My World View: the promotion of religion
I share with thinkers like Richard Dawkins the view that it is possible to develop a rational system of morality based not on religious belief but rather on some ideas that we might call moral-philosophical axioms.
However, I do not share with Dawkins and others his declared desire to disabuse all religious believers of their illogical and baseless delusions; my reason for coming to this conclusion is as follows: provided that any follower of a religion does not say or do anything that impinges on my freedom not to share his delusions or any aspect of his way of life, I consider him free to live his own life how he wishes, and to believe any nonsense he wishes to believe. I do not particularly wish to disabuse him of his foolish ideas any more than I wish to disillusion a small child about the fact that there is really no such person, magical or otherwise, as Father Christmas.
However, I will resist as strongly as I can any attempt by a person who has religious beliefs:
- to convert others to his beliefs where they have not sought him out to ask him about them (so that I readily tell any who, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, go from door to door trying to peddle his religion that they are misguided fools living a baseless delusion as naive as if they were believers in the Tooth Fairy)
- to change the law of the land to compel others to change his behaviour for reasons connected with his religious beliefs
- to wage war on those who do not share his beliefs
- to make his family’s lives, and especially his children’s lives, miserable or even (indeed) to force his beliefs on anyone in his family — including his children
Most religious people claim that they have the right to bring their children up as they choose; that is why there are what are called “ faith schools”. I do agree with Dawkins that bringing young children up in a religion is wrong. Indeed, bringing young children up so immersed in a belief system like that of Christianity or, particularly, Islam that they are effectively brainwashed, sometimes even emotional cripples, by the time they reach adulthood, so that they find dispassionate evaluation of the tenets of their parents’ religion impossible because of the emotional hold that it has on them, amounts to psychological child abuse.
The idea, reportedly part of Islam, that apostasy is a great sin, and (worse) the idea that apostasy is punishable by death, are themselves so pernicious that those who teach or promulgate them are the closest thing that an empricist can contemplate to evil. In my view, the act of teaching such a doctrine as the latter (at least if there is any suggestion that the believer should take it upon himself so to punish any apostate), either by preaching to that effect or by promulgating or promoting study of any written text that includes any statement of such a doctrine presented as a tenet for the reader to adopt, should be defined in law as incitement to murder for which any perpetrator should be punished accordingly.
For any English lawyer reading this, yes: I do know that the common law crime of incitement was abolished on 1 October 2008 when Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 came into force, replacing incitement with three new statutory offences of encouraging or assisting crime.
To an empiricist, evil is (obviously) not some kind of mystical force at large in the universe; it is an abstraction, the quintessence of malice, that being defined as intention on the part of conscious life forms to do harm to others.
Perhaps the greatest harm that any mind can contemplate inflicting on another is the misery of slavery to a false belief system — especially if that system entails, or often leads to, a greater degree of strife in the world; and, with the belligerence of so many of the vociferous adherents to Islam being a continual phenomenon in our day, any assertion that apostasy from Islam entails anything other than simply not attending the mosque (or reading the Koran, or saying prayers) any more is in itself a wicked thing, that any Muslim who does not bear malice to non-muslims should have nothing whatever to do with. At least, since (say) the end of World War 1, most of the Christians in the world have made no comparable nuisance of themselves to any who leave their numbers.
In short, I am not a proselytizing atheist; I know that leading a good life, and indeed even a happy life, as an atheist is much harder than doing so within the bosom of some embracing religion, because I know that many believers draw a lot of comfort from their religion. However, just as it would be foolish for an adult to continue believing in Father Christmas long after it had become evident to them that that personage is a figment of the collective imagination (of parents, movie makers, advertizers and others who peddle the myth of the chubby bearded figure clad in scarlet with white fur trim and the flying reindeer, who can stop the clock some time after dark on 24th December in order to visit hundreds of millions of children individually in one night), so the fact that a belief makes facing tragedy, and what happens in life generally, so much easier does not make the content of that belief true or real. It is still a delusion. On the other hand, provided they keep it to themselves, it is not necessarily more damaging than the old Miracle on 34th Street story ...