Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (10 page)

This whole “they’re not true Christians” thing is what atheists and rationalists call the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Imagine that Angus McTavish reads about a grisly murder committed in London, and says to himself, “No Scotsman would commit such a terrible crime.” Then the next day, he reads about an equally grisly murder committed in Glasgow… and says to himself, “No
true
Scotsman would commit such a terrible crime.” But Angus McTavish doesn’t get to decide that a grisly murderer can’t be a true Scotsman. And progressive Christians don’t get to decide that right-wing fundamentalists can’t be true Christians.

By all means, say that the Christian Right is wrong. Say that their vision of the world is hateful and bigoted and out of touch with reality. Say that their version of Christianity isn’t the only one, even. I’ll stand by you. But don’t say that they’re not true Christians. They are Christians, by any reasonable definition of the word. You don’t have the one true version of the faith, any more than they do.

The hair dryer analogy comes from “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. The extrapolation of the analogy into “why nice religion is still problematic” belongs to a comment by Brownian at
Pharyngula
. The “no true Scotsman” analogy was originally developed by Anthony Flew, in his book
“Thinking About Thinking: Do I sincerely want to be right?”

“But surely you don’t mean New Age religion! You’re talking about conventional religion, organized religion, religion with dogma and authority and a power structure. I understand being angry about that. But New Age religion and spirituality doesn’t have any of that! It’s transcendent, and healing, and fluid, and connected with nature and stuff! When you talk about what makes atheists mad about religion… surely you don’t mean me?”

Actually — yes, I do mean you.

It’s true that when I write about religion and religious belief, I tend to write about the Big Ones. The famous ones, the powerful ones, the well-organized ones with millions of followers or more. (Christianity, mostly, since as an American, it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and the one that’s most in my face.)

But it isn’t just the power structure of religion that’s a problem. It’s the spiritual belief itself.

So I want to talk about New Age religion. Or, as it’s sometimes called, “woo.” Neo-paganism. Wicca. Goddess worship. Astrology. Telepathy. Visualization. Psychic healing. The hodgepodge of Eastern and pre-modern religious beliefs imported into modern America — reincarnation, karma, chakras, shamanism etc. — that have been jumbled together and made palatable to a Western audience. Channeling. Tarot cards. Etc.

And I want to talk about why I have a problem with it.

I said this about progressive religion, and I’ll say it here: While I do think woo is harmful, I don’t think it’s as harmful as mainstream religion. Mostly because it’s not as powerful. It’s not as widespread, as wealthy, as symbiotically intertwined with governments, as the big religions. There’s a difference of degree, and it’s significant.

But the fact that it’s not
as
harmful doesn’t mean it’s not harmful at all.

There’s an obvious, practical, direct way that woo can do harm. And that’s the fact that false premises lead to bad decisions. Woo beliefs are untested and untestable at best; tested and demonstrably false at worst. And basing your life on a false premise is going to lead you to bad decisions. Garbage in, garbage out, as the data processors say. And this shows up most obviously when it comes to medicine.

When I was working as a counselor for a birth control clinic, we had a client who had come in for a cervical cap. I asked her what birth control method she was currently using, and she answered, “Visualization.” Really. She and her partner protected themselves from unwanted pregnancy by visualizing a protective barrier of white light over her cervix, shielding it from the sperm. She had decided to switch to the cervical cap, not because she’d decided that visualization was bullshit, but because she was concerned that she unconsciously wanted to get pregnant, and feared that this unconscious desire would make the visualization ineffective. Poke holes in the white light diaphragm, I guess. (Talk about an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If she didn’t get pregnant, visualization worked; if she did get pregnant, it’s because she wasn’t doing it right.)

So that’s part of what I’m talking about. If you believe in the visualization method of birth control, you’re a lot more likely to get pregnant when you don’t want to. If you believe in psychic healing or the manipulation of the chi energy or whatever, you’re a lot less likely to seek tested medical help for your injured leg or your cancer or whatever. (And you’re more likely to give up on conventional medicine if it takes longer than you want it to, or takes more work and trial and error than you’re willing to give it, or is partly effective but not completely.) That’s real, practical, physical harm done by woo.

But this principle doesn’t just apply to medical woo.

I once worked in an office with cats (no, this isn’t a tangent, bear with me), one of whom was pathologically shy and terrified of most people, but had come to trust me and be very attached to me, pretty much to the exclusion of everyone else. When I left that job (I’d been there for several years), I was worried that he would freak out without me, and asked my boss if I could take the cat home with me. Rather than consider the question on its own merits, my boss called an animal psychic… who did a consultation over the phone, and told her the cat wanted to stay in the office. My boss explained this to me, as if it had the force of complete authority. As if the psychic’s verdict completely and inarguably settled the question.

I’m not saying this was an easy decision to make. It wasn’t. I’m saying that it should have been made by me and my boss, who knew the cat and knew the situation. It should not have been made by a pet psychic, who never met any of us in person, and who made the decision
over the phone
.

(Slight tangent, although it is in fact relevant: If you want to read one of the funniest things ever about telephone animal psychics, read
“Friend’s Best Man”
by Harmon Leon, a.k.a. The Infiltrator, who called several pet psychics and asked them to do readings on his dog… a dog who did not, in fact, exist.)

I could give example after example of this. If you believe that your horoscopes and Tarot readings are all pointing to “serious love relationship coming soon,” you’re not going to make smart or careful decisions about your dating life. If you believe in reincarnation, you’re going to be more careless about taking advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities and experiences. If you believe that the Tarot is telling you to weather the rough spots in your relationship and that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, you’re going to stay in a destructive, hopeless relationship for a lot longer than you should. You might even marry the guy. (All examples from my own life, by the way.)

So that’s the most direct, immediate way that woo can do harm. False premises lead to bad decisions. And untestable hypotheses make it impossible to evaluate your decision-making process and adjust it. Garbage in, garbage out.

But there’s an equally important way that woo can do harm. And that’s that it leads people away from valuing reason, and evidence, and reality. Woo, like every other religious or spiritual belief, ultimately prioritizes faith over reason; personal experience over external evidence.

I’m not saying that religious belief completely eradicates reason or concern for evidence. I’m saying that, when it comes down to a hard choice between the two, it encourages people to reject reason and evidence in favor of personal experience. Religious belief encourages people to believe in their own feelings and instincts… even when those feelings and instincts are contradicted by reality or logic. It discourages people from being aware of the fact that their feelings and instincts can be deceived: by con artists and charlatans, or just by our own wishful thinking. It discourages people from being aware of this well-documented fact, and staying vigilant about it. Every unsupported belief you hold makes you more vulnerable to others… and less likely to value skepticism and critical thinking at all.

I think this is important. I think reality is important. I think reality is just about the most important thing there is. And I have a serious problem with any belief system that encourages people to ignore it. It’s hard enough to be vigilant and conscious and skeptical about your biases and blind spots when you
do
prioritize reason and reality over instinct and personal feeling. Throwing spiritual faith into the mix makes it even harder.

Now, as my wife Ingrid points out when we discuss this, there are some woo believers — neo-pagans and Wiccans especially — who take it all with a grain of salt. There are believers — a better word would be practitioners — who see the ideas more as useful metaphors, and who see the rituals as comforting and beautiful rather than literally effective. They see woo as a way of altering their consciousness, re-wiring their own heads — not as a way of directly changing external reality. And that kind of woo, I don’t have a huge problem with.

But I also think it can be a dicey path to walk. I remember, from my own woo days, how vague and half-assed my beliefs could be. And I remember how easily I could slip back and forth between thinking of my beliefs as metaphorical, and thinking of them as literal. Mostly, they slipped back and forth depending on how hard they were being questioned. When I was with someone who was more skeptical, I’d lean toward the “useful metaphor” end of the spectrum: when I was with other believers, I’d lean toward the, “Wow, isn’t this freaky, something weird must be going on here!” side. And I know from experience that other woo believers do this as well. A commenter on my blog, John the Drunkard,
summarized the attitude beautifully
: “We don’t really believe anything that you have demonstrated to be absurd… while anyone is watching.” When explaining their theology in public, when debating their theology with skeptics, they don’t admit to believing anything that contradicts evidence or logic. But in the company of other believers, and in the privacy of their own minds… it’s another story.

And if religion really is just a metaphor, then why do people get so upset when atheists say that it isn’t true? If religion is simply a story, a personal perspective, a way of framing experience and giving it meaning, then why are people troubled and even angered when someone says, “Actually, that probably isn’t true”? Any more than they’d be troubled if someone said, “Actually,
Alice in Wonderland
probably isn’t true”? If you’re getting upset when people point out that religion isn’t true, then I have to question whether you sincerely see it as simply a metaphor. And if you are going with the “this is just powerful metaphor and a useful practice” route, you need to do it consistently and with integrity — and not just as a way of dodging skeptical critiques.

But why do you need to do that? What business is it of mine whether other people’s practices are rigorously naturalistic or slip into supernatural belief? Don’t people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe?

Of course we have the right to come to our own conclusions about religion. I will defend that right passionately and ferociously. We have the right to believe that a mystical spirit guides the Tarot cards; that subatomic particles have free will; that our romantic lives are guided by balls of flaming gas billions of light years away; that psychics can detect our pets’ true desires over the phone; that Jesus Christ is our personal savior and anyone who doesn’t agree is going to Hell.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right for us to do so.

I’m free to believe anything I want. But I can’t do so and be honest with myself. I can’t do so and retain my intellectual integrity. I can’t do so if I’m going to make good decisions based in reality — the best possible understanding of reality we have. I can’t do so if I’m going to place reality as more important, and more interesting, than my own wishful thinking. As the saying goes, you have a right to your own beliefs, but you don’t have a right to your own facts.

And our beliefs don’t just affect our own lives. They affect how we treat other people. My decision to stay in a bad relationship because the Tarot told me to didn’t affect only me. My client’s decision to prevent pregnancy with wishful thinking didn’t affect only her. My boss’s decision to consult a pet psychic about our office cat didn’t affect only her. (For one thing, she spent money on the psychic at a time when she was having a hard time paying her staff.) And this doesn’t just apply to our personal lives: it works on a larger social-justice scale as well. The belief in karma and reincarnation, for instance, gets used to justify terrible social ills, and to treat people born into poverty and despair as if they’re simply getting what they deserve. Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes our beliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.