Lou Dobbs addresses this on CNN, with input from Christopher Hitchens:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Writing in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Free Inquiry, Austin Dacey and Colin Koproske warn of the prospect for additional assaults on free speech in the name of religious tolerance.

In April 2009, the U.N. will host a world conference on racism. Under the guise of protecting racial minorities, this event is likely to produce additional resolutions limiting free speech where it treads on cultural or religious sensitivities. A draft declaration written in Abuja, Nigeria, in preparation for the 2009 conference calls upon states to avoid “inflexibly clinging to free speech in defiance of the sensitivities existing in a society and with absolute disregard for religious feelings.” Like many of the HRC “racism” and “religious freedom” resolutions passed in recent years, this declaration focuses primarily on “Islamophobia,” seeking to paint all critical discussion of Islam, Islamic states, or Islamic organizations as racist and potentially violent.

Attempts to enshrine a protection against defamation of religion are antithetical to essential human rights, and pervert notions of religious tolerance by squelching dissent and insulating orthodoxy from criticism. It should be blatantly obvious, too, that the mutually-exclusive truth claims of various faith traditions cannot be reconciled, leading to the ludicrous situation where the canonical statements of one religion could be deemed defamatory by another.

Still, “defamation” concerns false accusations or malicious misrepresentations (as opposed to “blasphemy,” which deals with irreverent or impious behavior or utterances toward that which is held sacred). On some level, the prospect of having the truth claims of religion subject to the rules of evidence in a court of law holds some appeal. And, if the same protections attach to atheism (or its supposedly “religious” variant, Secular Humanism), it will be interesting to speculate how this can be used to the advantage of those whose truths are routinely defamed by religious fundamentalists.

A tip of the hat to Pharyngula. This issue has previously been discussed by Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and is also covered at The Freethinker and The Perplexed Observer. For a comprehensive treatment of this issue see the Center for Inquiry’s report titled “Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations,” which recommends the rejection of “defamation of religions” as a legal concept.

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By a three to one margin (71% to 26%) adults noted that they are personally more likely to develop their own set of religious beliefs than to accept a comprehensive set of beliefs taught by a particular church. Although born again Christians were among the segments least likely to adopt the a la carte approach to beliefs, a considerable majority even of born again adults (61%) has taken that route. Leading the charge in the move to customize one’s package of beliefs are people under the age of 25, among whom more than four out of five (82%) said they develop their own combination of beliefs rather than adopt a set proposed by a church.

Barna then goes on to speculate on the implications of this research, albeit from a slightly alarmist perspective. Among these are that 1) Christianity is a faith being defined by, rather than challenging, individuality; 2) many people embrace an unpredictable and often contradictory body of beliefs; 3) there is an abundance of unique worldviews tempered by various religious beliefs, as well as secularism; and 4) that “faith” is increasingly viral, rather than pedagogical, with observation, discussion and self-reflection contributing to the development of individual religious belief.

What may be distressing to organized Christianity is encouraging to those of us seeking to advance a rational, secular, humanist worldview. If many Americans are receptive to views at odds with religious orthodoxy, there may be great opportunity to make the case for humanism. We must, however, recognize that the increasing heterogeneity of religious belief suggests that we might be more productive in promoting a secular worldview if we refrain from broad and largely unproducive generalizations and focusing too intently on the nonsensical views of religious fundamentalists. We also need to begin making clearer distinctions between Christianity as a religion, and “cultural Christianity“.

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In a recently published study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, authors Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley demonstrate that when religion and science compete with each other for explanatory space, they also compete for value, in a sort of zero-sum game.

Although science and religion do not always conflict, a frequent source of tension concerns the competition for explanatory space. Religion and science offer different explanations for a wide array of phenomena, including some of the most fundamental human issues (e.g. intelligent design vs. natural selection). This direct opposition may cause the value of religion and science to become inversely related when these explanations are brought into mind. In the present research we investigate whether the evaluation of science and religion may be automatically opposed, such that increasing the perceived value of one as an explanatory system diminished automatic positive evaluations of the other.

In one experiment, participants read passages describing scientific theories involving cosmology (the “Big Bang Theory”) and abiogenesis (the “Primordial Soup Hypothesis”).  Each passage was concluded either with a strong statement, asserting that the theory best accounts for known observations, or a weak statement, claiming that the theory does not account for other data and raises more questions than it answers.  In the strong condition, significantly more respondents showed a positive attitude toward science when compared to God, whereas in the weak condition (where the explanatory value of the scientific theory was called into question), attitudes toward God were more favorable than science. In the other experiment, a reciprocal relationship was found when God was used as a strong explanation, with automatic evaluations of science diminished as evaluations of God were enhanced.

These data suggest that using scientific theories as ultimate explanation can serve as an automatic threat to religious beliefs, and vice versa. Perhaps more important, these findings also indicate that explanatory weakness in one belief system can bolster automatic evaluations of the other. These automatic oppositions emerged despite making no explicit mention of the potentially opposing belief system or to the possible conflict between science and religion.

Although it is somewhat obvious that the “God of the Gaps” is invoked where coherent and understandable scientific explanations do not exist, this study reinforces the idea that NOMA lacks practical applicability. Nature abhors a vacuum, and people seem to have an innate need to fill “explanatory space” with either science or religion. In light of these data, the best strategy with which to see reason and science prevail over irrrational religious belief may lie not in continually attacking  the incredulity of religious explanations, but to ensure that scientific advances are clearly and simply communicated, and that public confidence in the scientific endeavor is increased. As the authors note, “enhancing the apparent explanatory power of scientific explanations may automatically decrease positive evaluations of religion.”

A tip of the hat to The Situationist.

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[M]any measures of religiousness are associated consistently (albeit, in most cases, weakly) with a wide variety of outcomes that are relevant to health, well-being, achievement, and social flourishing. However, these associations present an interesting puzzle, because an overarching explanatory mechanism that might explain them has not been identified.

The authors undertook a comprehensive review of prior research surrounding the role of religion in fostering self-regulation and self-control, and the putative relationship between self-control and a variety of reported benefits. For purposes of this study, the authors defined religion as the “cognition, affect, and behavior that arise from awareness of, or perceived interaction with, supernatural entities that are presumed to play an important role in human affairs” and self-control as situations in which people suppress tendencies or emotions in pursuit of a goal with greater long-term utility.

Their analysis showed strong evidence that religion is positively related to self-control (and the related traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness), that religious practice influences goal selection and pursuit (with greater value placed on social harmony than on individual pursuits), and that religious ritual promotes self-regulation. Importantly, they found that these attributes of religious belief (that is, the tendency toward greater self-control) could account for some of the correlations between religion and improved health, well-being, and social behavior.

While their data supports positive effects from religious belief, the authors are not oblivious to the antithetical position that religion can lead to great harms.

There is no reason to think that religion’s effects on human life are uniformly good or socially desirable, even though most of the research on religion that has been relevant to this review has involved outcomes that are generally valued (e.g., health, psychological well-being, relational harmony, staying out of trouble with the police, school achievement). Indeed, the evidence for religion’s ability to motivate aggression and prejudice is at least as convincing as is the evidence for religion’s ability to facilitate cooperation and other forms of prosocial behavior, especially then the religion is of a fundamentalist, authoritarian variety.

Commenting on this research in the New York Times, John Tierney notes

So what’s a heathen to do in 2009? Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals. Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

In fact, although it may not be religious beliefs, per se, that yield these societal benefits, participation in a religious tradition fosters an important sense of community. Recapitulating that sort of community ( and its corresponding social support structure) among nonbelievers is no small order. As has been noted here before, the mere rejection of archaic fables is an insufficient basis for organizing such communities, especially given the breadth of the nontheistic population.

Humanist Community Centers, anyone?

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We should not try to pinpoint the unique origin of religious belief, because there is no unique domain for religion in human minds. Different cognitive systems handle representations of supernatural agents, of ritualized behaviours, of group commitment and so on, just as colour and shape are handled by different parts of the visual system. In other words, what makes a god-concept convincing is not what makes a ritual intuitively compelling or what makes a moral norm self-evident. Most modern, organized religions present themselves as a package that integrates all these disparate elements (ritual, morality, metaphysics, social identity) into one consistent doctrine and practice. But this is pure advertising. These domains remain separated in human cognition. The evidence shows that the mind has no single belief network, but myriad distinct networks that contribute to making religious claims quite natural to many people.

…

The findings emerging from this cognitive-evolutionary approach challenge two central tenets of most established religions. First, the notion that their particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths; second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape. On the contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

Improved understanding of the neuropsychology underlying religious belief will be helpful if rational, secular alternatives are ever to supplant religion as the predominant theme around which communities are organized.

A tip of the hat to Mind Hacks.

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Yet this is the approach taken by many atheists, unable to understand why repeatedly pointing out the errors and contradictions in sacred texts has failed to eradicate adherence to archaic and irrational religious belief and win “converts” to nontheism.

A well-worn aphorism by Karl Marx suggests that religion is “the opium of the masses.” But looking at that quote in context, we see a more nuanced view of religion.

The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Writing at the New America Foundation in an article entitled “Asking the Right God Question,” Gregory Rodriguez notes of that excerpt that:

Marx wasn’t just another hater of religion as a childish fantasy or a retreat from rationality. He saw faith as a symptom and not the disease, and he was interested in faith not in terms of right and wrong but because of what it told him about the human condition.

Rodriguez points to a recent study from Northwestern University published in the Journal of Research in Personality. That study of American Christians showed that the common denominator underlying religious belief across the political spectrum was fear. Rodriguez notes:

It appears that we do believe out of need, but it’s not, as Marx suggested, primarily because of material deprivation. Instead, it looks as if faith answers fear, and many different kinds of fear, which we can begin to delineate in some detail.

Humanists and others holding a nontheistic worldview aren’t gripped by uncontrollable fear that our lives are devoid of meaning or that the world will be overcome by chaos and conflict absent belief in imaginary deities. The problem is that the continued criticism (and ridicule) of religious belief does nothing to convey this important fact to those who might appreciate atheism on an intellectual level but who continue to cling, seemingly inexplicably, to religious practice. Humanism must be put forth as a positive alternative if we are to foster an evolution toward a more enlightened and rational populace, and we must address those issues which cause people to live in fear. It is not enough to kick the theological crutches out from under the arms of those who use them – we must show that they can walk without them.

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In his newly released film Religulous, comedian Bill Maher and director Larry Charles attempt to do to religious fundamentalism what Michael Moore did in exposing the irrational fear that leads us to embrace guns, surrender essential civil liberties, and march toward a poorly conceived war. Unfortunately, Maher does not muster an appropriate level of cinematic demagoguery, and the effort falls flat, succeeding neither as comedy nor as insightful commentary.

Maher attacks the low-hanging fruit of on the tree of willful ignorance, focusing too much attention on the bronze-age ethos of biblical literalism, theme park piety and the lunatic fringe of religion. In doing so, his approach is little more sophisticated than would be expected of an adolescent who has newly discovered the cognitive dissonance required for a belief in the literal truth of the Bible. Nowhere does this rise to the level of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, nor does it make as compelling a case as Sam Harris’ The End of Faith that religious adherents and their apologists pose a grave threat to the future of our civilization.

Maher argues against the arrogant certitude of religion, and embraces skepticism, but does so only superficially, never quite probing deeply enough into the contradictions and errors in the Bible or challenging liberal members of the clergy on the rationale for their entire religion once stripped of the nonsensical mythology. He sabotages his own argument, too, when acknowledging the psychological salve that is the faith of last resort practiced in foxholes and prison cells.

Had the film highlighted the juxtaposition between liberal (or even humanistic) and fundamentalist versions of those same religions, he could have made a strong case against blind faith without the need to ridicule religious identification itself. And it is that blind faith, rather than religious adherence per se, that is the true enemy of reason. While he does call for non-believers to emerge from their closets in defense of reason over faith, he failed to make a compelling case for this, showing religion as merely silly rather than inherently dangerous. Thus, when he finally asserts that religion must die if mankind is to survive, and urges the audience to “grow up, or die,” these admonitions seem like a non sequitir, the conclusion of a largely unsupported thesis.

Writing about this film in Salon Andrew O’Hehir wrote:

…to the extent that “Religulous” is meant to bemoan the auto-lobotomized mandatory Christianity of American public life (I’d include such honorary Christians as Joe Lieberman), and to encourage atheists, agnostics and other doubters to come out of the closet and claim their share of the debate, it’s performing a genuine social mitzvah.

True enough. And, granted, Maher’s intent was to play the farce of fundamentalism for comic effect, and there were laughs to be had. As a member of the secular choir, I enjoyed his romping sermon; but, I learned nothing new, and doubt anybody not already questioning their faith would be swayed by this movie. While this film doesn’t address the nuanced and more sophisticated religious beliefs held by many ostensibly religious Americans, it does cast a spotlight on the ridiculous beliefs held by a significant minority of registered voters, and for that it is to be applauded.

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Apparently, such logical errors are not the result of a general cognitive deficit. If that were the case, these same individuals would scarcely be able to dress themselves, and the streets of America would be awash in men and women, only partially clad in their Sunday best, lost en route to the local mega-church. No, if there is a pathology afoot, it is one that selectively diminishes capacity for critical thought in very specific areas – a not very likely prospect.

It could, as has been argued, be a simple matter of willful stupidity – a striving to maintain the bliss of enduring ignorance through acts of self-deception. In fact, Larry Moran, at Sandwalk, has posted a piece with the provocative title “Do Fundamentalist Christians Actively Resist Learning?” This post reiterates the point that there is an inverse correlation between educational attainment and religious fundamentalism, and goes on to puzzle over the “remarkable” phenomenon that a “significant percentage of fundamentalist Protestants can go to college and still reject the basic scientific fact that humans evolved.”

As we’ve seen time and time again on the blogs (and elsewhere), the Christian fundamentalists have erected very strong barriers against learning. It really doesn’t matter how much they are exposed to rational thinking and basic scientific evidence. They still refuse to listen.

But, is it really that fundamentalist Christians are averse to scholarship or somehow unable to comprehend scientific concepts? While that may feed into our idealized view of nontheists as the exclusive members of the community of reason, I don’t think this premise holds up under scrutiny. Too many fundamentalist Christians exhibit other signs of intelligence for this to be the case. And it would be naive to view all Christian theology as simplistic and childish; in fact, Christian apologists have jumped through astoundingly complex theological hoops to support their core beliefs in the face of what others might consider daunting and compelling contrary evidence.

Instead, I suspect that education is not always able to overcome preposterous and unsubstantiated beliefs as a consequence of faith. That is, faith, elevated to the status of virtue. Sola fide, the road to God’s grace. The sort of faith, the defense of which becomes a matter of preserving one’s very soul. Once faith is framed as more virtuous than materialistic scientific evidence, it is no longer amenable to argument, and the glossolalic apples are unable to communicate with the jargon-speaking oranges.

But, of course, faith is not a virtue. To a scientist, faith – holding to views that are unsupported by evidence – is a cardinal sin. And it is this, rather than the content of specific factual disagreements, that warrants our consideration. Faith is anathema to critical thinking, and has fallen into well-deserved disrepute in most spheres of our existence. But when the magisteria of science encroaches into a believer’s essential biblical worldview, faith is touted as the salvation of mankind and presidential candidates.

Rather than framing religious believers – even those holding fundamentalist, literalist views – as incapable of rational thought and as being willfully resistant to enlightenment, we should seek to understand the roots of this faith, and what attributes might make some more susceptible to its grip than others. At the very least, perhaps we can encourage this faith to be relegated to its rightful place, at the alter of the primum movens.

As Richard Dawkins has said:

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Amen.

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