One of the ways I’ve spent far too much time in recent months is poking around in two Quora spaces where atheists and other Unbelievers attack Gotchas (mostly flimsy ones) posted by religious Believers, much as children with sticks attack a piñata. Mind you, there are also Believers in both spaces who whack back enthusiastically at the unGodly criticisms and dismissals.1
What struck me after only a few visits is how each side has a not-terribly-long list of familiar barbs and retorts that they redraft and repost again and again (and again). Many if not most of the posts on both sides appear to be made by people interested only in condescending to and belittling the folks on the opposing team. (It also seems clear that many of the Christian-team questions are actually posted by habitual or professional trolls interested only in ‘owning the atheists’, or even merely in stirring up trouble generally or scoring views.) The Unbelievers for their part keep coming right back with answers and retorts — and it didn’t take long to get the sense that surely every frequent participant on both sides has by now heard every one of the other side’s basic arguments again and again.
I’m only rarely tempted to add a response of my own; and as time has gone by, one type of response I’ve become most likely to add is one in which I plead with a participant on either side to stop with the belittling and the condescension and the cheap slagging-off. (For all the good such admonishments ever do. Ah, well. Once a Libra always a Libra, I guess.2)
But I take that mutual hostility and dismissiveness, on Quora and in the world, very seriously, with grief at the injustice and even more at the waste. One of the most ruinous culture wars currently raging in my country (and I expect in a number of others) is the one between certain Overly Literal Believers and certain of their Overly Literal Unbeliever adversaries. When I was a kid, this battle was scarcely visible, but now it shows up (both baldly and directly, and more obliquely as an occasion for dissension in culture and politics) multiple times in each news cycle.
It’s been a number of years now since I started identifying myself as somebody living in the DMZ3 between the two sides.
Definitions? Happily:
Overly Literal Believers insist that their supernatural religion is objectively and exclusively true, and that it is possible for humans to know this.
Overly Literal Unbelievers insist that all supernatural religions are objectively false, and that it is possible for humans to prove this.
Against which allow me to juxtapose perhaps my favorite bumper sticker of all time:
[Can I hear an “Amen”?]
The problem common to both groups is that neither can conclusively prove the ‘objectively’ piece in their definition. It’s the Unbelievers who are forever pointing out that the Believers are entirely incapable of proving that their supernatural claims are true; but the Unbelievers themselves are equally incapable of proving that those supernatural claims are false.
Seriously: I’ve never figured out a way to prove the nonexistence of any god. One can present evidence that certain claims made for a particular god are untrue; but doing so doesn’t prove that the god doesn’t exist, only that the specific claims are inaccurate. I know of absolutely no way of proving that YHWH doesn’t exist, or Allah, or Krishna. (Or Dionysus, for that matter.) (Or Anubis.) (Etc.)
Meanwhile, the vast majority of humans (more than 80% as of 2015) still identify as Believers in one supernatural religion or another, and it seems clear to me that the insistent attacks of my fellow Unbelievers are unlikely to reduce that percentage to an insignificant fraction anytime in the near future. Which is not to deny that the worldwide percentage of humans who Believe has been decreasing — it absolutely has — but on the other hand:
There’s no guarantee that this decreasing trend will persist rather than stabilizing or reversing. Certain conditions seem to conduce to religiosity, among the principle ones widespread stress in daily life, immediate practical threats, and anxiety concerning the future. In a world beset by increasing Warming, shrinking supplies of clean water, and an apparent rise in the popularity of authoritarianism (to cite only three factors), I can’t see that stress and danger and anxiety show signs of evaporating anytime soon.
In the meantime, we still all have to live together as well as we can — to collaborate as well as we can — in largely mixed populations of Believers and Unbelievers, here on this single planet. Bullying inter-group rhetoric doesn’t strike me as the best way to achieve that goal
What’s been remarkable to me for the past decade or two (ever since about the time the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism first cantered into public view) is that while my Believer friends (mostly Christians, with a handful of Jews scattered in for variety) practically never make overt attempts to convert me to their supernatural Beliefs, I do have just a few dear Unbeliever friends who have protested (or indeed continue to protest) more or less strenuously against my willingness to accept without remonstrance other people’s religiosity.
Which is to say:
My Christian friends nearly never express a wish that I would join them in their Belief (though it would certainly not be surprising if they did, indeed, wish precisely that), whereas my willingness to accept religion as a normal and not-necessarily-evil aspect of many humans’ lives is clearly a persistent irritant to a few of my Unbeliever friends, who seem to feel that in my both-sides-ism I’m letting down the team to which I properly belong.
But hey, folks, I’m an agnostic! — albeit not literally a militant one. (Seriously: I’ve never wielded any deadly weapon in defense of my Unknowing.) And not only do I know myself incapable of proving anyone’s supernatural beliefs untrue; I also see religion as a highly positive element in many humans' lives. (And let’s not forget that religiosity has clearly been evolutionarily selected for in our species since long before we started writing about religion or anything else.)
Within the past day or so, the most insistent of my antiTheist friends wrote this Facebook response to a response of mine:
Get rid of them [all gods] because they have always held us back and are causing a lot of pain and disaster. I am thinking about the billions [of Believers], not ‘some people’ whose placebo works for them. It’s rather sad if they cannot be their ‘best selves’ without the guidance/support of anything which is associated with evil, immorality, injustice, unfairness, and silliness …
It's important that you understand that this is a deeply intelligent and heroically generous man, with a profound understanding of most things human. It was he who first introduced me forty years ago to the writing of Camus, still my most important 20th-century philosopher; and he gives a tremendous amount of his time and energy to charitable and humanistic endeavors (being in this like a significant number of my Believer friends). He’s an excellent friend and companion who possesses fine senses of humor and irony, along with a powerful capacity for empathy and concern.
All of which makes me (probably unfairly) only the more impatient with his incapacity to take a more nuanced view of religious faith, to appreciate the potential merits as well as the too-familiar drawbacks. I sometimes wonder if that incapacity is at least partly owing to his not having been brought up attending church himself. (Though there again, the predominant denomination in the country where he has spent most of his life is indeed deeply and problematically conservative, both religiously and politically, so likely it’s as well that he wasn’t churched.) As I’ve said repeatedly elsewhere, the beliefs of the clergy and congregation I grew up with were infused with little-to-no Holy Toxicity —no references to hellfire, no punitive insistence upon the innate evil of human nature, no strong focus on afterlives generally, no altar calls — in short, no bass pattern of dread or condemnation.
One of the things I’ve often found myself saying to this friend is that religion is like all of the other Ways of constructing and evolving subjective human meanings and values — philosophy, psychology, history, art, and so on — in that each of them can be done anywhere across a spectrum from wonderfully well to horrifically badly. I’ve repeatedly cited Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bishop Desmond Tutu as Believers whose faiths were instrumental in moving them to, and then supporting them in, their extraordinary, perilous championships of peace and human rights — to the point where two of them were assassinated precisely for their heroism.4
But my friend would of course respond that they could have been just as heroic without believing in a fictitious and morally objectionable Being.
To which I would of course rejoin in my turn that the specific Beings that those three men believed in were not, so far as I can tell, morally objectionable — because each Believer has their own version of the God of their faith, and those versions can and almost certainly will go on evolving in all sorts of idiosyncratic directions throughout that individual Believer’s life. The YHWH of MLK Jr. is clearly and radically distinct from the YHWH of the average member of the KKK, past or present, much as the Allah of Irshad Manji, Muslim author of two books banned in several Muslim countries (among her titles are Faith without Fear and The Trouble with Islam Today), is clearly and radically distinct from the Allah of the average member of the Taliban.
But my excellent friend — who has indeed achieved his own heroism without investing faith in any literally supernatural Being — would no doubt respond that King and Manji would have made still greater contributions if only they’d sworn off all this superstitious God-nonsense while continuing to persist in their humane work, thus inspiring other people to swear off as well. And of course I could spend all the dwindling energy I possess trying to convince him that, for some people, religion is and will likely always be the most powerful way to pursue the Good; but I’ve already accrued solid objective evidence that any such attempt would fail. My friend will acknowledge and even esteem the good works of my famous three, but will also continue to condescend to their supernatural beliefs
So that’s me, camped out here in the DMZ. For now, and very possibly for good.
As you can tell, I’m not the sort of evangelist who knocks people’s socks off.
(Very low conversion rate, me. =:o)
But on this particular issue, I do wish I could trailblaze a powerful collaboration between the Heroic Believers and the Heroic Uns — or at least, that somebody would. There are too many great humans on both sides to go on wasting all the potential synergies.
1 The two spaces are https://divineatheists.quora.com/ and https://atheismnow.quora.com/
2 I don’t at all believe in astrology, except insofar as it supplies us with self-fulfilling prophecies; but most of us do encounter simplistic cliché descriptions of our sun signs from fairly early on; and all my life I’ve seen, high up in the list of traits for those of us born under the sign of The Scales, statements to the effect that ‘the Libra spirit inclines toward peace, justice, and balance’. So of course occasionally, when I notice any of those tendencies cropping up in my feelings or actions, I hear an enthusiastic little voice from the back of my inner auditorium calling out, ‘See? We are a Libra.’
3 DeMilitarized Zone [DMZ], acronym for a belt of land separating two warring nations (or the two warring halves of a single nation). As I’ve mentioned, a number of my key formative years were significantly darkened by consciousness of the hideous war in Vietnam, and the DMZ there evidently got lodged in my memory.
4 It doesn’t at all escape me that I’m presenting both my Unbeliever friend and these three historic Believers as ‘heroes’. It’s absolutely how I see all four of them, each in his own way; and the awareness only sharpens my disappointment at my friend’s need to denigrate the other three for the religious structures among the foundations of their greatness.