Witch Hunts, Religious and Secular

I don't know if Christians have any greater record of inquisitions and witch hunts than anyone else does. Christians invariably think that Christianity matters, and that what it has to say is important and worth spreading. But you need something more than that to get witch hunts etc. You need the idea that this end justifies the means used to accomplish it, and that it is appropriate to use the weapons of power to get people to believe the right thing. Most Christians today, I think would say that a forced belief in Christianity isn't real one, and that such actions on behalf of Christianity are inappropriate and self-defeating. The people who brought the idea of a free and democratic society to the Western were mostly Christians. Any democratic society needs religious freedom to survive. For political reasons, autocratic governments pursue religious (or non-religious) uniformity. Democratic ones ordinarily tolerate opposing religious views. Islam is somewhat of a different case, because Islam, is rooted in the idea that the government should be implementing it. That's why it's so hard to get a democracy going in an Islamic country. 

Now Christian autocrats have pursued Christian uniformity, and often pursued Catholic or Protestant uniformity. Atheist autocrats have also pursued atheist uniformity, as in the case of the League of the Militant Godless in Russia. The way this is prevented is not by supporting or opposing religion, it is by saying the governments should stay out of the business of enforcing uniformity in matters of religion. 

People will sometimes say atheism is a non-belief, not a belief, but in the minds of many this non-belief matters. Some, like Dawkins, think that society will either progress or regress depending on whether or not we are successful in ridding ourselves of religion, which they consider to be irrational superstition. So, if you have the power to use force to help eliminate religion, or to force it on others, would you use it? If you were given Tolkien's One Ring, and could use it to make everyone religious or everyone nonreligious would you use it? If religion or lack of it matters, and most of us on both sides think it does,  then it is always possible for anyone to "use the ring" to compel assent, if the power to do so is present. 

Religion and violence

I looked at some dialogue I had in March of 2008 about Dawkins and his child abuse claims, and I claimed at that time that those claims were irresponsible and a potential threat to the separation of church and state. Dawkins said he thought that teaching a child the doctrine of everlasting punishment was worse abuse than sexually abusing the child. We use force to prevent child sexual abuse, so even if Dawkins doesn't advocate the forcible removal of children from religious parents, the road in that direction is already marked out in what he says.

There is an intellectual path that leads from religious belief to religious persecution. There is an intellectual path that leads from atheism to religious persecution. The child abuse talk on the part of Dawkins takes us part of the way.

One step in the direction of persecution, either religious or anti-religious, involves something that I think is true, namely, that ideas have consequences and they do matter. We can remove the temptation to persecute on behalf of our beliefs by adopting a "Can't we all just get along" kind of intellectual relativism, but the price is, in my estimation, just too steep.

Christians have by and large rejected the idea that they ought to use political power to inculcate their beliefs, so the "religion leads to violence" concept is not borne out by at least the last couple hundred years of history. That is because Christians have decided that the right to impose their sectarian beliefs on others isn't worth risking the possibility of being persecuted for one's own beliefs.

The fact that Billy Graham might think it likely that Richard Dawkins will suffer in hell forever for his atheism, while Dawkins doesn't think that Graham will roast for his religious faith doesn't mean that Graham is a better candidate to persecute than Dawkins is.

Religion doesn't lead to violence. A willingness to use the powers of the state to enforce religious or non-religious conformity is what leads to violence. Political power carries with it temptations. Christians have a track record in dealing with those temptations. It has some bad patches in it, but by and large Christians aren't going down that road. Do atheists have a track record? No, unless the Communists count. If they do, the record is bad, if they don't, then atheists are untested when it comes to not persecuting when possessing sufficient political power to do so.

Would you take The Ring if you thought you could make things so much better by so doing?

Hallquist on religious persecution

I had indicated, in a previous post, the kinds of considerations that might lead a believer in, say, Christianity, to use force in the promotion of his own beliefs. I had given the following argument as to why they might think this way.

1) Our beliefs are true, and others are false.
2) Whether you accept our beliefs or not determines whether you go to heaven or to hell.
3) The people who promulgate these other religions are putting other people's souls in danger.
4) Even if we have to forcibly stop them from doing so, we can prevent them from leading other people on the road to hell.
5) Therefore, the use of force in the name of religion is justified.

Chris Hallquist has responded, suggesting that assuming Christianity and some biblical assumptions, this line of arguments provides a good reason for using force to promote Christianity. I had maintained that there were gaps in the argument, but Chris thinks those gaps can be easily filled. Hence, he maintains, people like Sam Harris are right in supposing the religion leads to violence.

First, I would begin by saying that Christians have gone far enough down this road to see that they don't want to go there anymore. In the present day, we don't see persecution in the name of Christ, or not a whole lot of it. (The disputes in Northern Ireland are political first and religious second). But we did have the 30 Years War in which Protestants and Catholics decimated 1/3 of the population of Europe. This is largely because religious groups have gradually come to accept the secularization of government. The bitter lessons of history have made Christians think twice about the kind of reason that leads to the use of force to promote their beliefs. This history is why I, for one, am a pretty thorough church-state separationist who gets nervous when people like Falwell and Dobson look to state to support their religious values. Even though there have been persecutions since the Thirty Years War, the trend has been away from the use of force on behalf of faith.

Remember, Christianity was founded when it had no political power and it survived for nearly three centuries before it got any political power. Islam is another story, since it's inception was political, and it does seem essential to Islam that it have the aspiration to rule.

Second, many Christians that I know are inclusivists and universalists, not exclusivists. I know that there is a biblical argument to be made for exclusivism, as Chris mentions, but many Christians don't accept that argument. I am not an exclusivist myself.

Third, if we say religion causes violence, presumably the violence would be removed if religion were removed. Of course atheists affirm 1 in the above argument just as vehemently as Christians do. They think they are right and we theists are wrong. Of course, atheists do not believe in hell. However, it would be naive to suppose that there is no equivalent to hell in the atheist ideology. To be able to say, with John Lennon, that if we had "no religion" we would have "nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man," one would have to smoke as much pot and drop as much acid as John did. To people like Dawkins and Harris, religious belief is delusional and insane, and impedes the progress of science and the human race in general. My commentator mattghg's equivalent argument is relevant here:

1) Atheism is true, and so obviously so that religious believers must be insane.
2) Insane people can do outrageous things.
3) The people who promulgate belief in God are putting other people's sanity in danger.
4) Even if we have to forcibly stop them from doing so, we can prevent them from leading other people on the road to insanity, and hence possibly outrageous actions.
5) Therefore, the use of force in the name of suppressing religion is justified.

We already get Dawkins saying that raising children to believe in supernatural beings is to abuse them. He doesn't just say the sensible thing that you could say here, which is that religious upbringing can be abusive if the doctrine of everlasting punishment is used as a tool for control. He says that all religous teaching of children is abusive. Now he doesn't say that the forcible removal of children from religious homes is justified, but most of us think that Child Protective Services is doing its job if it removes a child from an abusive home. Dawkins and Torquemada agree that one's beliefs about religion matter profoundly to the well-being of human beings. Taking one's children away forcibly to prevent Christian parents from teaching them their faith is anti-religious persecution.

Have atheists shown that, put in the seats of political power will all the tendency to corrupt that political power provides, that they would wield that political power in a way that respects the beliefs of all and doesn't force unbelief down anybody's throat? Well, there were atheistic governments in Russia, China, Cuba, and throughout Eastern Europe. Oh right, those were communists, and communism is really a religion. They weren't true humanists. So I suppose it is also a telling point to say that the so-called "Christians" who did much of the persecuting in history were Catholics, and that I am not a Catholic? Didn't think so.

I suppose one could be escape the possible temptation to persecute by being a thoroughgoing relativist. But that kind of position is just incoherent. No, the way out of this problem is not to enlist political power to promulgate one's world-view, whether that world-view is religious or secular.

It is quite true that Christian history has had some bad chapters in it. But we have for the most part learned our lesson. If the New Atheists acquire political power, would they learn the same lesson or would they think themselves immune, since they have no religion?

The road to religious persecution

The thinking that leads to religious persecution seems to go like this.

1) Our beliefs are true, and others are false.
2) Whether you accept our beliefs or not determines whether you go to heaven or to hell.
3) The people who promulgate these other religions are putting other people's souls in danger.
4) Even if we have to forcibly stop them from so, we can prevent them from leading other people on the road to hell.
5) Therefore, the use of force in the name of religion is justified.

However, you should notice that none of the other statements on this list follow logically from 1. The problems come further down the list.

Religions don't kill people, people kill people.