I watched the film Religulous this past weekend and found it phenomenal. Bill Maher's take on organized religion mixes elements of "laugh your face off" comedy with bits of intelligent skepticism a la Richard Dawkins. As I expected, the film was less about the impact of religious beliefs and more about the ignorant society that keeps them alive. It was hilarious, inspiring, and at times offensive in all the right ways.
Bill Maher is unforgiving in his documentary, where he puts Scientologists and Jews, Cantheists and Catholics on the same plane. And that's precisely what makes the mockumentary worthwile: the realization that all of these organized religions can be as absurd as the other. The fact that the Bible is the #1 all time bestseller doesn't make religions based on it less illogical! For Bill Maher, Scientologists are as crazy for believing in the alien spaceship as Catholics for believing in a virgin woman giving birth to the human version of a God.
Surprisingly, the most intelligent parts of the film were provided by the Vatican's chief astronomer and a retired Vatican priest. These men, although strictly religious, made it clear that it is not the educated religious elites that take religious scriptures as dogma ad absurdum, but rather opportunistic religious leaders that use the fear inciting power of religion to spread harmful lies. (i.e. the for profit religious corporations like the Evangelists)
But the message is by no means that of intolerance towards religious people. Maher is not against religion per se. Instead, he is against the negative effects that religious thought has on the human thought process...because the mechanism of "faith" goes against the process of questioning, of unrestrained curiosity. He criticizes these organizations because they discourage scientific doubt in favor of imposed dogma. And a mind that doesn't doubt, might as well be dead.
Needless to say, I left the theatre with a big smile on my face.
9 comments:
Brilliant!
"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise."
http://faculty.cns.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html
Heeey, se puede conseguir ese documental? Lo quiero ver!!!
Y estoy completamente de acuerdo contigo, el proceso de fe va completamente en contra del proceso lógico mental de cualquier ser humano. Por eso yo creo que hay quienes nacen con una tendencia a ser personas de fe, y habemos otros que nacemos con la tendencia de cuestionar esa fe. It's a calling I believe.
No, yo no creo que los seres humanos nazcan preprogramados... ese argumento sólo sirve como excusa para justificar la falta de duda. Además, decir que alguien simplemente "nació" predispuesto a algo es lo mismo que decir que no puede cambiar...es condenarlo a sus propios prejuicios. Me rehuso a pensar que Haider y Le Pen nacieron racistas, por ejemplo.
The "calling" thing es puro bullshit. Yo creo que las personas toman decisiones personales, a veces razonadas a veces impulsivas. Pero deciden. Decir que simplemente "son" nos convierte en seres pasivos que no pueden escoger su camino.
El "calling" es simplemente otra decisión. Es la decisión de dejar de hacer el esfuerzo de cuestionarse las cosas, para refugiarse en la comodidad de las "verdades" prefabricadas.
La fe no te "nace", te la enseñan en bible school. Así como también te podrían enseñar sobre gravedad y hacerte sentir un "calling" de ser físico.
Busca la peli en el cine, seguro llega a Mexico
Y gracias Boogey por esa maravilla de Vonnegut. Has leido Player Piano?
Muero de ganas de verlo. God makes me crazy. Jesús, salvame de tus seguidores. Mahoma, inshala dejaran de creer tanto en ti. Y Adonai sigue escondido.
So I thought today that I might mosey on down to your blog to check out what you had to say about the recent election. I continued reading your posts until I reached this one, and now, in the spirit of questioning and unrestricted curiosity (I wouldn't want to have "a dead mind" after all), I feel compelled to ask three questions:
1) You say that "Maher is against the negative effects that religious thought has on the human thought process." So what's the difference between a stupid, dogmatic atheist and a stupid, dogmatic Christian?
2) What is the value of demonstrating that one is intellectually superior to a person who poorly exemplifies his religion's intellectual tradition? Shouldn't we be more focused with the exemplars of this tradition?
3) What role do these criticisms have in determining how we assign truth-values to the various metaphysical claims made by religion - specifically, Christianity?
[Hint: Avoid empty and unnecessarily pejorative rhetorical flourishes such as "medieval dogma" and "prefabricated truths."]
Harold, thank you for dropping by.
First of all, the "dead mind" part was not aimed at a person like yourself, who after three years of studying science and engineering, questioned the meaning of his life and chose to lead a religious life. By no means would I think that a person who is constantly questioning his belief systems via the rigorous study of philosophy and theology would have "a dead mind". The comment was aimed against the primacy of faith (versus the scientific method) as an explanatory device.
Now, before attempting to answer your questions, I must remind you that this blog is part public autobiography and part sketchpad for spontaneous ideas or thoughts that cross my mind. As such, I do not intend to be objective or perfectly accurate in my posts. By its very nature, my blog is a subjective, biased enterprise (I try to indicate this through my tags).
Nevertheless, I also feel that nothing enriches my writing experience more than criticisms or peer reviews. So...
1. Trick question! I'm strongly inclined to say that there is no difference, because at first glance, I could agree with you that a person can be as stupidly dogmatic with or without religious beliefs. In other words, stating that through your faith or your belief in divine revelation you "know" that God exists is as stupid as saying that through lack of scientific proof of God's existence you "know" that God doesn't exist.
Yet, I don't see Maher as a stupid dogmatic atheist, because he doesn't hold that he "knows" that God doesn't exist. Maher says that NOBODY knows that God exists because nobody has any proof (to him, faith and divine intervention are not enough proof). On the other hand, the people he interviews explicitly say that they "know" of God's existence through their faith. My statement ("Maher is against...human thought process") relates precisely to this idea that religions value faith (and not the scientific method) as a mechanism for proving the existence of divine beings...and therefore discourage scientific proof in favor of "belief".
2. Who do you mean by the exemplars? Popes, cardinals, priests? The so-called "saints"?
If a mediocre civil engineer does some poor calculations on the weight distribution of a bridge, I think it is of great value to prove your intellectual superiority by correcting his mistakes and preventing that bridge from collapsing. In this case, you would not be focusing on the emeritus professor of Calculus at the university where he studied (one of the exemplars of the mathematical tradition on which his profession is based), but on an engineer that poorly exemplifies his profession's intellectual tradition.
3. I don't quite understand the question. I must remind you that I'm not as well versed in theology as you are.
From what I think I understand, the criticisms are aimed at pointing out the absurdity of continuing to accept "faith" as a valid explanation for any metaphysical claims. In other words, I find no truth or value in metaphysical claims based on faith.
[Hint: can you not see "medieval dogma" as a purely descriptive term, aimed at situating a particular dogma in a time period called the Middle Ages. In other words, it is pejorative only if you consider the Middle Ages to be a negative time for human thought. But Thomas of Aquinas would not be happy. And "prefabricated truths" is not pejorative if you consider the process by which a series of writings by so-called "prophets" were edited and compiled into a book called the Bible, which subsequently became the source of truth and moral values for a large portion of medieval Europe. More surprisingly, even today there are large portions of the Christian community that take the writings in this bestseller literally and consider them unquestionable truths.]
Jorge, I’m glad to see you responded. I hope you’re doing well, and I’m glad to hear you’ll be graduating soon. I’m pretty long winded so I’ll get right to it . . .
The point of my first question is to demonstrate that stupid dogmatism can take hold of someone with or without faith. I don’t believe that it is religion that instills or is the cause of unquestioning dogmatism in people. I think an equally likely explanation to the one you give is that people with a certain temperament tend to be dogmatic about their beliefs, regardless of what those beliefs are (unless they are very self-critical and vigorously educated to stifle or transcend their temperament). Of course, since pro-religion worldviews are dominant in our society, it is evident that this dogmatism is going to express itself through religious people and consequently in religion. But it isn’t at all clear that religion has some essential, causal relationship with unthinking dogmatism - whether Maher is a stupid, dogmatic atheist or not is irrelevant to the question. Certainly, phenomenological analysis can’t discern the difference between the fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist Christians.
If you disagree you’ve got to demonstrate that your explanation makes better sense of the data than the one I’ve just given. Otherwise you should concede that your explanation flows naturally from your worldview, but isn’t the only reasonable conclusion and must therefore be a conclusion held in modesty.
Questions 2 and 3 are intimately related. In question 3 I want to know if your criticism of semi-informed people with low intellectual capacities is supposed to have some ultimate significance for how we view Christianity itself. In other words, does pointing out that there are stupid, ignorant Christians have any bearing on the truth of Christianity itself or not? I don’t think so, but if you do, would this also mean that whenever I question a stupid, dogmatic atheist and make him or her look foolish and ignorant that this is a mark against atheism itself? Surely not! It merely indicates that there is an intellectual deficiency in the person, and it would be a leap in logic to say atheism (or Christianity) is therefore false. If you wanted to critique religion as such I think it would be more fruitful to try to understand religion by reading people who actually study it and understand it rather than by taking pot shots at semi-informed people with low intellectual capacities.
Assuming you’ll agree with me that these criticisms don’t have any real significance in determining whether we should think Christianity is true or not, what then is the value in critiquing these people? (And that’s question 2.) Is it merely for your and your fellow atheists’ personal enjoyment? Is it supposed to encourage these Christians to think deeper? I don’t suppose to know how you will answer this question, which is why I really am curious to hear your answer.
Now I’d like to share some more observations of my own. First, I want to make a brief point about your understanding of faith. Second, I would like to offer a tentative and general “defense” (of sorts) of the ignorant.
You say that faith stifles the intellect, yet you have not yet given us a precise definition of faith, which is a central point of your critique. But, if we read your comments carefully, I guess we can discern an implied definition of faith, so let’s try to do that. You say that for a Christian faith is: (1) proof or explanation of God’s existence and other metaphysical claims (2) in favor of imposed dogma; (3) against questioning, scientific doubt, and unrestricted curiosity; (4) discouraging of scientific proof.
If you would like to critique faith properly, then I think this is an awful working definition, and I think you’ve done a poor job of that. If, on the other hand, you want to surmise what a handful of Christians with low intellectual capacities think might be a good definition of faith, then maybe you’ve done an ok (but not great) job. I think even in your critiquing these people you’ve failed to consider certain possibilities which I discuss in my defense of the ignorant.
At any rate, I don’t blame you for what I see as a failed critique because this is what Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest of their entourage do, so you would only be following their example. Terry Eagleton, a Marxist who is no friend of Christianity, writes in his review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, “[Does Dawkins] imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right” (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html). And I share his sentiment.
I have to be completely honest and say that your posts are indicative of the fact that you don’t really know what faith is at all and what role it plays in the life of a Christian. (I’m not saying that to be insulting, I’m simply saying it as a point of fact.) This working “definition” that I’ve extracted from your article is completely foreign to my experience as a reflective Christian, and it certainly doesn’t correspond with what any serious, thinking Christian (theologian or philosopher) calls faith. I think the best avenue for further discussion is going to be for us to try to clear up misconceptions in this area. If you want, rather than you trying to define faith, let me try to illuminate what it is in a post of my own on my own blog. I think the subject is worthy of discussion, and worthy of some serious and careful reflection in a post of its own. Of course, you are rounding out your days in school so I understand if you don’t have the time for this discussion at the present.
Now to my “defense” of the ignorant: I don’t claim to successfully defend everyone, nor would I even want to attempt such a thing because surely some Christians commit egregious intellectual sins, but here is a story for you to reflect on. Suppose John loves his wife Mary. I mean he really, passionately loves Mary. Now suppose John meets Paul the philosopher, who assumes a skeptical attitude towards love and starts questioning John on the subject. He asks: What is love? How do you know you really love Mary? Is love selfish (a la Ayn Rand) or selfless (a la Jesus Christ)? If Mary didn’t love you back, would you still love her? What if Mary lost all of her memories in some tragic accident, would you still love her? If Mary’s mind and character-traits were transported into the body of a man, would you still love this “Mary”? Is it really love if you only promise to love Mary temporarily or must love promise the eternal? Etc.
John is a simple man who, like 75% of Americans, doesn’t have a college degree, and he’s never been afforded the luxury of the academic intellectual training, time, and money that would more easily enable one to consider such questions. John is, for the first time ever, tackling these questions and trying to formulate answers based on his experience. Every time John thinks he’s answered a question, Paul, the wealthy Harvard graduate, comes back with some skeptical, philosophical retort. In the end, everyone watching this discussion agrees that John has failed to make a single point that hasn’t been rebutted; the thing he kept saying was that he just knew what love is and that he loved his wife Mary.
Does John’s inability to answer Paul mean he doesn’t know he loves Mary? Does it mean that he has to consider these questions before he is justified in saying that he loves Mary? Even if he did consider these questions, would his answers to them be an appropriate basis or foundation for his loving Mary? Of course not! John knows he loves Mary, and how does he know? Simply put: he knows “love” because he has experienced love, and the fact that he can’t explain the essence of love to some skeptical philosopher, by no means negates the fact that he has had an authentic experience of love (and that he is justified in believing that he knows what love is). The fact that he can’t wax eloquent on certain abstract philosophical considerations involving his relationship with Mary, by no means changes this.
What’s the point of the story starring John, Mary, and Paul? Well, I think it is similar to what people like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins do to believers, and I think many of the people they question are justified in completely ignoring these pestering questioners. In the words of John Henry Newman, “one-thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”
I don’t mean to excuse all ignorance by this example. Nor do I think it is healthy to never question things. Nor would I suggest that we should always ignore our doubts or questions. All I’m saying is that in some cases, a person can be epistemically justified in relegating certain questions to a role that is subordinate to an established relationship with the Triune God. Of course, I don’t expect you to understand this immediately because your natural reaction is to explain away this relationship with God from the perspective of your atheistic worldview, but as Dostoyevsky writes in The Idiot, “The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else – something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.”
[Finally, the problem with say that “medieval dogma” or “prefabricated truths” aren’t pejorative phrases is that: (1) you can’t strip a statement from its social context, and (2), you can’t ignore the fact that our experiences and beliefs are largely value-laden. You have to consider that a large part of your readership is going to associate “medieval” (especially when coupled with the word dogma) with an anti-intellectual time and with other ideas and phrases such as “scientifically ignorant,” “backwards thinking,” “dark ages,” “crusades,” “inquisitions,” and other word associations that are looked upon with disdain (whether rightly or wrongly) which aren’t valueless observations. The point is that most people are taught to disdain the middle ages, (if they weren’t, people might think of more noble events during that time period such as “the rise of the university,” “the birth of modern science,” “rich philosophical tradition,” “the establishment of governmental and economic order and stability out of a period of disorder and chaos,” “sublime cathedrals,” and so on), so you have to be careful with the way you select your words.
At any rate, my claim is that you are inciting certain emotions and a mindset that is hostile to Christianity before logic and reason make their way onto the scene. This makes it extremely difficult for people to remove unwarranted prejudice from their judgments. So to say that this phrase is purely descriptive is mistaken.
I think the same could be said about the phrase “prefabricated truths.” I see the word prefabricated as implying a sense of “invented” and “mass-produced” as though by some organization and for some purpose other than desiring to spread the truth. But this is not how scripture presents itself; therefore this is a negative, external, value-laden judgment on the nature of scripture. Moreover, this judgment would be hotly contested by a number of educated men and women, myself included, none of whom would be considered ignorant fundamentalists. I think this is enough evidence to convict the association of the phrase “prefabricated truths” with sacred scripture as pejorative. But this is really a tangential issue so I suggest we drop it so that we may have a more focused discussion. (Although I really would be curious to hear what you have to say about the editing and compilation of the writings that make up the Bible. I wonder what sources you would site and what primary texts you are familiar with.)]
Wow, that was a really "thorough" response, in the parlance of our times. Ok... I do need to graduate from school, so I'll hold my response until at least this week is over. But, as Terminator said, I'll be back.
[thanks for replying]
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