Belligerati

A Texan doctor once told me that the death certificates required that he check a box to indicate if the person died of smoking related affects. He asked me, what does in a man if he is sedentary, smokes two packs a day, poor, overweight, diabetic, has high cholesterol, and dies of heart disease? A lot of the critique is a version of this problem. You have poor, ignorant, people living without the benefit of the rule of law or property and they behave like beasts. One way they manifest this is by killing each other, and he says it was religious in nature. I am not buying it. The Muslims in India and Pakistan emerged from the lowest classes, then the British left and the whole system fell into war. Is that a war over scarce land, class, wealth or religion?

Rational (communist) or at least secular (racial) ideologues have committed the very greatest acts of murder in human history in the name of their ideas. I am not convinced that people who claim to use a rational system of beliefs are less capable of evil. He takes as "self evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn...scholars alive for blaspheming..." To that, I simply draw your attention to the chaos is New Orleans to see how thin is the vial of decency.
The killing fields of Cambodia can serve as a reminder that ordinary people can find good reasons to murder the blasphemer. There is no such thing as an ordinary person; He is simply using that as code for people like this -- those who have lived a safe, warm, educated and well-fed life. He tries to make much hay of the Muslim suicide terrorists who do things in the name of Allah. He seems to say that only religion can inspire such things, but the vast majority of suicide terrorists are secular, be they the Bathists of Iraq, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, or the Kamikazes of Japan.

One reason of his distain for religion is simply that that it is silly and non-falsifiable. Surly Popper was on to something, and good science is always falsifiable, but also surely, the non-falsifiable enriches the human experience. If religious ones do not suit you, then let me share a few that are. What you think of as orange also looks like orange to me. Ideas spread like living ideas beyond their thinkers. Your happiness is valuable as an end. Here the book really breaks down. Is he critiquing any ideology where you believe things without a full understanding of the evidence? Because his attitude makes him sound like a foolish Objectivist, berating everyone for not being at once an economist, a philosopher and a scientist. The universe is not fully knowable by one man, if by us all in total. It is essential that we take much on faith because of our limited capacities. Virtually all adherents of patriotism, cosmopolitan liberalism, evolution, and astronomy all essentially do so at a non-rational level. His book becomes a critique of accepting anything that you cannot establish with your senses as true.

The book purports to be an argument again religion. He makes no effort to address the believers’ issues. He shows contempt for the religious at every corner and simply assumes you will nod your head along for the ride. It feels like fuel for fiery anger that liberal, secular urban elites feel at a world they do not control

The book speaks at length about the danger poised be belief in an age of inexpensive mass destruction. If that risk is real, and he really does not expect to convince people, then the book is just resignation at the inevitable destruction at our world. The tone of the book does not read that way; it seems that he wants to convince people, even if he inexorably offends nearly everyone he needs to convince. As for the Brights, I lump them in with the Communists, the Objectivists, utilitarians, and the other elite consumers of secular ideologies. Nearly to the man, I have found them as dogmatic and unpleasant as the religious ideologues they seek to supplant, but lacking the carefully developed tools to make happier the people they aim to serve.

I do believe that without religion people would find reasons to murder on a mass scale. I submit into evidence the abattoirs of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the first under which secular ideologies conducted their wars. Would man tire of such things without religion? Would you accept the French revolution and the American Civil War as secular wars? The Napoleonic Wars? The wars of colonization of the Americas? The wars of the feudal period before the reformation? The Opium wars? The competition for scarce resources has driven most of the slaughter of life on earth. The amount of ideological murder engendered by man barely is a drop in the bucket. That certainly does not excuse it, but murder and mayhem lurk shallowly beneath the surface of man. Because religion is integrating deep within us, it simply provides another outlet for these ideas to manifest. Al Qaeda would not exist without Islam, but as I said, the Tamil Tigers and Kamikaze would still exist without religion. Anti-Semitism, which is not a religion, has served as a murderous ideology throughout the centuries. Anti-gypsy ideology has likewise served. I am just not convinced that the record of secular society if peaceful enough to conclude that the gradual elimination of religion will cause a parade of peace into the end of history.

The book is improving slightly as I work though it. I have found the explorations of the neurological foundations of rationality and irrationality interesting.

Heaping murderous ideologies claiming a secular mantle in with religions strikes me as unfair. Religious ideologies seem to indulge in less wanton slaughter then many of their rational counterparts. Certainly, with genetic, historical, and philosophical information available at the time of their founding, Sovietism and Nazism could be described as rational secular ideologies. I do not agree that secularist rationalists get to decide who is amongst their ranks. The temptation to exclude the unsavory should leave that in more unbiased hands. That goes for any group.

I am more comfortable with the idea that ideology is a tool that, while essential to the human condition, is also very dangerous. Given that progressive, liberal democracy is only one of several secular ideologies and has only been dominant for about a hundred years, the jury is still out on whether it will prove successful on the time scale of the species.

You would be hard pressed to prove the point that there are fewer wars or people dying in them today then there were 25 years ago. Huge, awful wars are rare. You might find the Richardson's work on "The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels" interesting. I know it only by reputation, but he gathered data on all (well all large and most small) armed conflicts between 1820 and 1949. He found 108 wars, and ranked them based on the log of number of people killed. Two were a seven on his scale, WWI and WWII, and a convincing case can be made that both were fought for secular reasons. He found seven in category 6,
Taiping Rebellion - 1851-54, 2 million dead
US Civil War - 1861-65, 800 thousand dead
Great War in La Plata - 1865-70, a million dead
Sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution - 1918-20, 600 thousand dead
First Chinese-Communist War - 1927-36, a million dead
Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, two million dead
Communal riots in the Indian peninsula, 1946-48, 800 thousand dead
None of those are obviously religious either, but I do not know them so well. I am a believer (but a weak one) in The Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. Relatively rich, free people tend not to murder each other on a massive scale. However, I am not sure that is a stable equilibrium. Often, the police state is erected in free societies to protect them from hostile, illiberal enemies. If they over swing, they may come to be as their enemies.

One of the ways I have backed into my faith is a realization that without faith, most lives are devoted to hedonism or selfishness. Raising children is expensive and for many, undesirable given other options. Perhaps you want to focus your energy on a few. However, in aggregate, people rejecting the sacrifice to have bigger families has massive consequences. In the rich world, people who are not religious have too few children to replace their number.
I wonder if that is sustainable.

If secular liberalism delivers great wealth, but current demographic evidence suggests that their number gradually is replaced by religious immigrants or not all, what then? If, two hundred years from now, there are a quarter as many people living in the rich world, will it be judged a success, no matter how rich they are? Can an ideology that jeopardizes the genetic connection to posterity of its subscribers be unequivocally successful?