Bill Moyers hosted a conversation last week with Martin E. Marty, a historian and the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. I found him to be quite interesting and also quite infuriating. I took great exception to the following comments:
I've been invited several times to debate one of the new school of atheists…And as you and every listener has to know that these four or five all say that if you just get rid of all religion the world would be benign and peaceful.
Well-- my question is how do you explain Mao and Stalin and Lennon and all of the great totalitarians, all of whom set out to get rid of God and religion and killed several hundred million people. I'm not defending the religious record. There's horrible stuff out there.
And I make a lot of my living in my noisy books about describing that. But you're not going to get rid of religion. You can't suppress this impulse.
I have a lot of issues with these remarks. Firstly is the bit about the new school of atheists. People like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett are, I would argue, very old school atheists. As Preston Jones has noted, Hitchens (and this applies more or less to all these guys) didn't come up with anything new in his jeremiad. True but irrelevant. Nearly 2,300 years ago Epicurus wrote:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Over two millennia later, Bertrand Russell published his classic Why I Am Not a Christian. There is no new school for atheists because they reiterate arguments that adherents of religion are unable to counter. If there is anything new to be had, it's an attitude that they're not going to be relegated to being a tolerated minority by the religious majority. These men stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, and to casually dismiss them is to dismiss centuries of criticisms and arguments.
The second bit with which I take issue is the notion that Messrs. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett promote the notion that, if religion were to disappear, we'd suddenly find ourselves in some prelapsarian paradise. This is complete and utter bullshit. Either Marty hasn't bothered to listen to the Four Musketeers or he told on a bold-faced lie. He is either intellectually lazy or just a liar. Dawkins' essay "Time to Stand Up" refutes Marty's ludicrous and quite plainly stupid assertion/lie. Here are some excerpts:
How can I say that religion is to blame? Do I really imagine that, when a terrorist kills, he is motivated by a theological disagreement with his victim? Do I really think the Northern Ireland pub bomber says to himself "Take that, Tridentine Transubstantiationist bastards!" Of course I don't think anything of the kind. Theology is the last thing on the minds of such people. They are not killing because of religion itself, but because of political grievances, often justified.
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all. I am not even claiming that religion is the only label by which we identify the victims of our prejudice. There's also skin color, language, and social class.
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both--and mixes explosively with both.
Religion has a most potent ability to exacerbate problems and to give focus to our darker sides. Of course the dissipation of religion won't make everything OK but the removal of religion is like the removal of a tank of gasoline being poured on a fire.
What about those godless cretins like Stalin? As Dawkins has said on many occasions, it was not his atheism which was the cause of his evil. No one is claiming that to be godless automatically makes one morally perfect. And even Marty admits that religion doesn't exactly have the best track record. Here's Hitchens' take:
Hitler never abandoned Christianity and recommends Catholicism quite highly in “Mein Kampf.” Fascism, as distinct from National Socialism, was in effect a Catholic movement.
For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
Harris:
People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Marty also says that the religious impulse cannot be suppressed. Well, certain European countries are doing a pretty good job - Sweden, Denmark, France, and Holland, for example. And, when he talks about all the thousands of folks in Africa and Latin America becoming Christians everyday, one must ask – why is it that people of wealthier/more educated nations seem to be able suppress the religious impulse in such numbers while people in poorer nations seemingly cannot? I don't think any of the Four Musketeers believe that religion is going to be eradicated; certainly not anytime soon. Hitchens remarks as much often. He accepts that there will always be religious adherents but he wants them to support secular society by leaving their beliefs at home and to stop imposing them onto him. Sam Harris has said numerous times that his goal is to open a dialogue and to remove the stigma on criticism of religion. He wants to pull it down from its privileged perch so it can be discussed openly instead of the religious always being given the benefit of the doubt and undue deference. Similarly, Dennett wants religion to be thought of as something within the purview of science, not some enigma in a society which would castigate those who sought to scrutinize it. And Dawkins is keen on spreading science & reason and to get people to dispel myths about evolution such as the canard that humans evolved from apes.
The last thing I want to say about Marty's comments pertains to his refusal to debate any of these folks. I think he mistaken implies that any such debate would be about the existence of Yahweh. Debates with any of the FM generally aren't about dissecting the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, they are about the pervasiveness of religion and the effects of it. They argue about practical matters and for a secular state knowing full well that religion will be, if I may say, an albatross around the neck of humanity for some time to come.
I don't know if Marty is just lazy or whether he intentionally lied. Either way it's a disgrace and a shame.
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