Last weekend I went to a dinner party where there were people from Sri Lanka whom I had not met before. When Sri Lankans meet for the first time, there is a fairly standard ritual that occurs. People try to find connections between you and them, starting with others who share your name (e.g., “Are you related to the Singham who used to work at X/who married Y/who lives in Z?”) and then on to questions about where in Sri Lanka your family is from and what K-12 school you went to. The last question is important because Sri Lankans are quite attached to their schools and many cities with a large expatriate populations even form associations based on these old school ties and hold dances, sporting events, and other elaborate get-togethers.

During a casual conversation at the dinner with three of my fellow guests (all sisters), they asked me the usual questions and then one of them went off-script and asked me which church I went to. I replied that I did not attend any church since I was an atheist.

The sharp intake of breath and astonished looks in response alerted me that this had gone over big. It was as if I had walked into a vegan conference eating a hamburger. It turned out that not only were the three of them Christians, but they were of the extremely religious “born again” variety. The stunned look on their faces at my revelation got even worse when they realized that I had once been a Christian. They simply could not understand how anyone who had once been a Christian could not believe any more, and for the next hour they proceeded to try and convince me that I had made a grave mistake. Of course, their arguments consisted entirely of quotations from the Bible, all of which I have heard many times before. It simply did not seem to register with them that there was no point in using the Bible as evidence to someone who did not believe that it was god’s revealed word.

Another interesting point was that they felt that my atheism had to be because I had not “accepted Jesus as my personal lord and savior”, which is the standard by which evangelical Christians judge whether you are a “true” Christian or not. In fact, they kept insisting that I had never been a “true” Christian because of my failure to pledge such allegiance. In my religious days in high school and college, I had attended many religious services where the preacher, at the end of a stirring sermon asserting that we were all sinners and in the grip of Satan, would ask people to come up front and pledge their lives to Christ so that they could be cleansed of their sin. I never obeyed this “altar call”, although many of the people I knew had done so in the past and they often asked me to join them. During one of those services, I was startled when the friend who had invited me suddenly clutched my sleeve and with tears in his eyes told me that Jesus was calling me and implored me to obey the call, helpfully adding that someone else who had rejected the call just a few weeks earlier had subsequently been run over by a bus right after the service. It was an awkward moment but I said no. I always rejected such altar calls, since I felt even then that a god who depended on a formulaic repetition of a slogan as a sign of faithfulness (and apparently was willing to kill someone who would not comply) was hardly worth following.

After some time, my companions at the dinner asked if we could pray together so that Jesus could enter my soul. Although I am an obliging sort and the discussion had been friendly, I had to draw the line and say no. It seemed like another altar call and, to my mind, highly presumptuous. While they were free to pray for whomever and whatever they wanted to on their own time (and they said they would pray for me later anyway), I wanted no part of it. It struck me then that if I told them about my dream from last week they would probably have thought that that really was a sign from god trying to save me from my path to doom.

I think that what puzzled my dinner companions the most was the fact that I was perfectly happy being an atheist and was not looking for anything more in the spiritual realm. They kept repeatedly asking me whether I felt a “yearning for something more”, whether I was “missing something in my life” and whether I had a “gap in my soul”. (My responses? No. No. No. To the last one I added that I did not have a soul and that did nothing to improve my image in their eyes.) They seemed to assume that since belief in the Christian god was such an essential part of their lives, that it must be the same for other people. They simply could not conceive that it was possible for someone to have a fulfilling life without god. And not just any old god, but their own particular Christian Jesus-god package.

One would have to say that my dinner companions exhibited all the signs of religious fanaticism. Not that they would in any way do harm to others such as fly planes into buildings. On the contrary, I am quite certain that they are very good people who would not dream of harming anyone. But they are religious fanatics in that they are absolutely sure that their particular version of religion is the right one, their own religious text is infallible, they have a personal relationship with god, that followers of all other religions are wrong, that those who do not believe what they do are lost souls who will suffer eternal damnation, and that it is their duty to try and convert others to their belief.

But while these particular people may be harmless, it is a very thin line that separates “good” fanatics from the bad. The problem is that if you accept that that kind of unquestioning faith and allegiance as a good thing, it becomes hard to condemn the actions of those who, again on the basis of that kind of faith and following what they believe are the dictates of their god, commit the most atrocious crimes. Voltaire’s remark keeps coming to my mind: “As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”

It was an interesting evening.

POST SCRIPT: Religious con games

It is amazing how preachers who claim to have some direct link to god are able to so easily con people into giving them huge sums of money to build their private empires and support their lavish lifestyles.

The Australian TV comedy show The Chasers takes a look at TV evangelists.

Mother Theresa’s legacy was not an unmixed one. On the one hand, she did important work that others were not doing, and took in the sick and dying from the streets of Calcutta and provided them with beds to spend their last days with at least some minimal care and cleanliness. On the other, she exhibited a serious tone-deafness when it came to hobnobbing with rich and powerful people, who, by giving her cause money, tried to immunize themselves from criticisms for their own barbaric cruelty to the people of their country.

Michael Hand in his review of Christopher Hitchens’ book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995) gives some examples.
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In the previous post, I wrote about Mother Theresa’s unfulfilled yearning to get a sign from god that he existed and that her faith was justified. What is most surprising to me is that she did not receive such a sign.

Most people who desperately want to believe in god, like Mother Theresa clearly did, are quick to seize on random events and coincidences that we all experience in our lives and interpret them as signs from god. If you really need a sign from god, it is not hard to manufacture one to your satisfaction. Surely there must have been many such instances in her life that would have served her purposes, such as receiving a generous donation for her mission at a time when they desperately needed money or having one of her charges unexpectedly recover from near death?
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There have been a flurry of news items and commentary about the publication of a book of Mother Theresa’s letters, which reveal that she struggled for most of her life with the fear that there was no god. Excerpts from the letters (as quoted in the press) show that during almost her entire ministry, she struggled with deep doubt, saying things like: “Where is my faith?. . .Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. . . . If there be God — please forgive me. . . Such deep longing for God. . . . Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. . . What do I labor for? . . . If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

The letters reveal a woman who yearned for some sign that her belief in god was justified, for some sense that there was a godly presence, and that she failed to receive such reassurance, although she publicly maintained a face of unwavering devotion.

Religious apologists have been quick to try and shield her from suggestions that she was a hypocrite acting in bad faith, hiding her disbelief in god behind a façade of piety. They point out (correctly) that most religious people have doubts from time to time and struggle to maintain their beliefs. It is perhaps only the psychotic who are absolutely certain that god exists and think that god speaks to them in clear and unambiguous ways. So while her doubts seem to have been deeper and longer lasting than most religious people would admit to, they are by no means unique.

It is not hard to see why Mother Theresa’s belief in god was being constantly challenged. Most ordinary religious people are fortunate in that they do not often have to deal with tragedy and sadness in their own lives, excepting for maybe one or two major events, thus making it easier to maintain belief in a benevolent deity. But she was dealing on a daily basis with the sickness and death of huge numbers of men and women, young and old, who had not done anything that merited the deep misfortunes that befell them. Under those circumstances it would have been inhuman for her not to question the benevolence of god. It was perfectly natural for her to seek some sign from god that all the suffering she saw had some purpose and meaning, and to despair when she did not receive such an assurance.

In some ways, Mother Theresa may have been a victim of her own success, trapping her into a belief structure that she could not reject without also undermining the work she was trying to do. Most of us who can switch from believers to atheists and the only disruption this may cause is within our small circle of family and friends. But she was an enormously successful figure for the image of the Catholic Church, generating immense amounts of goodwill and money because of her work with the desperately poor people of Calcutta. She would have known that to make her doubts public, let alone come out as an atheist, would have resulted in a huge blow to the faith of others. Such an admission would have been to turn her back on the basis on which she had started her entire life’s work. While she could have continued her work as a doubter, that would have risked losing the official backing of the Catholic Church and its publicity apparatus, which was undoubtedly helpful in efforts to raise money.

In the normal course of events, when we fail to find evidence for something, it is considered to be a reasonable thing to not believe in that thing. This is why we do not believe in the existence of unicorns or fairies and do not hesitate to publicly say so. To do otherwise would be considered hypocrisy. But in the case of Mother Theresa, the split between her public unwavering piety and her private doubts is being portrayed, oddly, as something virtuous. I find it hard to see how it can be virtuous to publicly profess devout belief while harboring serious doubts. That simply imposes feelings of guilt on those who also do not have certainty, making them feel that their own faith must be somehow inadequate or inferior to hers. Surely it would have been better for her and others if she had said publicly that she had her doubts, just like everyone else, but that she hoped that her belief and hope in god would be vindicated in the afterlife.

As Daniel Dennett points out, this hiding of doubt behind the mask of certainty cannot be a good thing:

[T]here is good reason to believe that the varieties of self-admonition and self-blinding that people have to indulge in to gird their creedal loins may actually cost them something substantial in the moral agency department: a debilitating willingness to profess solemnly in the utter absence of conviction, a well-entrenched habit of deflecting their attention from evidence that is crying out for consideration, and plenty of experience biting their tongues and saying nothing when others around them make assumptions that they know in their hearts to be false.

It is hard not to sympathize with Mother Theresa’s lifelong struggle to find some reason to believe. It must have caused her considerable anguish to fear that she may have been living a lie. I believe that such struggles are far more common than we realize and are due entirely to expecting people to believe in things for which there is no evidence and making them feel guilty when they cannot do so with easy assurance. This is the kind of thing that happens when we elevate ‘faith’, i.e., belief in the absence of evidence, to a virtue.

POST SCRIPT Constitution Day Forum

Case’s Third Annual Constitution Day forum will be on the topic Religion and the Constitution and held today (Monday September 17, 2007), 4:30 p.m. ― 6:00 p.m. in Ford Auditorium, Allen Medical Library.

The panel looks good and it should be interesting.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

I started this series with Matt Ridley’s quote: “The Asian tsunami was not an act of god but 9/11 was” and will end with it, because it says something very profound.

Religious apologists for Islam are quick to claim that the 9/11 perpetrators were not following their “true” religion, that god would not have condoned this act. But what is the basis for this claim of exemption? After all, the perpetrators themselves seemed to think that they were indeed the ones that were following the true religion. In his periodic video surfacings, bin Laden appears quite confident that he is serving god well, as is Bush when he speaks of his motivations.
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the comment that triggered this series of posts, the rise of liberation theology in South America was used to argue as a case where religion played a positive role. But let us see the liberation theology movement in its full context.

For the better part of the twentieth century, many of the countries of Central and South America were run by murderous despots, while Catholicism was the dominant religion in those countries. Around 1960, ‘liberation theology’ came into being, led by some intellectuals and clergy, arguing for a radical interpretation of the Gospels, focusing on those elements of the Bible that seemed to call for an end to oppression. But while there was this grass root effort to change the relationship of religion to state power, what was the church doing in those days, apart from a few brave priests and nuns? How many Catholic eminences took stands similar to even the limited calls for justice that Archbishop Romero took, or even came out in support of him while he was alive? Why did the Vatican and the Catholic Church not call for massive protests and agitation to overthrow the government of El Salvador when Romero was gunned down, in his own cathedral no less, by government death squads? If liberation theology was considered a good Christian thing, why was it not officially adopted by the Vatican?
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the US, after the systematic elimination of the Native Americans, one can consider Christianity to be the de-facto “official” religion, since most people would consider themselves to be good Christians and the political leadership repeatedly invokes religious piety and symbolism.

If, as is sometimes argued, the presence of Christians in the abolitionist movement is a sign that Christianity is benevolent, then why did Christians condone and benefit from slavery for so long before that? We now assume it is an unspeakable abomination to treat human beings as objects that can be bought and sold. Why was this not obvious to the religious leaders of that time, if religion is basically against oppression? Why could not the theologians and clergy and laity in those times realize what seems obvious to anyone now? Surely it is because they considered Christianity to be compatible with slavery.
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The author Matt Ridley made an interesting observation: “The Asian tsunami was not an act of god but 9/11 was.”

I think that quote makes a good starting point for the next series of four posts that deal with the problem of religion. The posts are in response to a discussion that originated in a previous post and although I did not specifically intend to have them start today (I am one of those who thinks that there is far too much emphasis on commemorations and memorials to tragedies), there is no question that the perpetrators of the atrocity committed on September 11, 2001 are emblematic of the problem with religion, and the dangerous mix that occurs when people of devout faith believe in life after death and are sure they know what god wants them to do and will reward them if they do it.
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(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from May 9, 2005, edited and updated.)

I am a huge fan of the English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, especially of his Jeeves and Wooster books. The plots are pretty much the same in all the Jeeves stories but the smoothness of Wodehouse’s writing, his superb comic touch, and his brilliant choice of words make him a joy to read. Even though I have read all of the Jeeves books many times and know all the plots, they still have the ability to make me laugh out loud.
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