. New York: reading its own policy preferences into the Constitution. Either scripture is authoritative or it is not; if it is authoritative, then it means what it says; if it is not authoritative, if it is metaphor and parable, then how are you religious?

But the New Atheists' criticism of religion is not that religious people are doctrinaire literalists. Doctrinaire literalism is just the most virulent (and stupidest) manifestation of a deeper, more fundamental problem. The problem is the assertion of revealed moral authority. The problem is not that religious people devote themselves to their deepest values; the problem is that religious people — all religious people, because this is what it means to be religious — take their deepest values to be "transcendent," beyond our "mundane thoughts or . . . our most advanced scientific descriptions." It doesn't matter whether you take these transcendent values literally out of the Bible (or Torah, or Koran, or Veddas, or whatever), or whether you make them up on the spot. Indeed, those who take these values literally from scripture have a much stronger claim to authority than those who make up their own "transcendent" values. The error of the doctrinaire literalists and that of the "refined" is exactly the same: taking one's personal preferences as objective truth. There's nothing wrong with personal preferences per se; our society and culture is nothing more than the millennial negotiation and social construction of personal preferences. To an atheist, what else could it be? But when a person takes his personal preferences to be revealed truth, God's truth, whether those truths are pulled out of a book or out of his ass, he is assuming an authority he has no right to claim.

I have to compare the criticism of religion to the criticism of racism, in a particular sense. (I do not mean to say that being religious is the same as being racist.) A lot of people who criticize racism naturally focus on the really dramatic instances: the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the grossly disproportionate incarceration rates of black people, the grossly disproportionate rates of black poverty, racial profiling, not to mention three hundred years of slavery, rape, lynching, cross-burning, overt discrimination, ad nauseam. To argue that this criticism somehow is itself "rightly criticized" because it ignores all those white people who don't go around actively lynching black people is the height of obtuse stupidity; indeed it is simply apologetics for white racism. Even those "refined" racists, those who believe that of course lynching is terribly wrong, but still think that black people are inferior and need the guidance, benevolence and (sadly, sometimes firm) correction of the superior white race are still racists. They are still holding the fundamental error of the most virulent lynch-every-fourteen-year-ool-who-talks-to-a-white-woman (oops, I mean Emmett Till racist: that black people are inferior to white people. The "refined" racists cannot attack the virulent racists on the one tenet that would completely, instantly undermine their position: the supposed inferiority of black people. And as long as this one tenet remains, the virulent racists will not fade away.

Again, I don't want to say that religion is like racism. The comparison is on one point and one point only: the fundamental principles of both are wrong. The "refined" must protect the foundational tenet of the virulent, the fanatic. And, like racism, as long as the foundational tenet remains, religious fanatics will also remain.

Sophisticated Theology

"God is dead," says Nietzsche. He's right. Every form of theology and religion, from Aquinas and Spinoza to Spong, Craig and Plantinga has been found false, vacuous or trivial. There's no there there. the only sophistication in "sophisticated" theology is in the obfuscation and double-talk hiding the underlying bullshit of the theologian's theory. The philosophical battle is over. That the Gnu Atheists are bringing nothing philosophically new to the table is a fair cop: there's nothing new to bring. We need not bring anything new to debunk flat-Earth theories, philogiston or the luminiferous ether; and we need not bring anything new to debunk religion. Religious apologists are in a Wile E. Coyote situation. They've already stepped off the cliff; they dare not look down lest they fall.

If you're using the terms "religion" or "God" you're either wrong, you're saying nothing at all, or you're saying what you could say more easily and straightforwardly without reference to the error, oppression, and atrocity that has for millennia been the purview of religion. Do you believe the world is 6,000 years old because the Bible tells you so? You are wrong. Do you believe that God is the ground of all being? You are flapping your lips without actually saying anything, and you're wasting everyone's time. Do you believe that God is the natural order of the universe? You are wrapping modern science in the trappings of parasite, pedophiliac priests and pompous popes. All of these activities are — or should be — beneath the dignity of a civilized, educated person.

Just as the program of modern physics is not to examine arguments and theories about the luminiferous ether in a scholarly, careful manner, the Gnu Atheist program is not to examine arguments and theories about God. That program is complete; to continue is to paint the lily. The Gnu Atheist program is simply to encourage people to actually look down: their religious beliefs rest not just on sand but on nothing at all. Of course, getting rid of a bad way of thinking, however prevalent and pernicious, is not to absolutely ensure good ways of thinking. Humanity is prone to endless varieties of error, vanity and bullshit, even if God and religion are decisively rejected. But to argue against the Gnu Atheist program on this basis is to commit the Utopian Fallacy; that eradicating smallpox will not eradicate all disease is no argument against eradicating smallpox.

There are several components to the Gnu Atheist program. In their rush to defend an utterly failed intellectual program, the religious all too often attempt to undermine scientific inquiry, intellectual integrity and basic principles of factual accuracy, institutions and social constructions the Gnu Atheists strongly advocate.

I see the Gnu Atheist program as primarily a matter of political principle. The fundamental and ineluctable social role of religion has been to externalize and objectify social and political preferences onto a God and into the privileged control of a priesthood. Usually these social and political preferences are those of the ruling class, sometimes they are those of the population at large*. Sometimes those preferences, both of the ruling class and the hoi polloi, would meet with the approval of most Gnu Atheists (who are predominantly liberal humanists); sometimes they are not. Because religion is fundamentally vacuous, it can be used to support any position, odious or laudatory. From a position of pure expediency, we might want to strongly confront those preferences we disapprove of, and praise (or at least remain silent about) those we approve of. There is a place for expediency (in the long run, as Keynes wryly observes, we are all dead), but in this case we believe expediency must yield to principle.

*In history, the people have on occasion used the form and forum of specifically religious discourse to resist the depredations of the ruling class, sometimes in a revolutionary manner. But even as a component of revolution, religion is a Johnny-come-lately, always following material forces. When revolution is already in the air, some would-be religious authority will inevitably attribute the revolutionary forces to his or her god.

The Gnu Atheist program is about the principle: it is illegitimate, we maintain, to attribute any preference to God. (To attribute no preferences at all to God is to render the concept superfluous.) There's nothing wrong per se with preferences — the negotiation of preferences is central to even the weak-tea pseudo-democracy we have in the West — but the Gnu Atheist goal is to persuade people to own their preferences directly. We want advocates of all sides of important social negotiations — feminism, racism, gay rights, etc. — to take personal ownership of what are, after all, their own preferences and desires. I am not interested that you think God hates fags: I want to know what you personally think about gay rights. But as a matter of principle, I am equally uninterested that you think God loves gay people. You are the citizen, and you have standing to negotiate for your preferences. God (if by no other virtue than His non-existence) is not a citizen; His preferences have no more standing than Hu Jintao's. Similarly, your preferences are only your own preferences; attributing those preferences to a God does not in any sense elevate them in prestige or importance.

To no small extent, I have more contempt for religious liberals than I do for religious "fundamentalists". If you have some disgusting or odious belief — that women's uteri are public property, that homosexuals are filthy perverts, that black people are inherently inferior, that the poor and working class deserve to be exploited, harassed, and oppressed — then I have some sympathy with the fundamental embarrassment you would feel, which would cause you to externalize this belief onto your God. But why externalize a good belief onto God? Do you personally not give a fig on your own account for the well-being of all humanity? Do you care about humanity only because you think God does? Do you believe your own human sympathy for the well-being of your fellow human beings is not a sufficient reason for resisting oppression, eliminating suffering, and helping others to be happy? If we could know that a God actually did exist, and know He actually did hate fags, would you follow God or would you follow your own human sympathy? If God is by definition always on humanity's side, there's not need for God; if not, whose side are you on: God's or humanity's?

Attributing humanistic preferences to God as a method of "engaging" with fundamentalists is nothing more than conceit. As Rieux succinctly notes, "A fundamental problem with "liberal" religion is that its offered rebuttal—"No God Doesn't [Hate Fags]"—concedes the issues on which the [Westboro Baptist Church] is actually vulnerable, and it reduces a matter of serious moral concern to a quibble about the thought processes of an invisible and ineffable deity. That's the sole debate that conservative believers can and do win." This sort of theological discourse not only concedes that God is not always on humanity's side, but is nothing but Argument Clinic futility. And as most scripture was written in cultures that were, by today's standards, brutal and oppressive, the religious liberals must commit more sins than the fundamentalists against common sense and intellectual integrity to find scriptural support for their modern beliefs. Finally, every religious "liberal" I've met has some sort of political and ethical principle that he or she cannot support merely by an appeal to the well-being of humanity. I would be please, of course, if someone were to renounce explicit chattel slavery, but that renunciation would not dissuade me in the least from criticizing the formation of second-class citizenship or its theological justification.

What I want, and what I think a majority of the Gnu Atheists want, is for each person in our democracy to stand up and say, "I don't give a fig what God wants, this is what I want." If you want women's uteri to be public property, stand up and say that's what you want, and God be damned. Equally, if you want a woman's uterus to be her own property, stand up and say that's what you want. To attribute any belief, good or bad, to God is to give away the basic tenet of a democracy: that a society should be — in broad terms — what its citizens want, not what God wants, and especially not what those want who can most persuasively assert private, privileged knowledge of God's wishes. There is no middle ground between democracy and tyrannical theocracy. A benevolent tyranny is still tyranny.