Why we need the Devil

In Breaking the Spell, Dennett quotes Rodney Stark's assessment of the need for the demonic to counter our understanding of the divine:

he even proposes that a God without a counterbalancing Satan is an unstable concept - "irrationaland perverse." Why? Because "one God of infinite scope must be responsible for everything, evil as well as good, and thus must be dangerously capricious, shifting intentions unpredictably and without reason" (p. 24). (192)

The question raised by Stark and Dennett here is the human need to create a powerful parental figure who wishes us good - who is benevolent and caring. But the universe as we know it is not composed entirely of positives. Humanity therefore has created for itself a scapegoat, a figure of pure and unadulterated evil whose purpose and intention is to do harm to us, to cause us to give in to our darker desires. A figure on which to blame those who do not wish to subscribe to that benevolent dictator.

We, as human beings immersed in our constructed religions, want someone to blame for the evils we have created. In Judaism, there was no devil (originally). There was only a deity whose capriciousness and violent changeability made him inherently unreliable as a father-figure. So, in subsequent years, humanity created a counterpart to this god, a way to siphon off those things that were undesirable in a deity and place them into the - necessarily weaker - body of a creature we dubbed the devil.

So what does it mean that future generations - notably including our own - have attempted to reclaim this devil from his isolation and damnation? Why have we tried so hard - and sometimes, as with Milton's Paradise Lost, against our will - to redefine and reidentify this demon as something we can understand? Something we can sympathize with? Something we can - sometimes - even love?

It is because, I think, we are coming to terms - slowly and unconsciously - with the fact that both deity and devil are contained within ourselves. If we love the divine, then we must also love the demonic, because we are both.

Excuse me, what?!

So as we were watching The Colbert Report (a few days late, thanks to technology), I had one of those I-don't-believe-someone-really-thinks-that-way moments. Colbert was interviewing Douglas Kmiec, a Catholic Professor of Law at Pepperdine about his new book, Can A Catholic Support Him? (the "Him" is Obama). My surprise was not at the book, but at a comment made by Kmiec regarding gay marriage.

Kmiec's argument is that marriage should be the province of the Church and that "legal contracts" should be the province of the government. The latter should be entirely unrestricted by gender, creed, etc. The Church (or synagogue or whatever) should be allowed to put whatever restrictions it wants on who it marries or doesn't.

This was not shocking. In fact, it is one of the more rational religious stances. While I think that, as a society, we have created a legal status that is "marriage" that should not be restricted, as long as religious belief continues, a church should be allowed to marry/not marry whomever it wants for whatever reasons it wants. But that is the purview of the religion, NOT the state.

The shocking thing was when Kmiec suggested that if "legal marriage" were to be only a contract, atheists would convert to the Church to get a valid spiritual marriage.

Um... I hate to be the one to break it to you, Mr. Kmiec, but an atheist doesn't care one little bit about a "spiritual marriage" because we don't believe in the existence of god. As the internet would say, epic fail.

Ages Pass

So it appears that I unintentionally gave up blogging during Lent. Oops. I have good reasons why this happened, but regardless, I have been remiss.

At present, I'm reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, which attempts to rationalize with "believers" that "brights" (his adopted term for atheists and agnostics) are not out of their minds and that "believers" should feel obligated to investigate and question their beliefs.

Given that it is the night before Easter Sunday, I feel obliged to comment.

I think what Dennett is attempting to do is a good thing; there are far too many people out there who blindly accept whatever they are told - whether in regards to religion, government, or American history. My father did me a favor as a child and told me blatant lies on a fairly regular basis, leading me to never take him at his word and investigate everything he ever told me.

Sometimes he was telling me the truth. Sometimes he wasn't. But I did the work and found out.

In twenty-first century America, our society retains the childlike tendency to simply accept whatever we are told - by anyone in a position of ostensibly trustworthy authority. Unfortunately, for some people, this category does not include scientists. Certainly, science has been wrong (something Dennett is more than willing to admit). However, science has also done a very good job of showing when it is wrong and fixing the issue.

Religion... not so much. Not only is religion very hesitant to admit its wrongs, but it is even more hesitant to correct them, instead claiming the all-encompassing net of "faith" or "doctrine" or - better yet - "tradition." I'm sorry, folks, but if "tradition" states that I'm not allowed to be educated simply because I lack a particular piece of genitalia... I don't think so. And yet, this is one of the things that religion does insist upon: Catholicism insists that women cannot be priests; Islam insists on the inherent weakness and inferiority of women; for that matter, all Judeo-Christian-derived religions blame women for the fall of the human race, so we must be bad.

Dennett's problem with religion is not that it insists upon "tradition," per se, but that it ignores factual information in favor of it. For example, the Bible states that the world is 6,000 years old. Science has proven it is not. Believers in the literal truth of the Biblical text insist that science is wrong, despite the evidence that confronts them otherwise.

But my biggest problem with religion - organized or not - is that it fundamentally interferes with personal and social freedom and egalitarianism. Religion insists upon a hierarchy in which all people are subordinated to something somewhere. But at the same time, they insist that they are the "chosen," the most superior [race, species, creed, gender, etc.]. They must submit themselves to a set of rules created by "god" (through the mediating power of generations of very privileged and wealthy clergymen whose personal authority and status was coincidentally increased by these rules) while gleefully condemning everyone else for not wishing to be subject to those same rules.

Religion cannot bring peace and harmony so long as there is more than one, and humanity is incapable of agreeing on a creed. (This is not to say that if the world were atheist, we would all get along. Of course we wouldn't. But we wouldn't be fighting about religion, that's for damn sure.)

Ultimately, this is a subject about which I am pessimistic (uncharacteristic for me). I cannot imagine the people who adhere so desperately to their faith giving it up, since they are clearly unwilling to consider reason at all and therefore will not be swayed by it, no matter how hard people like Dennett try. Those who are reasonable people will cherry-pick: "Okay, I'll concede this point, but you just don't have faith. You have to have faith."

And it all comes down to that: faith. You're right, folks. I don't have faith. I have logic. I have reason. I have ethics. I have a deep respect for human life and the human condition. I have insatiable curiosity and a highly active imagination. I have compassion and love and joy and sorrow and anger and boredom. I have a desire to be more than I am, but also to make a positive difference in the world. I have a passion for life. But I do not have faith. Not in god. Not in religion. Some days, not in the humanity that devotes itself to a creed (which ever it may be) that demands the subjugation and destruction of those with whom it disagrees.

What do I have?

Hope that someday, people will stop using religion as a scapegoat and an excuse. Hope that people will confront one another in terms of ethics and reason, rather than myth. Hope that logic will allow us to move forward scientifically, rationally, and technologically when we are no longer held back by the desire to waste our time and energy devoting ourselves to a fiction that we have deluded ourselves into believing is real.

I do not have faith. I have hope.