Religion – Bad and Good – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

14 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for the beliefs that can unite people rather than dividing them.

Almost everywhere religion shouts today, its shouts fan the flames of exclusion, bigotry, hatred and violence. The hateful actions drown out the pious talk.

We shudder as we hear the shouts of self-righteous judgment and see the actions of bigotry, and our hearts shiver. Let us go inside our own minds and hearts for the more hopeful and peaceful messages we carry there.

Let us give thanks for beliefs and actions that can make us more whole, and let us be grateful that those beliefs have such deep roots into our very own souls. These are the “still, small voices” that can still offer us comfort and courage. Here are some of the timeless and universal words that come from that place. These were adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, but our own hearts could have written them, if we but had his poetic gifts:

Lord of life and love, or all that is holy and good,

make me an instrument of your peace

Where there is hatred sow love

Where there is injury pardon

Where there is doubt give faith

Where despair give hope

Where there is darkness shed light

Where there is sadness, joy

Let me not look for help so much as to help

To be understood as to understand

To be loved as to LOVE

For it is in giving that we receive

In pardoning that we are pardoned

And in dying to small ways, we are born into greater ways:

The paths of peace, hope and love.

Let us give thanks that the words find such a natural home deep within our own souls, so that we may have them with us always. Amen.

SERMON: Religion – Bad and Good

You know, we meet here in this liberal church, along with about 1/10th of one percent of Austin’s population, and we can do honest religion, can talk about high ideals like character, can attack selfish behavior as the cardinal sin of all great religions. We can insist that all beliefs should be open to questioning, because honest religion is one of the highest callings we can have. It’s one of the best hopes we have of evolving beyond the “chimpanzee politics” of power that is sought for selfish ends, and the rest of it. And it’s all true.

But it can also be pretty naive. Because outside the walls of this place, across our country and around the world, what the vast majority of people associate with the word “religion” has been and continues to be responsible for immense harm to millions upon millions of humans and other species. And if we just do our liberal thing and remain silent about the horrific abuses of religion, we become silent accomplices to the things done in the name of religion and its gods the world over.

While the worst forms of religion have owned the news headlines for the past several years, some new authors have arisen to attack the very idea of religion as a dishonest and evil thing. And at least five of these books have become best-sellers, read and discussed by millions of people. I can’t think of another time when so many books attacking the very idea of religion became best-sellers.

These authors are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). This morning, I want to share some of their criticisms with you, because I think they are mostly very good criticisms. And even if you find some of them disillusioning, honest religion has always claimed that it’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned, because the worst kind of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad.

There’s another reason for taking these angry critics seriously. These are the voices of some of our modern prophets, doing what prophets have always done. They come in from outside the polite little games of religion, saying, “This is nonsense! You people are hypocrites! You claim to serve high ideals, but You’re not! And we come to criticize your silly religions in the name of those higher ideals sacred to us and which, we insist, should also be sacred to you!” These are bright men whose values and beliefs are very close to those of most of us here. We ignore good angry critics at our peril – especially when so much of what they say is clearly right.

As Sam Harris says, “That so much of [human suffering] can be directly attributed to religion – to religious hatreds, wars, taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources – is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity.” (Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 57) I agree with him there.

All these authors are angry about the harm done by the kind of religion that gets all the headlines, and about the moderate and liberal religious spokespeople who stand silently by, acting pious.

Richard Dawkins ridicules the Islamic reactions to the 12 cartoonists whose anti-Islam cartoons appeared in Danish papers with banners including “Slay those who insult Islam,” and “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion.” (Dawkins, p. 25) Let’s be honest: carrying a banner that says, “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion” is both absurd and obscene. And for the record, it does not do any honor to Allah.

Another author lists a few examples of the warring due directly to religion today: The fighting that has plagued Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Niberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Iran and Iraq are merely a few recent cases. (Harris, pp. 81-82)

Another says Northern Ireland’s problems would probably disappear in a generation if religiously segregated schooling were abolished. (Hitchens, p. 261) And in Ireland alone, it is now estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority. (Hitchens, p. 51) For far too many priests, the culture of systemic child abuse became the eighth sacrament. It is inexcusable for people in religion not to speak out about it under some misguided sense of banal sweetness.

The angriest of these books is the one by Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). While he can be a brilliant bully, he has traveled and lived all over the world, done very impressive research, and seems as well-informed as he is angry.

He notes that both Protestantism and Catholicism – though mostly Catholicism – have been eager allies of fascism. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. (Hitchens, p. 235)

And the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was a treaty with the Vatican. In return for the concession of some privileges to the church, the Holy See ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be “especially significant in the struggle against [Jews].”

German Protestants followed suit by publishing their own accommodation with the fuhrer, and establishing what became known as the German Christian Church to support the Nazis. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy did in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20th. On this date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted “warmest congratulations to the fuhrer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany,” these congratulations were to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out. (Hitchens, p. 239). These were immoral and ungodly acts of institutional cowardice, and you need to expect those of us in the religion racket to speak up, to police our own discipline.

The Catholic Church was equally involved in Franco’s bloody dictatorship in Spain – and is now paying for it, as the Spanish government is cutting funding to the church, permitting gay marriages, and saying publicly that it will establish a secular Spain. Throughout Europe, organized religion has largely died out since WWII, perhaps from a widespread reaction against the sins of the churches when they were offered political power.

Perhaps Voltaire got it right long ago, when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” for the atrocities do seem to grow directly from the absurdities.

Short of the big-screen drama of war and fascism, religion can be linked to other forms of deep and lasting harm. In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data seem unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance that will disadvantage our children, and it looks like it is linked to the influence of religion. (Harris, p. 70)

Besides cataloging some of the physical harm done by religions, all these authors also attack the teachings of the religions as ignorant, hateful, and destructive of both human character and human society. They could have in mind, as an example, the creationist teaching that Noah had a pet brontosaurus. Daniel Dennett offered a very interesting metaphor for understanding how ideas – at least bad ideas – work.

You watch an ant in a meadow, he says, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant”. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum) that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into a position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely – even suicidal – ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host. Daniel Dennet asks whether anything like this ever happens with humans, and of course it does. (Dennett, pp. 3-4) What He’s saying is that ideas work like these parasites in humans, driving us to serve the ideas – the ideologies – even at our own expense. And He’s saying that many of the ideas taught by the world’s religions are among the worst offenders, doing the most harm.

One famous religious teaching is that intercessory prayer works. Dr. Herbert Benson (author of the best-seller The Relaxation Response in 1976), a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, headed a $2.4 million Templeton-funded study on intercessory prayer. (The Templeton outfit, generally not respected by scientists, tries to save face for supernatural interpretations of religion.) They monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn’t know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn’t know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. (Dennett, p. 63)

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other, but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. (Dennett, p. 63)

This may sound counter-intuitive, but talk to any hospital chaplain about the number of times a patient reacts to their visit by saying something like “Oh God, I didn’t know I was so bad off they”d send a chaplain!”

All these authors ridicule the idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality. While good-hearted people can always find good-hearted teachings, the other kind also abound. If children get out of line, we are to beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes. (Harris, p.

And Christopher Hitchens asks about what the Ten Commandments do not say. Is it too modern, he asks, to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? (100) Is that too modern a criticism?

He says that as far as he is aware, in every country in the world today where slavery is still practiced, the justification of it is derived from the Koran. (Hitchens, p. 181) If this is true, this should not be the first time we’re hearing it. Religious spokespeople and the media should have covered this long ago. Maybe some of you will tell me that they have, but I”m not aware of it. Why should anyone believe religions have any good honest advice for living, if we haven’t the decency to point out the honestly bad advice they also contain?

What is new and different about these critiques is that they are also angry at moderate and liberal religions for their complicity in the harm and bad teachings done in the name of religion.

Sam Harris says that even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. (Harris, p. ix)

And Richard Dawkins says even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which religious extremism flourishes. (Dawkins, p. 303)

And there is indeed longstanding and widespread complicity with the worst religious teachings, among those who should know better. It isn’t just those we might consider fundamentalist crazies who support hateful and murderous teachings. St. Augustine thought heretics should be tortured; St. Thomas Aquinas thought they should be killed. Martin Luther and John Calvin both advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, Jews, and witches. (Harris, p. 12) If this is Christian love, nobody needs it.

When the author Salman Rushdie was given a death sentence by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who disliked some of his views on the Koran, the key religious leaders of the world did not condemn Khomeini’s order of murder. Instead, they said the main problem raised by publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. These included the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, as well as the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. (Hitchens, p. 30) Let’s be clear: the problem was not blasphemy; it was the psychopathic order by a charismatic religious leader to murder someone who disagreed with his religious beliefs. If moderates and liberals want to be regarded as moral and courageous people, why didn’t they speak out? Many secular people did, but very few religious leaders.

More recently, in the wake of the Asian tsunami, liberals and moderates admonished one another to look for God “not in the power that moved the wave, but in the human response to the wave.” I remember reading some of these things, and imagine you did too. On a day when over one hundred thousand children were torn from their mothers” arms and drowned, there is something very smarmy about moderate or liberal theologians pretending to find God in the actions taken by caring people in response to a destructive act of nature. It is trying to save face for their God, but more importantly it is trying to save face for themselves and their profession, pretending they are really still about something real and important that affects the world. (Harris, p. 48) I agree with the critics who find this abominable.

In the face of this kind of horrid thinking, as Sam Harris says, atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of bad religious beliefs. (Harris, p. 51)

All of these authors think religion should be ended as an unredeemable kind of evil. I don’t agree with them, even if such a thing were possible. But much of the developed world has nearly done away with religion. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations” Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. (Harris, p. 43)

On the other end, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations” human development index are all quite religious. (Harris, p. 44)

Countries with high levels of atheism, these atheists point out, are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. Or consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms” average employees in godless countries: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population say they expect to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Jesus is credited with saying it will be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Apparently, in the fantasies of many American Christians, come Judgment Day there are going to be huge herds of camels galloping through the eyes of needles. (Harris, p. 46)

I agree with all these critics that one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about our deepest personal concerns – about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering – in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. (Harris, p. 87)

I wonder how many of you here agree with the general thrust of these critiques of religion? (About 80-90% of hands went up.)

So do I. Where I disagree with these men is in the matter of the definition of religion, though it isn’t a terribly big quibble. Some of them won’t consider Buddhism or Confucianism as religions because they have no official supernatural gods. And they wouldn’t consider what we do here to be religion either, though I think they”d like it. They don’t want to call anything done in churches that is honest or healthy religion, though some will call it spirituality or philosophy. I call it honest religion, but don’t really care what it’s called, as long as it can be called forth. And I think healthy beliefs are really far more widespread than these authors think, or than polls show.

There are tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe a tenth of the official dogmas of organized religions, but who do believe in the basic decencies upon which we depend for a civilization. There are tens of thousands of people who believe the same generic things we do, right here in Austin. And these healthy generic beliefs we share also have a lot more healthy and fun humor to them – official religions are horribly humorless. So let me quote from a few people who have spoken from this more wise and witty center, and see if you don’t feel a bit closer to them.

One of my favorite wise quotes about religious belief is from H.L. Mencken, who said: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” (Dawkins, p. 27) In other words, we must respect other people’s religious opinions, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect their opinions about art, music, politics or football. What matter most are their actions, not their words.

And on the subject of death, since the fear of death seems to drive so many religions, I like Mark Twain, who said: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” (Dawkins, p. 354)

And a very sweet thought from Emily Dickenson, who said, “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” (Dawkins, p. 361)

When these critical prophets talk about what they believe rather than what They’re so angry about, it’s easy to feel close to them. Here’s Christopher Hitchens, speaking for all who, like him, reject religion: Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. (Hitchens, p. 5)

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. (Hitchens, pp. 5-6)

There are tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands right here in Austin who would resonate with these sentiments far, far more than with the hateful rantings of an Ann Coulter or Rev. Hagee in San Antonio who wants a Christian holy war to begin with our nuking Iran.

I would love to have all four of these critics in church here, where I could preach to them, invite them into an attitude of prayer, and try to sell them on reclaiming the possibility of honest religion, even while you and I would probably join them in rejecting the many varieties of bad and dishonest religion that most people of good heart and good will would also reject. And I think those four authors would like it here. They might even find a certain kind of good and healthy spirit move within them – and I think they”d like that, too. Honest religion is one of our best hopes for a more humane future.

Bad religion really is a mean and dangerous thing, and we need to say so when the occasion invites it. But honest religion – and it can’t be liberal without being honest – is equally a blessing to theists, polytheists and atheists, because it honors our heart without insulting our head, and knows that while we are indeed a mixture of good and evil, the good will usually win out, if only we will help it, and help one another. That’s good news. It’s also good religion.