Astronomical Cheesology OR Who and What Deserves Respect?

17Jan07

I’ve been talking about respecting people, but exactly who and what deserves respect? Let me start with the premise that we need a minimum level of respect for our fellow humans. This isn’t for philosophical reasons as much as pragmatic; society would never work if nobody had any respect for anybody else. It would be kill or be killed, effectively reverting us far back on the evolutionary scale to our ancient ancestors. It would be like you combined the negative sides of pretty much all political and philosophical ideologies that humans have conceived over the years. This should be obvious, but it is obviously not to all people. The question, then, becomes where relative to this minimum level we should place people and/or ideas.

Where do you place people on this scala? Given that we’ve got this minimum level of respect, this is where we put people initially. People you meet on the street, in a shop or using public transportation are fine examples of people at this level. They might be immoral, evil people worthy of little respect, or they might be moral, caring people worthy of great respect, but you will probably never meet them again in your life and don’t have anything to go by, so it’s best to suspend your judgment of these people until you have to deal with them more personally, which in most cases is never.

The same applies with people you meet in your personal life. At the onset, they’re worthy of no more than your minumum level, because you don’t know them and have nothing by which to guide you. These are largely unconscious processes, but it doesn’t hurt to think about it. This applies to authorities, too. An authority figure is no more or less worthy of respect than any other person. In might be beneficial for you and your environment if you show some consideration for authorities, but this is not respect. This is primitive weighing of reward versus punishment, reminiscent of how some theists behave good because of fear of Hell and longing for Heaven.

As time goes by, people earn your respect or disrespect, and you theirs. Some people are such evil pricks that they end up below the default level. I don’t think, however, that there’s anything that qualifies for some of the more primitive evils, such as capital punishment.

In The Angry Atheist, I wrote about respecting the other party. This got massively misinterpreted, and someone thought what I was saying was that we should respect religious fundamentalists or saying Dawkins is a BIG MEANIE ATHEIST DOODY HEAD. This, of course, is wrong. But in a discussion, one should at least have the minimum level of respect for the other party so as to maintain focus on the case in point, and not degenerate the whole debate into ad hominem attacks. It can be summed up as follows: a discussion is a dialogue, and that means you should not move in the infantry and shoot arguments at your opponents as though it is a war, totally ignoring their counterarguments. Sadly, this is all too common in debates, especially ones concerning something as personal as belief or non-belief, not to mention belief versus non-belief. In this matter, Dawkins and other high-profile atheists mostly manage to avoid the pitfalls, but other parties or just what someone reads between the lines (which one should be cautious to let have any weight in a discussion) can easily leave the discussion a battlefield.

Does religion deserve any respect, then? Let’s have a look at what religion is. It is a set of beliefs and ideas, ranging from the nature of reality to ethics and in many places (my home country, too, I’m sad to say) even law. Religion is an immaterial, abstract belief system. Notice that when I talked about levels of respect, above, I mentioned specifically people and not stones or buildings or such things. They are unconscious, material, non-living things. Religion is that, too, except it’s not even material, but rather an abstract concept or collection of concepts. Should we really be paying respect to an immaterial, unconscious, non-living concept? Of course not. Mercilessly attacking religion and calling religious doctrine stupid when it is stupid should not be taboo. Pretty much every other abstract idea is allowed to be criticized and picked apart and pointed at by people saying “Hey! That over there, that’s stupid, and here’s why.” But as soon as someone calls the idea their religion, it’s suddenly inherently worthy of respect.

Alonzo Fyfe of Atheist Ethicist, in a comment on one of his blog posts, argues that ridiculing someone’s views is just shorthand for saying you’re ridiculing the person for their views. I disagree. A person is not that person’s views (and that’s not what Alonzo’s hinting at) and more importantly, pointing out flaws in one of that person’s views is not pointing out flaws in that person. Few views are completely perfect, but is believing in them really a flaw on the part of the person? Not really. Acting stupidly because of a view is a flaw on the person, however. When someone puts so much of themselves into a view, by defining and labeling themselves as being that view, they also become extremely sensitive to critique regarding that view, even if it’s not a critique of them directly. “This is what I’m all about” is dangerous thinking, because it may blur the distinction (in your mind) between the mind and some of the mind’s thoughts. Remember, the thoughts are living inside your brain, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, this is what people do with religion. By choosing rational belief or non-belief, you’re implicitly stating that whenever something better comes along, you’ll jump on it. You’re disentangling yourself from your views sufficiently to judge those views better than if you choose to belief or non-belief on faith, which is completely irrational and amounts to tying yourself tightly to your views, and that isn’t healthy in the long run. You’re going to feel strongly about some things, but the moment you have found the absolute truth in a matter where truths aren’t absolute (essentially every matter except mathematics and logic), you’ve lost perspective.

That said, should we respect religious fundamentalists, or those shoving their fear-based religious propaganda on their children mental marks that will last the rest of their life? Should we respect rapists and terrorists? Those who call for the burning of Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, witches or other groups? In a discussion, one should at least look at the arguments before the person presenting them. But in other areas of life, there are those who fall well below the default level of respect. This hardly qualifies to put them through inhuman treatment like torture or execution, but it does lower the bar on what to react on. If I knew someone were calling for the banning of homosexuals or burning of purported witches, my first thought wouldn’t be to greet them nicely.

But is a way of thinking or acting ever worthy of respect even if it is wrong, if the purpose is noble? The answer is, it depends. Many people feel it was right that the US dropped the A-bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it lead to the end of the war. I don’t, but that’s another topic. Let’s turn to something with fewer casualties.

Imagine a community is absolutely convinced that when we sleep, aliens are conducting horrifying experiments on us. They teach this to their children because they think that if they don’t, the children will have a painful experience finding out this on their own. The intention is noble, but the children are scared, just like hellfire and eternal damnation scares children. Then, they start telling their children that if they wake up at night and need to pee, they’re not allowed to use the bathroom, because then the aliens will find out they’re awake and come after them. The intention is still noble, but the action is not. Soon after, they start deciding that the children must not watch tv or surf the internet, because that might alert the aliens. Pretty soon, all electricity is to be cut. Then, they have to move out of houses and find shelter in a cave or some such, because any sign of civilization at all will attract the nasty aliens.

During this time, the alien-belief goes from being simply a horror story presented as fact, which is bad in itself, to gaining influence in what the children can and cannot do (way beyond the necessary limits parents must set) into completely controlling the lives of not only the adults, but also their children, most of them not capable of distinguishing this doctrine from reality and certainly not capable of distancing themselves enough from their parents to have a good childhood. All the while, the intentions are that the children be spared from horror and live the best possible life. Still, the acts are immoral, irresponsible and wrong. The parents have turned their not-so-harmless belief into what amounts to a religion, and they’ve ruined the lives of their children in the process.

Not all religious upbringing is nearly as extreme, of course. That’s why I hesitate to accept that religious indoctrination in general be labelled “child abuse”, which is what Richard Dawkins says. This is not only because the motives are noble. As we’ve seen, noble intentions don’t lead to noble actions. One must consider what effects the indoctrination has. Scaring children with false stories presented as fact is destructive and bad. Bad, religiously rooted actions are not better because they’re rooted in faith (quite the opposite!). But considering taking a child away from their family because their parents told them that unbelievers will go to Hell is too much.

Religion is not special, and religion as a concept deserves no special treatment just because people are passionate about it. Some theists entertain the notion that religion is a field of study, and is immune to criticism by people who have not studied theology. Have a look at Terry Eagleton’s critique of Dawkin’s The God Delusion (via Black Sun Journal, where you’ll find a great rebuttal to Eagleton’s misunderstood criticism):

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

Here, Eagleton makes the mistake of putting an equal sign between science and theology. He assumes that religion, because there are people who study it, is inherently worthy of respect. What he doesn’t seem to get is that one doesn’t need intimate knowledge of a subject to tell it is wrong if its very foundations are wrong. When one of the premises is wrong, you don’t need to look at the logic (or, in the case of theology, the lack of logic) to tell that the conclusions are wrong.

Imagine that I believed the moon and all the other planets to be made of cheese. Because I believe this, I start studying the implications, and found a whole new field of study, called Astronomical Cheesology. I write numerous, ground-breaking books about the cheese on the moon and its implications. Others start investigating how an object the size of the moon made of cheese would react under certain conditions.

Then, a book by one of my followers called The Moon Landing Fraud is published and tops the sales lists. It presents how a moon-sized cheese would react to the moon landings and concludes that it wouldn’t react as the moon did to the moon landings. Thus, the moon landings must be fake. Moreover, there’s a worldwide conspiracy to hide the fact that the moon and other celestial objects are made of cheese. Soon enough, the Moon is Cheese movement is founded. And the worst thing is, the majority of the population actually believes this.

That’s pretty much the case with Theology. One doesn’t need to study arcane Theology books to see that the foundations of Theology are unsupported claims. Here’s how Eagleton’s critique would look if we apply it to Astronomical Cheesology:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read A. Nonymous on astronomical cheesology.

Card-carrying conspiratorists like A. Nonymous, who is the nearest thing to a professional conspiratorist we have had since George W. Bush, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of astronomical cheesology that would make a first-year cheesology student wince.

To sum it up: respect is something to be earned. Religion is not special, and we should not treat it as though it is inherently worthy of respect just by virtue of being religion. Terry Eagleton doesn’t understand atheist arguments. The moon is not made of cheese.

Filed under: atheism, dangers of faith, extremism, morality, philosophy, religion, superstition, theism   |  7 Comments