Why is Faith treated differently than any other unprovable belief

This blog was partially inspired by, and in some instances, directly plagiarized from the writings of Sam Harris. Let me make that clear. In many cases I felt no need to put Harris’ words into a different presentation. It was my view that it was more important to get the ideas out than to make this all original content.

Why is “Faith” not treated like any other belief system? Why is it that all other belief systems that we have can be legitimately scrutinized by our society but not our religious beliefs? Why is it that you are held accountable by your belief systems in every other aspect of life, but with religion, with “Faith”, your views must be respected? We can’t even challenge religious views…..it is taboo…and in the present culture of political correctness where we have to treat everyone’s belief systems as equal..well, it can be quite dangerous..

There is an overarching taboo around criticizing religious faith…we are told we should respect our neighbor’s religious beliefs….no matter what…. Where else in our public discourse do we play by these rules?….when was the last time that someone was admonished to respect another’s beliefs about history, or geography, or medicine, etc…? If someone has a belief that women are subordinate to men or that one race is superior to another than society is outraged and defiant. Cloak that same ideology into a religious framework and we accommodate it; we stay silent; even the the most devout liberals among us.

If I said the Holocaust never happened you would be under no burden whatsoever to respect my beliefs. Say the earth is flat and your views will be rightly discarded. We don’t respect the beliefs of people who think Elvis is still alive…or from those who believe that the Moon landing never happened. These people do not get invited to sit on our Boards of Directors, or become Presidents of our Universities…but, all bets are off when it comes to changing the subject to “God”. If it’s a belief about “God” we are required to respect it. Ironically some of the most repugnant and subhuman ideas ever published come from religious doctrines.

What if we treated everyone who spoke about God on the floor of the Senate as if they were speaking about Poseidon, the mythological God of the Oceans…imagine that whenever there is a hurricane some senator gets it in his head that we should be praying to Poseidon..clearly that would be the end of that person’s career….(well, maybe not in the year 2022).

It’s not like we can say that the Biblical God exists and the mythical God, Poseidon, does not….

Every religion is making claims about what the world is….based on Faith....based on hope, based on books written many hundreds or even thousands of years ago. These books are all directly contrary to one another.

My argument is …either you have good reasons for what you believe..or you don’t…if you have good reasons…your views will hopefully be incorporated into scientific evidence. If not, your reasons will be dismissed …as something other than provable. And, religion is the only area of our lives where having no provable or empirical reasons are often considered even more credible, and even more noble. There is no burden of evidence for religious beliefs; you can just draw from some 4,000 year old text passed down through the Ages. In what other area of belief do we rely on the testimony of people who lived 4,000, or even 1,000 years ago.

And, perhaps most dangerously, due to some construct of our society, we are prevented from even noticing the differences in religions…We are told that I’m the public arena we must see all religions as being the same…

Do we treat all drugs as if they are the same? Do we treat aspirin the same as we treat heroine?

Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers….? If anyone should have suicide bombers it should be the Tibetan Buddhists…something like 1 million have been killed since the Chinese occupation….where are the Tibetans calling for the death of the Chinese?….where are the Tibetans who are blowing themselves up on the streets of Katmandu in protest….it’s not happening. The core principles of Buddhism do not promote violence or retribution, etc.. In contrast, if you are a muslim…you don’t have to work so hard to imagine this if you follow the Koran …it is prescribed in the dogma. By no stretch of the human imagination could you make the claim that the core principle of Islam is non violence.

We are forbidden from having a conversation about this …because this is the sacrosanct subject of Religion. We don’t even tiptoe around it...we throw up our hands at the first thought of inquiry....”don’t shoot”.

We are not talking about a race, or ethnicity…we are talking about the consequences of ideas……we are at war with Islamic Fundamentalism….not merely ISIS, extremist Islam, etc., but the mainstream doctrine of Islam contains this notion of martyrdom and Jihad…this imperative to convert, subjugate, or kill infidels. Anyone who says it doesn’t has not read the Koran…has not read the Hadith…

The circumstance we are in is much more sinister than many want to realize

It is possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb..and still think that you are going to get the 72 virgins in Paradise..that is how partitioned the human mind is…..we can have one foot in the 21st century and another in the 5th century…..that is how immune religious propositions are to critical and conversational pressure in our discourse….

How do we make peace with the incredible amount of violence in the Old Testament and in the Koran….? It is breathtaking….

Catholic Saints, Thomas of Aquinas and Augustine both had very clear views of what to do with heretics. Aquinas thought they should be killed outright and Augustine thought they should be tortured. This disposition and punishment didn’t come from their imaginations....it came from their reading of the Old Testament….and these were ”Saints”.

We are taught to believe that burning people alive was a departure into psychopathology---it wasn’t …it was called for in the Bible…just like a prescription being filled at the local pharmacy.

The only surprise is that we aren’t still doing it now…because the Bible dictates that we do this..…clearly and explicitly. Just look at Leviticus, or Exodus, or Deutoronomy from the Bible…it creates a vision of life so needlessly horrible, so subversive of the basic project of creating a sustainable society where human happiness is even possible.

The idea that if you find that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night…you stone her to death…you stone homosexuals… .if your kids talk back to you…..you stone them to death. If you go into a town and you see someone praying to a foreign
God you kill him, you kill his family and you kill everyone in the town. These are not metaphors, or analogies for some spiritual struggle within …these are explicit directives to kill people for theological crimes…no one ever says this is immoral….

Over and over again you see countries breaking down over religious lines…their core moral identities are built around religious affiliation…

And it leads to religious violence ..people killing other people because they think the Creator of the Universe wants them to do this…and that there will be a reward for doing it.

Unless we call into question the dogma of faith…..the idea that beliefs can be sanctified by something other than evidence and argument…..we will never successfully undercut the basis for religious violence.

The stakes are high….Critical thinking and intellectual honesty are desperately needed. Conversation is desperately needed…but in muslim countries it is strictly forbidden to even question Islam…it will likely get you killed.

We either have conversation…or we have war.

Food for thought…