“The Dangers of Faith: The Clash of Religion and Reason in the 21^st Century”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

February 26, 2006

            Let me begin this morning with a question for you to consider: Would the world be better off without religion?

            It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? And one without an immediately obvious answer, I think.

            Without religion, we might not have a lot of magnificent architecture. We might not have many religiously inspired works of art and music.         On the other hand, we might not have had human sacrifices, the Crusades, and the Inquisition.

            And while the Holocaust was not a particularly religiously-inspired, could it have happened without the centuries of religiously-inspired anti-Semitism that preceded it?

            On the other hand, Mahatma Gandhi’s liberation movement in India, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa were also religiously inspired.

            Without religion, there would be fewer hospitals, colleges, and universities. There would be fewer organizations dedicated to helping the poor and the most vulnerable among us.

            On the other hand, without any doubt, our lives are better today because of science, and religion has often stood in the way of science. The Roman Catholic Church persecuted Galileo in the 16^th century and banned his works. Today, most of the opposition to stem-cell research, which has the possibility of transforming medical science, is religiously inspired.

            Without religion there would be less opposition to contraception and legal abortion, without which equality for women would be nearly impossible. Without religion we wouldn’t be having debates about whether evolution should be taught in public schools or whether it’s better to distribute condoms or teach abstinence, as our own government now requires, in African nations with the highest incidence of AIDS.

            Without religion, we could ask, would the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, have happened? Without religion, would there be peace in the Middle East? Without religion, would we be watching riotous, violent crowds of Muslims on CNN angry about caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers? Without religion would the fighting and killing between Sunni and Shiites Muslims be taking place right now in Iraq.

            Without religion, a lot of people might face life with less hope and death with more fear. On the other hand, a lot of other people might live life without as much guilt and shame.

            Throughout human history, if you were to add up all the people who had led better, longer, happier lives because of religion, and then were to add up all the people who had suffered and died because of religion, which sum would be greater?

            One person who has answered this question is Sam Harris. In his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris makes the point that humanity has too long suffered the excesses of religion, especially the excesses resulting from irrational, unjustified belief, which Harris defines mostly as any belief that comes to us from a sacred text, such as the Bible, rather than from science or people’s own experience of life.

            Harris focuses particularly on the role that religious intolerance, which he believes is intrinsic to all religions, plays in human conflict. The majority of people in this world, he says, look to a particular sacred text that claims it alone contains the truth about how to attain salvation. “Once a person believes - - really believes - - that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis,” Harris says, “he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers.”

            This certainty that one’s own religious tradition contains the only path to salvation and the certainty that others who believe differently pose a threat to oneself, one’s loved ones and society itself has led to much of the religiously inspired violence in the world, Harris concludes.

            And while humanity has already suffered too much from the excesses of irrational belief, we are now at a turning point in human history, Harris says.

            With the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility that they could be used in a religiously-inspired war - - Harris offers a nuclear war between India and Pakistan as an example - - or by any group of religious fanatics, Harris suggests that the time for more rationally-minded people to politely tolerate the unjustified, irrational beliefs of others is over, whether their beliefs be Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic or anything else.

            “It remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society,” he says but suggests it is time for a change, saying more rationally-minded people should start being more openly critical of the unjustified, irrational beliefs of others.

            I have a lot of criticisms of Harris.

            He makes broad, sweeping generalizations about religion. Despite his claim that he has studied Eastern and Western religious traditions for 20 years, his understanding of religion often seems shallow and characteristic of somebody who has learned mostly from books rather than from first hand experience. For example, he seems to understand religion as simply “bad science,” and fails to understand the religion is more about the yearning for connection and meaning than it is about holding certain beliefs about the way the world is. He also seems to assume the only value in a religious text is its literal truth, unable to acknowledge that it’s possible to take a text seriously without taking it literally. His treatment of Islam is especially deplorable. For example, he claims that any observant Muslim poses a threat to Western Civilization and its values. To argue this, he does a lot of proof-texting of the Koran, which means taking a single verse from a sacred scripture to prove one’s point while ignoring context in which the verse appears.

            On the other hand, there is also something appealing about Harris’ argument to me.

            I consider myself to be a religious person, but as a Unitarian Universalist, I highly value the use of reason in the examination of religious beliefs. As a result, I am highly skeptical of the things that many other religious people believe.

            And like Harris, I am often tempted to think that the world would be better if more people didn’t believe so many irrational, unjustified things. I am often tempted to the think the world would be better if more people thought…well, more like me, more like most of us here.

            In his book, Harris quotes a passage from Betrand Rusell’s famous essay “Why I am Not a Christian” about Spanish explorers in Mexico and Peru who used to baptize native infants and then immediately crush their skulls to kill them, guaranteeing they would go to heaven. I remember reading this as a college student, and being disgusted. When I read it again, I remembered a quote from the French philosopher Voltaire that I recently came across: “He who can make me believe absurdities can make me commit atrocities.”

            These days it’s the beliefs of more conservative Christians that drive me especially crazy. Sometimes in conversations I’ve had, I’ve just wanted to shake the other person and say, “Why do you want to base your life and try to force all of us to base our lives on a book written at least 2,0000 years ago by individuals to whom the wheelbarrow would have been a major technological innovation?”

            Like Harris, I have often wondered whether I shouldn’t be a little less tolerant and more willing to say, “Nonsense! Ridiculous! Poppycock!” or even something a little more earthy.

            I think for many of Unitarian Universalists, it might be tempting for us to jump on Harris’ band wagon.

            What I want to suggest for your consideration this morning, however, is why we shouldn’t, and my answer is not just that it wouldn’t be very nice.

            My answer, simply put, is that Harris and others like him - - Daniel C. Dennnet comes to mind - - offer too simple an explanation. They assign too much blame for the problems of the world to religion, even irrational, unjustified religious beliefs. (And let’s acknowledge right now that one person’s irrational, unjustified belief may seem perfectly rational and justified to another person.)

            Let me explain why I believe Harris and others like him are wrong by giving you three examples.

            As a first example, let’s consider the 19 terrorists who participated in the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

            In considering the rationale for this attack, Harris asks, “Why did nineteen well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors?”

            He then answers his own question: “Because they believe that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of human beings so fully and satisfactorily explained,” he says.

            Were we to agree with Harris, this would also offer an explanation for the suicide bombings that continue to plague the Middle East. We could agree that the motivation of certain individuals to blow themselves and innocent bystanders up is based on a literal interpretation of certain verses of the Koran that promise paradise to anyone who dies in the defense of Islam.

            It’s a tempting explanation, but it’s an explanation that ignores the fact that suicide bombings were first made popular by communist - - and I presume atheist - - guerillas in Sri Lanka called the Tamil Tigers.

            It also ignores the fact that people have always been willing to risk their lives and have been willing to die for causes they truly believed in, not because of a promise of heaven, but because of the important of the cause. Socrates, Jesus, and Martin Luther King, Jr. come to mind of individuals who have been willing to die for noble causes.

             It also ignores the fact that people have especially been willing to die violently, and kill others as well, if they believed that violence was the only choice they had.

            Let’s consider a second example. Let’s consider opposition to gay marriage in this country.

            We all know that a lot of opposition to marriage equality has come from the so-called Religious Right, about people who point to a few verses in the Bible as justification for their belief that marriage between two people of the same sex is immoral.

            However, is opposition to gay marriage in this country really a religious issue? Is this issue really about people of genuine faith struggling with the question of what the Bible says about homosexuality? My answer is that opposition to marriage equality in this country is not really a religious issue. Why?

            The Bible prohibits a lot of different thing, but few of them have elicited the response that provoked the outrage in recent years that homosexuality has. For example, Christian scripture is much clearer in its prohibition against divorce than it is in its prohibition against same-sex relationships. (The most likely reason, for this, incidentally, is that divorce often left women and children in poverty.) However, how much opposition to divorce laws have you seen from the so-called Religious Right recently?

            Opposition to gay marriage is not about people trying to live their lives according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. The truth is that nobody, no matter what they say, takes all of the Bible literally. Opposition to gay marriage is plain and simple homophobia, using the language of religion as a disguise.

            Homophobia, in turn, serves at least two purposes in our society: It helps preserve traditional gender roles within society, especially the role of the male as the traditional head of household, and it offers gays and lesbians up as scapegoats for everything that is wrong in our culture.

            Let’s consider a third example: the sometime violent and deadly protests by Muslims across the world outraged about the publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammad. On the surface, it would be very easy to say this was another example of the danger of irrational religious belief, about a fanatical response to the violation of a seemingly irrational prohibition against any visual representation of the Prophet Muhammad.

            A closer examination of the context of events reveals another story.

            In Europe, Muslims are a larger minority than they are in the United States, and in Europe they often face severe racial discrimination, even more so, I believe, than they do in the United States.

            The Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons caricaturing Mohammad had previously refused to publish cartoons lampooning Jesus, leading me to believe that the publication of these cartoons was less about championing freedom of speech and more about degrading the beliefs of a religious minority simply because one had the power to do so. I understand the Muslim outrage to be less about upset over a prohibition against any visual representation of Muhammad and more about upset about an insult to their dignity and the perpetuation of stereotype of their faith. After all, the vast, vast majority of the 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet are peace loving people.

            I also find it revealing that in countries where Muslims have democratic rights, protests were generally peaceful. In nations, where Muslims do not have democratic rights, in nations where they have no ability to give political voice to their legitimate grievances regarding their own lives, in nations where it was advantageous for the political leadership to find a scapegoat for people’s everyday anger , protests have not been peaceful.

            My point in sharing these three examples is that irrational, unjustified beliefs do not often cause the problems of the world as we might assume.

            Rather than blaming the allegedly irrational, unjustified beliefs for the problems of this world, I think a better question to ask is, “What’s behind those beliefs?”

            What’s behind the violent protest of some Muslims over the cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad? What’s behind the opposition to gay marriage? What’s behind suicide bombers? What’s behind the religious opposition to stem-cell research, and abortion? What’s behind the attempt to teach creationism or intelligent design in public school classrooms?

            I can’t answer all those questions this morning, but my suspicion is that anytime we pull back the curtain on allegedly irrational, unjustified belief, we’ll usually find some other problem, using religion as a veil to conceal its true nature. My suspicion is that we’ll often find things like fear, anger, desperation, greed, and oppression

            My suspicious is that we’ll especially find fear of change, in a world that is changing very quickly. We’ll find people getting left behind by globalization.

            In this country, we’ll find parents trying to raise children in a society that is not supportive of raising children. We’ll find couples trying to make a marriage work in a society that is not supportive of making a marriage work. We’ll find individuals yearning for connection and meaning in a society that is increasingly isolating and devoid of meaning except for the ultimately empty promise of a good life based on consumerism.

            Around the world, we’ll find people so without hope, so lacking in the ability to see any practical way of making a better life for themselves, their families, and their neighbors, that they are driven to desperate means.

            Anywhere you look, we’ll find the powers-that-be desperately trying to hang onto their own power, desperately trying to keep people from looking too closely at what’s really causing the problems in their lives, and offering up any scapegoats they can find.

            You know something that concerns me? Recent polls show that 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years.

Why does this concern me? Should it?

            (After all, being a minister of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, I figure if the Rapture happens, most likely I’ll still have a full house on most Sunday mornings.)

            It concerns me because history tells us that this kind of millennialism is most popular when people do not see much hope for their own lives or for the world without supernatural intervention, and it bothers me that 22 percent of Americans are so hopeless that they can’t imagine the possibility of a better world without Jesus making a comeback.

            What should our response be?

            I am not suggesting that we should never criticize other people’s religious beliefs.

            After all, speaking of Jesus, Jesus didn’t refrain from criticizing other people’s beliefs. In fact, Jesus was very critical of some religious beliefs in his time, especially the beliefs of religious hypocrites, those who used religion toward their own material ends.

            In the gospels, Jesus railed again anything that oppressed the human spirit, anything that oppressed or dominated or exploited the human spirit, anything that kept human beings from living freely and fully.

            And in the world in which Jesus lived, which in many ways is not unlike the world in which we live, the thing that most oppressed the human spirit was exploitive human relationships, and Jesus’ harshest criticism, his strongest rebukes, were for the political and economic elites as well as the religious elites who provide the justification for such a society.

            However, I think it’s important to note, Jesus was never critical of others’ religious beliefs because they didn’t make sense. He was critical of them, ultimately, because they diminished people’s ability to live abundantly.

            Harris suggests we should respond to irrationality with calls for rationality. As big a fan as I am of reason, I don’t think that will work.

            Instead, I suggest, let us respond to hatred with calls for forgiveness.

            Let us respond to violence with calls for peace.

            Let us respond to indifference with calls for compassion.

            Let us respond to greed with calls for generosity.

            Let us respond to oppression with calls for liberation.

            Let us respond to desperation with calls for hope.

            These are values that are affirmed in every religious tradition in the world, including our own.

            I don’t believe we can create a better world by insisting on a more rational world. We may, however, create a more rational world by insisting on a better world.

            So may it be. Amen.