Giving Too Much Away

I have been working my way through Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition). This is quite exhaustive of the topic and very well written but last night I read something that gave me pause. here is the quote:

“The second argument for faith is that it gives solace to the marginalized and destitute. And that’s no doubt true. When you see yourself as being without hope, there is consolation in thinking that God and Jesus are looking out for you (even if they’re not helping much), and in thinking that all will be set right in the next world.” (Emphasis added. SR)

I have read many comments like this but this time I realized that this is a concession I am no longer prepared to give. You see, this is just a part of the Big Con, the Big Lie, that is very prominent in Christianity. Your reward comes after you die, so just do your job, don’t complain, and don’t ask for a raise. Religions that don’t help coerce labor from the masses to serve the interests of the religious and secular elites just do not survive. Christianity has survived on this basis.

The consolation of having some false fairy tales to believe in is poor pay for all that was robbed of you throughout your life. I am not just talking about tithing or money given to churches in collection plates at services. I am talking about the billions of dollars not available to be spent on the poor or for education that go to tax breaks for religious orders and enterprises. I am talking about the wages one didn’t get or the abuse one suffered in the expectation of a heavenly reward after you die. If you had not that “consolation” while you were working, might you have gotten pissed off enough to demand higher wages? Might you have expected your governments, the collective “we,” to be more helpful than it has been?

I think we have to stop and think before we make such concessions to religion and faith. Often as not, even the innocuous offerings we might make are unsupportable.

I am not advocating that we disabuse dying elders on their death beds of their religious fantasies. That would be unkind. They have already made the bed they will go to sleep in. I do advocate disabusing young and the middle-aged people of their religious fantasies. Jerry Coyne does a quite good job of that in his book. Here are a couple more quotes to give you a taste of what he is offering so you can decide whether or not you want to read the book:

But consider how many questions religion once told us could never be answered—and were taken as evidence for God—and yet ultimately were solved by science. Evolution, infectious disease, mental illness, lightning, the stable orbits of planets: the list is long. Religious people often call for scientists to be “humble,” ignoring the beam in their own eyes, which see things like morality as forever inexplicable by science. How much more arrogant, and ignorant of history, to argue that our failures of understanding are somehow evidence for a god! And how much more egotistical to believe that that god is the god of your own religion!

In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe— at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we’ll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally.