Religious Extremists Make Way More Sense Than Moderates

One in three Americans believe that the Bible is the literal word of god. These are the people who put prayer in, and take evolution out of, our schools, brutalize homosexuals, oppose stem cell research, practice faith healing, and every other thing you've heard of horrible fundamentalists doing. These people are (rightly so) usually the target of Richard Dawkins' wrath. You seem them on full display in Bill Maher's movie Religulous.

These people are crazy, they are deluding themselves, and they are dangerous. But they're not deluding themselves nearly as much as religious moderates.

Being a biblical literalist takes one leap of faith: the Bible is true. It's quite a leap, but it's a single leap. Once a person believes that, all kind of crazy behavior is consistent with that belief. Contrast that to the religious moderate. A religious moderate has to make 10 leaps of faith before getting up in the morning. Everyone's belief system is different, but a lot of American moderates share certain beliefs, such as:

a) god exists, and he resembles the god described in the Bible
b) he loves everyone
c) he loves me personally
d) he chooses not to give us evidence of his existence
e) only the parts of the Bible that I like are true. The rest was made up or misinterpreted by writers or translators.
f) god wants me to do, coincidentally, what I'm already doing now, or something similar.

There are many more, but I think you get the point. Since there is no source a person can point to and say "that is true," every individual belief is a new leap of faith. It's a new willful suspension of rationality.

A person who really believes that the Bible was written by the holy spirit should be a complete ass. He should prostheletyze relentlessly. What's an annoying afternoon compared to eternal damnation? He should attempt to stop anything (science, acceptance of homosexuality, etc.) that causes people to disbelieve the Bible. And he should use any method permitted by the Bible. Moderates tend to look down on these people, but extremists are simply living up to their beliefs.

Moderates tend to invent their own belief systems based on what they wish was true. They can clearly see that parts of the Bible can't be true. But instead of admitting that the Bible is not a credible source of information, and refusing to believe it, they just excise the parts they don't like, which tends to be most of it. They keep the broad outlines, cherry-pick a verse or two that they saw on a bumper-sticker, and fill in the rest with whatever makes them feel good. As usual, Sam Harris puts it best:

[Religious moderates] perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life. While religious moderates don't fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

Making a leap of faith, I can understand. It (unfortunately) happens to the best of us. But making that many? All the time? That is what seems really crazy to me.

Easy Answers

Trinley Gatso, the 12th Dalai Lama, was asked, "What is god?" by an accolyte. He responded:

If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume that the light on the wall is God. But the light is not the goal of the search; it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revelation upon seeing it! Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God, is the byproduct of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished, not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume that we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do! Or we turn to look at our shadow, and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose; which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty…and in all its flaws. And in so doing better understand the world around us.

This sounds very, very wise. It's not. This is what I call a "middler's answer." It's the type of wisdom that those that fall between the faithful and the faithless love. These answers generally take one of these forms:

The search for god is god. (as above)

We are a part of the universe / god attempting to understand itself.

The realization that we are not god is god.

We are all one.

Enlightenment is the end of the search for enlightenment.

Etc. If it's punchy and tautological, odds are it belongs in the middling category. All too often, these concepts are taken from one of the eastern religions (Buddhism being the most heavily borrowed from) without the context of the rest of the faith. A lot of Americans are willing to spout off the Essence of Oneness, while omitting the Path of the Bhodisattva. (Don't worry if you don't know what that means, that's kind of the point -- Wiki has some great articles on Buddhism).

What's important here is that these seem like answers. They sound as though they settle the question of where man fits in the universe very tidily, without leaving around some absent deity. They don't settle anything. What they do is take a very positive concept and rephrase it away as something mystical or spiritual.

Hidden in the examples listed above is one of the great fundamental truths of existence. It is every person's duty to find what truth they can. When you get down to it, this is all we have. We are born with our faculties and our instincts, and nothing else. Everything we learn about the universe stems then from our attempts to understand it. This is the crux of philosophy, science, and religion. If mankind has a universal feature, it is that we all must search for meaning, in some form. The middler's answers play to this fact. We are all looking for truth, and these ideas seem to provide it.

But they don't . The middler's answers are just that: answers, not wisdom. Read again the quote above from the Dalai Lama. What has he said other than, "keep looking," in so many words? So do keep looking, that's all we've got. Please don't think this Starbucks-cup "wisdom" will actually teach you anything.


Now onto my super-secret second point of this article. It really, really irritates me the extent to which westerners idealize the eastern faiths (specifically Buddhism, Shinto, and Hinduism -- for some reason the Jainists, Sikhs, etc. don't get the same treatment). From t-shirts to making your blog posts sound more impressive, eastern wisdom is everywhere. Consider these two statements:

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly."

"Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."

They are both relatively wise statements, and express a good point eloquently -- life is about living. Which would you put up as a status message in your favorite chat program? What if you had to source them? The first is attributed to the Buddha, the second to the Apostle Paul.

To nail this point home, I opened this post with a quote from the Dalai Lama. At least I told you that I did. That speech was actually delivered by a reptilian alien on the TV series Babylon 5. Does it seem quite so wise now?

Be well,
Chris.