“Believe in Nothing”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

January 13, 2008 

Back in 2005 at our U.U.A.’s General Assembly, a lot of my colleagues were talking about a man named Sam Harris, who had published a book called The End of Faith.  The buzz was that he had written a tough book, but one that people ought to read, because his challenge to the future of religion was important.  It seemed everybody was talking about it.  I heard about it from folks here in the congregation, too; Harris was even featured in UUWorld magazine.  A lot of people in our movement thought Harris was really on to something.   

Here’s a sample:  “It is time we recognized,” Harris writes, “that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.” 

In the past couple of years there have been several books published that have taken religion to task with a sharpness that hasn’t been seen since the 19^th-century Unitarian skeptic Robert Ingersoll, who in 1879 published a book called Some Mistakes of Moses that savaged the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.  Just the titles give you a flavor.  In addition to Sam Harris, the current crop includes Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.  We’ve already heard from the one I’ve spent the most time with, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great.  The authors all characterize themselves as atheists, but they’re more like anti-theists.  The books are polemics against religion and religious beliefs of any kind.  These “new atheists,” as one journal calls them, are issuing a call to arms not just to defend reason and the scientific method, but to assert them boldly as the only true ways of knowing. 

It makes sense to me that these books have been greeted with delight by so many Unitarian Universalists, especially those of us for whom God-language is not compelling or comfortable.  There are some powerful arguments in them, as well as some delightfully skewering turns of phrase.  Speaking of the idea that any religious belief could be considered evidence of insanity, Harris says, “It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.”  The “new atheists” do an excellent job of listing some of the worst excesses and atrocities that have been committed in the names of religions throughout the history of the world, and they have an unerring eye for the most troubling stories, scriptural passages, doctrinal inconsistencies and personal hypocrisies in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

We enjoy this a bit, I think, in part because we live in a world where religious fanatics and religious frauds on all sides of too many conflicts are using their religion as an excuse for political violence, and in a time when American religious fundamentalism seems to have gained control of too many of our own political institutions.  We’re feeling beleaguered, and it’s nice to have some smart articulate people on our side.  We like it because good polemics are snappy and fun, and some of us have been known to let loose a diatribe or two of our own.  We like it because we’re tired.  We’re tired of feeling attacked by people with some of the beliefs these authors treat so fiercely.  We’re tired of hearing from our kids that their friends told them they’ll go to hell because of our church; we’re tired of arguing with our own family members that we do, too, have meaning in our lives; we’re tired of having to explain that we don’t need to believe in the Nicene Creed or the special divinity of anyone to live a good, healthy, moral life.  We value reason and the scientific method, too, and it’s good to hear them lifted up so vigorously.  

The polemic quality of the “new atheists’” writing has risks, though, and critics have cautioned that all the authors sometimes let their conviction carry them beyond the bounds of reasoned debate.  As I said before, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great is the one I’ve spent the most time with, and there is no doubt that his passion runs away with his commitment to intellectual integrity from time to time.  The subtitle of his book is “How religion poisons everything,” and in order to justify that foregone conclusion, he is willing to play some tricks with the evidence.  

The most glaring thing for me in Hitchens’ case is a double standard about the source that inspires good and evil actions.  “When we read of the glories of “Christian” devotional painting and architecture, or “Islamic” astronomy and medicine,” he says, “we are talking about advances of civilization and culture—some of them anticipated by Aztecs and Chinese—that have as much to do with “faith” as their predecessors had to do with human sacrifice and imperialism.”  In other words, the content of Michelangelo’s religion, for example, has nothing to do with the power of his expression of that religion’s stories.  That’s all skill and technique. 

Again and again, Hitchens attributes the best actions of religious people—Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, American and British abolitionists who led the fight against slavery—not to their faith, but to humanist ethics and the natural progress of evolving moral understandings.  But the same standard does not apply to negative actions:  Terrorists, tyrants, and torturers, along with all those who have resisted scientific progress, are all motivated, not by power or politics, not by sadism, not by fear of new ideas undermining their value structures or cultural stability, but by religion.  The idea that there might have been political fanaticism and ethical blindness in the minds of the September 11 terrorists, perhaps even overshadowing their veneer of fanatical devotion to a particular version of Islam, has apparently never occurred to him; for Hitchens, the attacks were entirely “religious” acts.   This makes for great rhetoric, but it is an extraordinarily naïve reading of history and human motivation. 

The other overriding problem for me in the work of the new atheism is the failure to make any distinctions between kinds of religion and ways of understanding whatever power organizes, sustains, and moves the universe.  “Belief,” for them, means belief in a personal, individual, human-like God; it means acceptance of every line of every scripture; it means literal understanding of the ancient mythologies that underlie the modern religious vocabulary. It’s not so much that they don’t make a distinction between fundamentalist and fanatical religious beliefs and liberal or progressive ones as it is that they don’t even acknowledge the existence of any religion other than the most conservative and strident kind. 

My colleague Rob Hardies from All Souls Church in Washington, DC, points out that Sam Harris's End of Faith does not actually denounce faith, but ideology, a rigid and artificial certainty about one set of beliefs.  In an article in Shambala Sun magazine, Rob and others, like philosopher/psychologist Ken Wilber, express concern that by identifying all religion with the most extravagant excesses of fundamentalisms and religious fanatics, writers like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett unwittingly accept fundamentalism’s definition of religion.   

In fact, all the criticisms they raise have come for centuries from within religious movements.  Religious liberals have been revising our religion to be in harmony with advances in human knowledge and science all along.  We have long understood that scriptures are written in the language of myth and metaphor, not intended to be taken literally.  Wilber says this rather bluntly, pointing out that this debate “wastes time telling us that Moses didn’t part the Red Sea.  Well, duh.”  Religious liberals have long resisted the excesses and abuses of religious fanaticism.  But we’re invisible in all these recent books. 

For me, writers like Harris and Richard Dawkins show what happens when the doubt we cherish becomes not the attendant of truth, but the only truth in which we have faith.  I love the Robert Weston reading we shared earlier, but I’ve always wanted to point out the danger that if our whole loyalty is given to doubt, then the acid that eats away the false will just keep eating, and we’ll be left with nothing but acid.  That isn’t enough. 

In a UUWorld interview, Sam Harris says that certainty is the breeding ground of fanaticism and terror—yet he’s very certain that there is no power, process, or purpose guiding the Universe along its evolutionary path.  For the “new atheists,” there is only one way of knowing.  We live in a purely material, purely mechanical universe in which all meaning, value, and sense of narrative is artificially constructed by human beings.  They believe in nothing with all the fervor of religious fundamentalism’s belief in a jealous, angry, rule-obsessed and punitive God. 

Many if not most of us rejected that kind of God long ago.  I walked away from that idea as a 19-year-old college freshman and spent years assuming that anyone who mentioned the word God was talking about the understanding of God I had as a teenager.  Meanwhile, the grownups I wouldn’t talk to stopped believing in that God, too.  They believed in an impersonal process of creativity and destruction.  Or they believed in a power of justice that aligns itself with the oppressed and urges us to do the same.  Or they believed in the simultaneous evolution of consciousness, matter and energy from the moment of the Big Bang until the present and into the future toward one another.  Or they believed in a vast, all-encompassing fabric of being in which each of us is a thread interwoven with countless other threads, affecting and affected by every other thread which has ever been part of the fabric. 

While I am the other hand was busy believing in nothing. 

I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t think “religion poisons everything”; I think bad religion poisons some things.  I don’t think faith is the enemy of humankind, but I know that it matters what we have faith in.  I don’t think that God is necessarily a delusion.  Religion, like science, is a way of understanding the deepest truths of the universe, truths that are so vast and complex that no single person can ever be expected to grasp them all at once.  I am skeptical of the claim that any single theory, scientific or mythological, is likely ever to sufficiently explain the entirety of existence for all human beings.  We need different ways of knowing, and religion and science both need to be subject to constant criticism, revision, and correction.  Holding that assumption and that commitment with regard to religion has been the special mission of our faith tradition for hundreds of years.  It is our religious heritage. 

So let us cherish our doubts—but let us also cherish our faith.  They need each other, and we need them both.