[Guestblog] Anti-Theists and the Religion Scapegoat

Heathcliff knocks one out of the park with this guest post, which I agree with in writing style and message.

Images stolen, altered, and captioned by Phil the Pill.

As economist Robert Solow once said about the famously single-minded Milton Friedman “everything reminds [him] about the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.” Bill Maher will not like being compared to his economic antithesis, but Maher is also quite good at finding a single cause for many of today’s major issues, from the ineptitude of the United States government to the violent political climate of the Middle East: religion.

I shouldn’t be picking on Maher, though: he’s only one in a large group of anti-religion polemicists including Christopher Hitchens and the all-powerful Richard Dawkins who know that religion is truly the root of all evil. I know I should respect these luminaries, especially because these days it takes real guts to blame religion for the world’s major problems considering how much power and esteem religious institutions such as the Catholic Church wield. Seriously though, before these brave men arrived, we were simply too afraid to blame religion for the violence of undereducated, underfed, oppressed, and cripplingly poor people worldwide. Now that they are here, solving our major global issues will only be a matter of time.

The tradition of blaming a nation’s culture for the violence of its citizens or some other undesirable trait is nothing new. U.S. settlers used it to soothe their worries over decimating Native American populations, slave traders employed it to feel alright for selling humans as property, and Rudyard Kipling popularized it in his poetry. The White Man’s Burden lives on today, from conservative attitudes toward fatherless black families (It’s the rap music!) to Maher’s denunciation of Islamic states (It’s the Koran!). All irony of Hitchens’ calls for violence against violent Islamic states aside, what we have here is a group of men who can’t really be serious, right?

Prayer stance. Homicidal glare. Coincidence?

Does religion really cause violence? There are plenty of religious people who are not violent. So, that claim is out. We can refine it a bit, maybe claim that Islam causes violence. Again, plenty of nonviolent Muslims. We can keep going like this until we get to a tautology–only true Islam causes violence—or some other, equally useless claim. This process can be repeated for any variant on the theme “religion causes ______” that Maher and crew throw out there. Why is this so? Because religion alone is not causing the problems. It is the poverty, the inequality, the injustice, the broken political and economic systems of these nations making their citizens violent. This should be obvious, but to Maher and his crew, it isn’t. In fact, some may go as far as to say that religion causes the poverty, the inequality, the injustice, and so on, but by that point we have removed ourselves from reasonable discourse.

Nearly all people yearn for some deeper purpose and for many, religion provides that purpose. In the very prosperous United States, basic survival is pretty much ensured. This means that Americans do not need some deeper purpose to get them through the day. Hence, we do not value religion as highly as poorer countries. In most of the world, however, life is extremely difficult, and religion gives people a reason to make it through every painfully difficult day. Religion is very important to a poor person. Naturally, we should get rid of it.

But if religion is not there to fill the void of meaning in a poor person’s life, then something else will. That could be nationalism – as in Palestine – greed – as in Sierra Leone – or some other belief system that gives purpose to a person’s life. Trying to eliminate religion in poor countries is a lot like using Band-Aids to cure haemophilia. Treating the symptoms is not the same as treating the cause. The real problem is that the majority of the world lives in terrible conditions. We can tell the savages that their beliefs are stupid, think that injecting western intelligence into their lives will help them see the light, or we can actually help them. Give money, support organizations like Oxfam or Kiva, but for the love of God, quit listening to Bill Maher.

Heathcliff is a math and economics student who has known some Mormons in his day.