God Kills Compassion
When I try to step into the religious frame of mind, I get a deep urge to scream and run for the hills. Religious ideas feel like ill fitting clothes on a sweaty, sticky summer day. They chafe and confine. Their irksome restraint gives me no moment of peace. I want to leap out of my confining clothes and into a refreshingly cool shower.
Such has been my experience as I try to explain why we need compassion for people whose inclination and perhaps action deviate from cultural norms. I hoped to demonstrate the need for compassion by using religious ideas and doctrines so that my religious interlocutors could see the need. I don’t expect them to become atheist. I just hope to speak up for true compassion.
But God looms large over the shoulder of the faithful. They might want to be more compassionate, but they first check with God who gives a slow, stern shake of the head. The faithful turn back around and say, “Sorry. God says homosexuals can’t get into heaven.” God hampers our native inclination to compassion. God kills our humanity.
People think they know the mind and will of God. The arrogance! Then they justify their own bigotry in his name. Their false idols sycophantically echo the believers’ prejudices back to them with the appearance of authority. When the compassion of their views is challenged, they assume that since God is Love, his laws are loving. The believer is satisfied that all is well in Zion (2 Nephi 28:21, 25).
If anyone needs me, I’ll be outside tilting at windmills.
Tags: absolutism, Atheism, belief, bigotry, Christianity, compassion, homosexuality, idolatry, illusion, LDS, love, mindfuck, morality, Mormonism, pedophilia, prejudice, religion, sexual predators, sexuality
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August 23, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
Hi Jonathan. For what it’s worth, God inspired me to recognize as sin the oppression of committed and loving homosexual relationships.
August 23, 2007 @ 4:19 pm
“God hampers our native inclination to compassion. God kills our humanity.”
Yeah, I think that’s crap. I think people use God to justify their native inclination to selfishness and clannishness. If nobody believed in God, it wouldn’t make people behave differently at all. They’d find a different reason to justify their bullshit. There’s always something.
August 23, 2007 @ 5:57 pm
That I was too harsh on all religion would be a fair criticism. I was dealing with Mormon fundamentalist thinking, I was frustrated, and I needed to vent. The fundamentalist God certainly does hamper compassion, as I imagine you’d agree. I wasn’t very precise in where I aimed my words. That’s true.
American Christianity should come up with two different names for the schism between the Church of Love and the Church of Law. It’s too easy to unwittingly offend people in the wrong church because you go by the same name.
In my own experience, whenever I try to start thinking religiously for the sake of discussion and communication, my thinking gets very confused and I remember how full of contradiction and confusion my thoughts were. I had to reconcile my religious beliefs with how the world worked, but it never fit quite right. I start to feel claustrophobic inside of the religious frame of mind, at least the religion of my youth. It actually causes me physical discomfort.
When I think as a mystic, I don’t feel the same way. Perhaps this is how liberal religion feels?
Yeah, people would always be pig-headed and rationalize, but I don’t think it could hurt to eliminate one tool for this: the notion that we can know the mind of God. I have a hope, perhaps naïve, that getting rid of religion (combined with learning human-centered compassion) would get us closer to a healthier community without tribalism.
August 23, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
In other words, I believe atheism is a necessary but insufficient condition for a just, equitable, compassionate, effective community. But religion is only one source of the kind of fanaticism that disrupts such a community.
August 24, 2007 @ 6:21 am
That’s a pretty common sentiment among atheists, but I just don’t think it’s true. I mean, do you really think that Fred Phelps feels the desire to be compassionate to homosexuals, but he just honestly believes that his god wants him to hate them, so he suppresses his natural desire for compassion?
Even if you’re talking structurally and socially, I still don’t see it. Nothing in human history leads me to believe that people are naturally compassionate.
The whole “take away all their excuses to be hateful” logic doesn;t seem sound to me. do you really think that when you eliminate all the excuses for hate, that people will just say “well, I guess I don;t have any excuses anymore, so I’ll be compassionate.” First, I really doubt you could get rid of all the excuses for hate, and I don’t think that getting rid of religion would even make an appreciable dent in the myriad of resons to be hateful to other people. And even if you did take away all the tools, I really am not convinced that it would change anything. People would invent new tools, or go on being nasty sonsofbitches for no reason at all.
At the very least, geography ensures that there will always be an “other” to despise and distrust.
August 24, 2007 @ 8:20 am
You’re right that there is no guarantee. This is a matter of speculation. But I can’t help but think that removing the authority to speak for God would put us all on a more compassionate footing.
Fred Phelps would be forced to find another justification for his hatred. He would be less able to gather followers who feel justified in their hatred by believing that they are doing God’s will. Whatever other justifications they could find, they couldn’t be presented as the absolute will of creator of the universe. These other justifications wouldn’t have the same punch as those backed up by an all-powerful deity.
Religious rhetoric helps tyrants come to power and maintain their power. The divine right of kings is the bane of human rights. There is some speculation that Stalin was able to exercise such terrible power because Russian peasants had been taught for centuries that they and the land belonged to the Czar, to the leader of Russia. Without religion, the peasantry might not have followed Stalin so loyally.
I agree that getting rid of religion won’t be a panacea. Strong leaders will still be able to gather following based on the force of their personality and the human need to follow strong leaders. These would-be tyrants will just lack religion to amplify their claims into eternity. Other ideologies would claim adherents, but they would be human philosophies, not divine dictums.
Human beings are nascently compassionate by nature. Our neurological makeup ensures that we feel the pain of others whom we identify with. It takes some education to remove that native compassion through dehumanizing others. It also takes some education to nurture that compassion into maturity through helping the child to identify with others.
The more we can nurture the ability to identify with others, the more compassionate we can become. The custom of saying “I’m Mormon” or “I’m Hindu” or “I’m Roman Catholic” hinders our ability to identify with each other. We hear a lot of people touting diversity, but diversity is a mixed blessing.
I think I’ve recommended it before, but if you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis’s The Inner Ring.
August 24, 2007 @ 9:50 am
Lincoln,
Again sorry for the time delay.
Anyway I think there are too many different gods running around in people’s minds telling them conflicting things. One man’s god tells him to hate homosexuals. Another’s tells him to love them. Our personal gods don’t give very consistent answers. Yet we’re all confident that our god wouldn’t steer us wrong.
Perhaps we should set up a conference where all the personal gods could get together and get their story straight. Life would much easier then.
August 25, 2007 @ 5:24 am
I just don’t buy it. I think you’re working on the false assumption that if you take away peoples’ reasons to hate, they’ll stop hating. I think it’s a false premise for a couple of reasons. First, you can never take away all the reasons to hate. There’s no possible way to ever make nobody be the Other. You’ll always have “the people in the next village,” “the people in the other family,” and “the people that don’t conform to my social norms.” You could argue that those things wouldn’t spawn the same level of hatred and nastiness that religion does, but I would disagree with you vigorously, and I think history backs me up. Second, even if you could take away all the reasons to hate other people, people would invent new ones. Even granting the possibility that religion is the source of hate, if you took away every scrap religion, people would just start over again with new superstitions that ultimately evolved into new religions.
You could say “people hate what’s different, and religion is one of the things that makes people different from each other- the less differences we have, the less reason we have to hate.” But I think that’s oversimplistic- religion is just one manifestation of culture. When Religion A leads a crusade against Religion B, the sacred trappings are superficial misdirection. Really it’s just that People A are fighting People B, and religion just gives them a choice of rhetoric. Again, history has shown us that people are perfectly capable of being whipped up into a frenzy and committing atrocities against each other even when religion doesn’t come into the calculus at all. The bottom line is that people will always hate “those other guys,” not just because they worship a different god, but because they wear different clothes, eat different food, read different books, tell different stories, generally live their lives differently. And not to mention the fact that they also inevitably compete with us for resources of some kind.
I suppose we could go the rounds on it without ever convincing each other. But I just don’t think that taking religion away would change the things you wish it would in any appreciable way.
August 25, 2007 @ 7:25 am
I guess our difference of opinion comes down to my speculation that removing religious thought would provide a marginal benefit while you believe that religious thought (granting for the sake of discussion that it causes hatred) would be replaced by some other reason bringing the net level of hatred back to our natural level.
Yesterday I pondered why I feel confident that removing religion would be beneficial. I am extrapolating from personal experience. When I let go of religion, a void of meaning and purpose was created. I eventually settled on humanism without thinking to call it that. I found my purpose in furthering the progress and well being of humanity, and by extension all life on Earth. So I didn’t just let go of religious thought patterns; I replaced it with humanism.
Our cultural context certainly guided me to a concern for humanity in general instead of nationalism for example, but the point is that leaving behind religion in the right cultural context deepened my concern for my fellow beings. My capacity for empathy and compassion deepened. For me, letting go of religion has been a net positive.
I realize that it’s weak reasoning to assume that my experience could be extended to most other people, but I have no reason to assume that I’m special, somehow more prone to compassion than average.
Because of my personal experience, I believe if the fundamentalist religion that uses God, heaven, and hell as a weapon and denies patent reality out of loyalty to superstition could be replaced by simple concern for our fellow beings, then we would be more compassionate. I worry that if we keep more moderate religion around, it would constantly degenerate back into fundamentalism.
August 26, 2007 @ 8:33 pm
“Religious ideas feel like ill fitting clothes on a sweaty, sticky summer day. They chafe and confine. Their irksome restraint gives me no moment of peace. I want to leap out of my confining clothes and into a refreshingly cool shower.”
Well said, Jonathan! I used to think I had a great deal of emotional tolerance for all religious ideas, but I have discovered that some ideas — particularly fundamentalist ideas — make me feel dirty. By the way, I often get the same feeling listening to bimbo talk show hosts spew lies and hatred.
I think religion enables a person like James Dobson or Pat Robertson to get a bigger audience for their hatreds than they would otherwise have. It facilitates their hatreds and even legitimizes them. So, while I think people like Dobson and Robertson would probably have pretty much the same hatreds without religion, I believe religion must be held accountable for contributing to how effectively and efficiently they are able to disseminate their hatreds.
August 26, 2007 @ 11:06 pm
Kullervo makes a good point that bigotry, war, etc., would exist without religion. I’ve talked about this extensively in my post Is religion the problem?
However, the Bible explicitly teaches that it’s righteous to massacre and enslave people when God commands it. When you regard the Bible (or other equivalent holy book) as the source of your morality, you can’t help but have your code of ethics influenced by what’s written in it.
And I have seen this in my real life interactions: not to the point of slavery or massacre, but people close to me who regard obedience and loyalty to God (and His Earthly representatives by extension) as the highest virtue are sometimes willing to go along with bigotry they might have otherwise questioned if they think it has God’s stamp of approval on it. Religion acts to group people into cohesive, family-like communities, and defining which people must be excluded is one of the ways a religion builds this cohesion.
August 27, 2007 @ 9:54 am
It is hard to base a religion on the Bible that doesn’t become tainted by the Bible’s bigotry, especially when the religion is at all literalistic.
Just in case anyone misunderstands, I’m not advocating for some kind of authoritarian purge of religion from society. I hope that there will be a sea change toward freethought and compassion away from authoritarianism and apathy. I’m hoping that culture and personal choices will create a feedback loop that fosters this change.
I hope people would eventually say “I don’t care what you or your holy books say. X is not good.” Most positive cultural changes have followed this pattern: the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, etc.
August 29, 2007 @ 10:17 am
I haven’t been to your blog in a while. I do enjoy reading it.
I’ll be honest – it kind of bums me out to hear you make these huge, sweeping, simple, generalizations and criticisms against all religion. It strikes me as a pretty selective and even close-minded view of the religious landscape, and I think it’s insensitive to the reality of religion as simply a mixed bag of good and evil, like most things in the world. I see that you’re frustrated and don’t get me wrong – I am very sympathetic. As I’ve said earlier, I am agnostic and stopped attending the LDS church because I had serious concerns about it. However, I know so many thoughtful, intelligent, even liberal (serious!) people that belong to the church and have good hearts and kind hands. Let’s not forget that religion inspires people to be unselfish, to improve the world, to right wrongs, and to take care of the needy. There is an empowering and ennobling quality to the belief that all life is divine and worthy of love and service. I believe that it probably does more good than harm in the world.
Yes, it can be used to justify racist, sexist, or homophobic ideas. But you don’t need religion to do that.
You seem to have in mind the most conservative, orthodox, close-minded Christians one could possibly conjure. Don’t focus so narrowly on this sort of symbolic enemy of yours that you lose sight of real religion, with all its good and bad.
Those “positive cultural changes” you talk about – many of them were backed by deeply religious people that believed that humanity’s divineness means that women, blacks, and others deserve more. That tradition continues today. True, it continues mostly in more liberal faith traditions, but it exists nonetheless.
Your comment about the dangers of moderate religion because of it’s potential to “degenerate” into fundamentalism or whatever is interesting. Isn’t that what Sam Harris says? I see what you’re saying, but it’s just atheistic wishful thinking or something. Religion will always be attractive to humans, and I don’t think that’s all bad. Rather than sort of angrily and wishfully hope for the end to oppressive religion, I see more value in working to improve the religions that do exist, and to work with religious people to improve the world. Heck, I think I’m religious in a sense, despite my agnosticism and rejection of the supernatural, because I believe in the value of people coming together to affirm shared values, to affirm the worth and dignity of all life, and to celebrate our humanity.
August 29, 2007 @ 12:28 pm
Let’s not forget that religion inspires people to be unselfish, to improve the world, to right wrongs, and to take care of the needy. […] I believe that it probably does more good than harm in the world.
First, I don’t want to let this pass uncommented. Those are testable claims, and I’ve seen no reason to believe that religious folk are more generous or caring than non-religious folk. It’s common wisdom that religion helps people to become better, but I doubt that it’s true in general. For example, do believers commit proportionally fewer violent crimes? Religion dogma seems to have little salutary effects on a person’s behavior on average.
I propose a twist to Christopher Hitchens’ challenge: provide a single, measurable benefit that can be gained from religion that can’t be reproduced by a secular group. [In fact, I think I'll make that a post.…]
I admit that there is good and bad in religion, but is the good inseparable from the religion? From my experience, we can have everything demonstrably good about religion without religion. Healthy communities with a culture of selflessness, cooperation, and acceptance can provide many of those benefits. I’ve lost nothing in my transition to atheism and I’ve even gained something.
When I tried to think like a Mormon in order to discuss something from that point of view, I found it very difficult to find reasons to have compassion in situations where I now (as an atheist) feel empathy naturally. Mormonism inhibited my ability to have compassion. The same thing goes when I try to think like a conservative Christian.
The religious movements who promoted social change acted in opposition to other religious forces. The Abolitionists had to argue against the Bible. So did the Suffragettes. Many of the people behind the civil rights movement were secularists. We spend so much energy working against religious bigotry, why not dispense with it?
I hope for a day when we don’t need delusions and fairy tales to command us to love one another because God made us in his image. I hope for a day when we can look our brothers and sisters in the eyes with love, valuing them because they are human beings who suffer and live like we do and our destinies are tied together. No one is going to rescue us, so we need to be good to one another.
cybr said,
August 30, 2007 @ 12:15 am
I admit that there is good and bad in religion, but is the good inseparable from the religion? From my experience, we can have everything demonstrably good about religion without religion. Healthy communities with a culture of selflessness, cooperation, and acceptance can provide many of those benefits. I’ve lost nothing in my transition to atheism and I’ve even gained something.
Obvious then that the bad is inseparable from the religion then.
August 30, 2007 @ 8:29 am
cybr,
Good (implied) question: is the bad in religion inseparable from it if the good is separable?
There are certainly undesirable aspects of religion that I recognize could be improved. Certain cultural changes could do a world of good in some religions.
There are some big inherent problems in theistic religion that I do not see as separable. The believe in an unseen world that influences our own is one. This is a tool in the hands of anyone seeking power. If someone proclaims that they’ve been called of God, you can choose to ignore them, but if they claim authority over your community, you have no way to refute their claim to divine vocation.
If your family is convinced that God called this person to a position of power over them, how can you convince them otherwise? You can’t go visit God together to ask him. You could both pray about it, but answers to prayer are notoriously inconsistent (note all the world’s religions). You could show how this person is using their power for their own gain, but perhaps God is just prospering his righteous servant. It is possible to change a believer’s mind, but difficult. In the end, the person must choose to believe you.
You could explicitly deny in your religious doctrines that anyone could have such authority over you, but it is natural to seek out a teacher whom you can trust implicitly or a leader to surrender your will to. The mere idea of an unseen world allows us to believe that these teachers and leaders are more than they are.
I don’t believe this idea can be taken out of religion.
cybr said,
August 30, 2007 @ 11:23 am
OK, I’ll take that as a check in the yes box.
However, I don’t believe this issue you bring up is necessarily a religious one. Religion aside, as a society we have not always chosen the best individuals to follow. And not all have claimed to be called by a higher power to lead us in our local, state, or federal governments. Many non-religious leaders have asserted fear and threats to force people to follow. I’m sure you can tell me several. As a society, I’ll argue we need leaders. Not everybody has leadership qualities, I’d be the first to admit. But, it is inherent to structure. And, leaders, even if unintentional, will benefit.
But by your argument, you have thus claimed religion to be bad(evil) and that have in essences stolen good qualities to pursue itself further. You have thus defined what is moral as you see it.
August 30, 2007 @ 11:41 am
I admit that removing religion wouldn’t remove the danger of following self-serving leaders. I’m just saying that religion gives the tyrant a great tool to make their job easier. And this problem is inherent to a belief in an unseen authority figure to back up his earthly representatives.
Parts of religion are bad depending on what you value. With different values, religion would look different to me. Neither position would be more moral than the other. Morality is the wrong question to ask. It’s like someone saying “I like yellow houses, therefore red paint is immoral.” Then his neighbor counters “I prefer red houses, therefore your yellow paint is degenerate.” A third neighbor then chimes in “I know that Jesus’ favorite color is blue (cerulean to be precise) therefore your paint colors are a sin.”
I personally value the autonomy and development of the individual and the pursuit of truth. Religion has a pretty spotty track record on those counts, so I don’t value religion (i.e. I think it’s bad).