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The God Delusion
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins | ||
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5 The Roots of Religion |
Psychologically primed for religion | Cross-reference: |
Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a soul which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body. We can also easily imagine the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more obviously, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything has a purpose, whose purpose is it? Gods, of course. | ||
We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. | Compare to: | |
From a Darwinian point of view it is, no doubt, important to choose a good partner, for all sorts of reasons. But, once having made a choice even a poor one and conceived a child, it is more important to stick with that one choice thorugh thick and thin, at least until the child is weaned. Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love? | ||
Tread softly, because you tread on my memes | ||
Even where religions have been exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution. [...] In the early stages of a religions evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions, are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes cartels of mutually compatible memes. This doesnt rule out the additional role of deliberate manipulation by priests and others. | Topic: | |
6 The Roots of Morality: Why Are We Good? |
Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? | |
Natural selection favours genes that predispose individuals, in relationships of asymmetric need and opportunity, to give when they can, and to solicit giving when they cant. It also favours tendencies to remember obligations, bear grudges, police exchange relationships and punish cheats who take, but dont give when their turn comes. | ||
7 The Good Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist |
There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of Americas boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as to use the contemporary jargon a role model. Note (Hals): end note | |
The Old Testament | ||
Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we dont take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheists decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is morality flying by the seat of its pants, so is the other. | Topic: | |
Is the New Testament any better? | ||
I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as Christ-killers: did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too? Note (Hals): Apparently the doctrine is so familiar that Dawkins doesnt bother to understand it. I suspect the word atonement is one source of his problem; it suggests God is somehow required to inflict punishment on somebody for humanitys humanity. I concur that punishment for the sake of punishment is unacceptable, but the notion that God could just forgive our sins has an obvious flaw. Suppose we applied the same notion, in law, to the offense of driving while intoxicated. We could just forgive it, without punishment, but the offenders would in all probability repeat it, endangering themselves and others. Modern programs offer alternatives to imprisonment and other punishments which are more effective in getting them to stop. Sin is like drunk driving; without help, people tend not to be able to stop. The point of the doctrine of atonement is that an alternative remedy has been made available: God, like the legal system, has taken on the burden of fixing the problem instead of simply punishing, or simply and uselessly forgiving, sinners. The long history of Church-sponsored persecution of Jews is precisely the sort of sin that needs to be stopped, not just forgiven. The church from which Dawkins claims to draw his familiarity with Christian teaching, incidentally, declared that those persecutions had been wrong, decades ago at Vatican II. As to passed down in the semen, apparently a reference to original sin, Dawkins himself attributes human failings (among which he includes the tendency toward religious belief) to the biologically inherited structure of the human mind. (See Chapter 5.) That comes to the same thing, without the slanted language. end note | Cross-reference: See also: | |
Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. Love they neighbour didnt mean what we now think it means. It meant only Love another Jew. The point is devastatingly made by the American physician and evolutionary anthropologist John Hartung. He has written a remarkable paper on the evolution and biblical history of in-group morality, laying stress, too, on the flip side out-group hostility.
Note (Hals): Hartung is an anthropologist, apparently from the school that considers imagined motives to constitute proofs. He also believes that definitions, interpretations, and attitudes toward in-group and out-group ethical obligations remain fixed over millennia; a great deal of his argument assumes that the views of Maimonides (1135-1204 CE) represent those of Moses and Jesus. end note | ||
The moral Zeitgeist | ||
It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter of observed fact, it does move, and it is not driven by religion and certainly not by scripture. [...] Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good. | ||
8 Whats Wrong With Religion? Why Be So Hostile? |
How moderation in faith fosters fanaticism | |
More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades. Note (Hals): Ive noticed the New Atheists lean very hard on Hebrews 11:1 to redefine faith as a certainty of ones possession of absolute truth, without regard to evidence. Christian teachers, treating that verse as a definition, are largely responsible. They ought to have noticed by now that when treated as a definition, rather than as a description, that verse is made inconsistent with most other uses of the word in either Testament. end note | ||
9 Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion |
In defense of children | |
The same tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the source of squirming internal conflict in the minds of nice liberal people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to respect other cultures no less than their own.
Note (Hals): end note | ||
10 A Much Needed Gap? |
Consolation | |
It is amazing how many people seemingly cannot tell the difference between X is true and It is desirable that people should believe that X is true. Or maybe they dont really fall for this logical error, but simply rate truth as unimportant compared with human feelings. I dont want to decry human feelings. But lets be clear, in any particular conversation, what we are talking about: feelings, or truth. Both may be important, but they are not the same thing. | ||
[...] wouldnt you expect that religious people would be the least likely to cling unbecomingly to earthly life? Yet it is a striking fact that, if you meet somebody who is passionately opposed to mercy killing, or passionately against assisted suicide, you can bet a good sum that they will turn out to be religious. The official reason may be that all killing is a sin. But why deem it to be a sin if you sincerely believe you are accelerating a journey to heaven? | ||
The mother of all burkas | ||
The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. There is an anthropic sense, then, in which our existence should not be surprising. Id like to think that I speak for my fellow humans in insisting, nevertheless, that it is desperately surprising. Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. We now understand essentially how the trick is done, but only since 1859. | ||
text checked (see note) Feb 2010 |