Barbara O'Brien writes at Glen Greenwald’s blog in response to Barry Seidman’s criticisms of people trying to organize a “Religious Left” political movement:
Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet, I admit. In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, here even the nonreligious assume this dogmatism is what religion is all about.
But conservative Christianity’s emphasis on a literal belief in doctrine and ancient texts is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all of Christianity.
Barbara O’Brien is confusing two issues here: dogmatism and scriptural literalism. It’s true that they often go together because they are good fit, but they aren’t the same thing. Scriptural literalism is a problem with conservative Christianity, but it’s not the main problem because it would be easy to ignore if it weren’t combined with dogmatic absolutism (something which can exist even in the absence of scriptural literalism).
It’s not that extremists follow a false religion or an illegitimate expression of a religion. It’s not that they are depraved and evil. Instead, the problem is that they are taking aspects of their religious tradition far, far more seriously than liberal and moderate believers do. They accept the absolute demands of God more readily. They are willing to adopt positions which reject negotiation, concession, and compromise.
Most of the time, liberal and moderate believers are willing to reconsider, negotiate, and compromise when it comes to demands they believe are placed on them by their religious faith. Because of this, they are less dogmatic and absolutist and this can put them in a better position than others. On the other hand, however, there is absolutely nothing about liberal religion which makes it immune to dogmatism and absolutism. Liberal believers are every bit as susceptible to these problems as conservative believers are — and the reason is simply because they are as human as conservative believers.
There is nothing inherent to liberal religion or liberal Christianity which would prevent a Christian Left from becoming just as problematic as the Christian Right has been. Ultimately, I think that was Seidman’s main point: because religion tends towards dogmatism and absolutism, we should be wary about how much power and influence a Religious Left might have. So long as liberal believers don’t truly understand where and how religion can cause problems, they may be more inclined to make the same mistakes themselves.
Unfortunately, Barbara O’Brien appears to prove the truth of this point by making mistakes when it comes to diagnosing the problems with religion...
I have had lovely discussions with liberal Christians who understand the Bible was written by people with limitations and prejudices, and that ideas about God have evolved over time. Many even accept historical evidence that the Gospels were not, in fact, written by Apostles but by second- and third-generation followers who didn’t know Jesus personally. Once you accept that Jesus’s words may have been imperfectly recorded in the Gospels, disregarding the parts that seem out of whack is not “cherry picking,” as Seidman assumes, but critical thinking.
No, Seidman is correct: it is cherry picking when you pick some things to believe as Truth and other things not when the only criteria are your own culturally-derived values. Everyone in every religion cherry picks because it’s impossible to treat everything in an ancient religion as equally valid. If you are a religious believer who is active in your faith and actively practices your religion, I guarantee you that you aren’t involved with more than a fraction of all the traditions and teachings that have made up your religion over the centuries.
It’s not possible, just as it’s not possible to actively engage in all of the traditions of a culture generally. There’s nothing wrong with that; but ignoring it — or worse, pretending that it isn’t so — can have negative consequences.
Few religious believers are honest enough to admit that this is what they are doing — to admit that they have arrived at an independent decision to treat some things as belonging to an ancient culture and as no longer applicable, even though the text doesn’t explicitly permit it. There’s nothing wrong with cherry picking, but there is something wrong with pretending that this isn’t what you are doing. The problem for Christians is that there isn’t anything in the Bible which explicitly condones this, and much which condemns is, so they are forced to engage in amazing intellectual contortions to justify what they are doing — they have to come up with rationalizations for why this text is True but that text can now be ignored.
Particularly sad is the fact that all of these contortions add up to an abdication of personal responsibility. They don’t simply take a personal stand and saying that some of what’s in the Bible can not be recognized as immoral or just unbelievable. Like fundamentalists, they think that they have to justify what they are doing by the text itself — but they simply pick different parts of the text to use. This puts them in the same boat intellectually, even if their social and political conclusions are more palatable to the rest of us living in the 21st century.
But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn’t have to be that way. ... [T]he fault for this lies in the corruption of religion, not in religion itself.
Barbara O’Brien makes the same problem that so many liberal religious believers do: she attacks fundamentalists and religious conservatives in the desperate hope that what ails them is not something which can afflict her — but she’s very, very wrong. Even worse, by pretending that the problem lies outside herself, she leaves herself open to exactly the problems she is complaining about.
Whatever the faith in question, it’s common to see liberal and moderate believers react to violence committed in the name of religion by insisting that the perpetrators are not “true” representatives of that religion and that their actions are unChristian, unIslamic, or unWhatever. I’ve even seen them described as atheists.
It is inaccurate because extremists, even those who advocate or commit violent acts, are not illegitimate or invalid representatives of their religious traditions. They may emphasize certain traditions than more liberal believers, but they are no more guilty of “picking and choosing” what suits them than anyone else. They are no more guilty of bringing outside cultural elements into a religion than anyone else. Everyone picks and chooses because no one can do equal justice to all the traditions of a religion - the tapestry that makes up a religion is just too complex.
Barbara O’Brien is also very wrong for insisting that when we have these problems, it’s due to a “corruption” of religion, not “real” religion. This statement assumes that there is some sort of “true” religion out there, independent of our actions and thoughts and that’s just not true. Religion is what religious believers do — and if religious believers are violent or intolerant, then that’s what religion becomes. It’s not a “corruption” of religion because there is nothing about religion which requires that it not be bad sometimes. It’s a conceit of some liberal religious believers that they are following religion the “right” way and are thus above the “errors” made by conservatives or fundamentalists.
What Barbara O’Brien and others need to understand is that even the worst excesses of religion typically derive from traditions and elements that are every bit as much a part of that religion as all the best and most moral things they like so much. Allow me to share with you a passage from Kelton Cobb’s essay in the book September 11: Religious Perspectives on the Causes and Consequences. Cobb, a Professor of Theology and Ethics at Hartford Seminary, writes:
Every religion has its heresies, and heresies must be marked and remembered as out of bounds. Heresies are always children of the religion from whence they come — rogue children, but genetic heirs nonetheless. Heresies are usually borrowed elements of their parent religions, but elements that are broken off and isolated from counter elements that moderated them.
Better than charging these radical Islamists with not being true Muslims would be to ask questions like: What components of this faith lend themselves to these distortions? What counter elements that might keep them in check are being neglected? What dangerous traps lie hidden in its scriptures? What responsibility do the bearers of a religious tradition have for the distortion in its transmission?
The Islam of these terrorists does not do justice to the magnificent, civilized, and peace-loving past of Islam, but it has to be recognized as a ‘real strand’ of Islam.
Cobb isn’t just talking about Islam, though — he also has his own Christianity in mind. Thus he continues:
Every religion is like a rope, woven from many strands. Christianity is a weave of the teachings of Jesus, the theology of Paul, the neoplatonism of Augustine, Constantine’s conversion, the “Little Flowers” of St. Francis, the iconography of the Copts, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the piety of the Puritans, the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil Rights movement, Jerry Falwell, and archbishop Romero.
I don’t like several of these strands, but when I study them I discover that they contain fibers I recognize in my own faith. Inside the racism of the Ku Klux Klan one can find firm beliefs surrounding Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, divine election, God’s sovereignty over all reality, hatred for the devil, absolute faith in the resurrection of Christ, the importance of purity and righteousness, and the lordship of Jesus Christ. The Klan did not come out of thin air; it is a development within Christianity which I abhor, but in calling myself a Christian I am complicit and have to answer for it.
How many Christians are willing to accept complicity as Christians for extremists within their religion? How many Muslims are willing to accept complicity for extremists within their own religion? The general trend is in fact to push these extremists as far away as possible, refusing to acknowledge that there is any real relationship between extremism and mainstream religion at all. This denies that there are any problematic or dangerous beliefs and traditions within a religion, but this is false.
Worse than false, it’s also dangerous. So long as people like Barbara O’Brien keep pandering to liberal religious believers by telling them that they are better than others for not succumbing to scriptural literalism, the real problems of dogmatism and absolutism will go unaddressed. So long as liberal believers fail to recognize that the fault lies within themselves, not in the stars, they’ll just end up repeating the mistakes already made by others.
Over at her own blog, Barbara O’Brien whines that people were “pissed off” for no other reason than that she used the word “religion.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that people might have read her post and concluded that she was simply wrong. That’s a good example of dogmatism, which appears to prove my point.
Religion & Religious Beliefs:
Then do atheistic secularists have to answer for the actions of twentieth-century communism, which has claimed more lives than any other movement?
Atheism and communism have no inherent connection. People killed by communists were no more killed in the name of atheism than they were killed in the name of cleanliness (I’m guessing most communists bathed or showered regularly). Most atheists aren’t communists; communism itself is not only compatible with theism, but is sometimes closely connected with theism.
Atheism is a completely incidental trait shared between atheists today and atheistic communists in the past — as irrelevant as skin color. You might as well ask me if I have to answer for the crimes committed by Russian communists how were white.
Atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheists and communists don’t share a belief system. This means that there is no analogy with the situation between extremist Christians and non-extremist Christians who do all share a common belief systems, common traditions, and common theologies. They aren’t identical, obviously, but they are part of the same family in a way that isn’t true of atheists and communists.
I should point out that the statement above about religious people being complicit in the actions of their extremist brethren was made by a Christian and a professor of theology — it’s not simply the opinion of some deluded atheist. It is, in fact, a theological position with a solid sociological, theological, and ideological foundation.
Yes! And we humanists use reason and facts, as do the religious when they cherry pick, so that we don’t accept and don’t do anti-human notions.However, to avoid the no-true Scotsman fallacy ..?
“we humanists use reason and facts”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ohhh….this is a joke…no?