Religion: Public Enemy No. 1

By: Derek Bronish

Posted: 3/7/07

A few years ago I would have been willing, even eager, to enter into a vigorous discussion with any proponent of any religious dogma. I now feel an existential nausea at the very idea.

Anybody still under the spell of mysticism either hasn't done the research, or is lost, and should be considered a threat to humanity. Ironically, all that society needs to overcome the devastating blight of religion is the one thing that our cultural climate will not permit: intolerance.

I don't aggressively hate people of faith, nor do I endorse such an attitude. We have entered an era in which the only appropriate response to religious faith is unadulterated fear. Not a paralyzing fear which renders us impotent, but rather a consciously acknowledged, rational fear in the face of a clear and present danger.

I will not hesitate to point out that it is only religious faith which should provoke such an emotion. Faith in the authority of scientific experts, in the data provided by the senses, that the sun will rise tomorrow, etc, is of course, useful and proper. But political and technological reality now renders faith in the supernatural a liability for our continued survival as a species. It truly is a matter of life and death.

Why are droves of kind-hearted moderates still struggling to understand what could have provoked the attacks of September 11th? Wasn't it obvious that the very morning of these attacks, the 19 hijackers were all desperate to become martyrs for God, and that politics was barely secondary in their motivation? If 9/11 were a purely political act of war, then the Towers would have been hit by unmanned missiles. During the cold war, non-suicidal air attack was indeed how doomsayers envisioned our demise at the hands of the Soviet Union. The notion of suicide bombings by communist sympathizers was rarely, if ever entertained, precisely because religious martyrdom was not part of their ethos.

The doctrine of martyrdom is but one symptom of the disease which religious faith engenders. The deeper problem is that truly held faith in the supernatural deemphasizes the preciousness of this life. Real, literal belief in the afterlife entails the view that our life here on earth is pathetically transient and largely inconsequential. It should be obvious how easily this view can be parlayed in to a justification for suicide bombing, mass murder or even eagerness for the apocalypse.

Such a detrimental worldview would be marginally tolerable were it possible to dissuade the faithful from their philosophies. But faith isn't just an apparatus for bad ideas; it also undermines the mind's self-correcting mechanisms by allowing us to entertain ideas which do not correspond to the facts of reality. In fact, this is almost the very definition of faith. We, the unbelievers, must recognize that not only do the faithful see us as undesirable, they also adhere to an ideology which warrants our destruction, and are immune to our rational attempts at deterrence.

Let nobody infer that Islam is the specific target of this plea for intolerance. Murdered abortion doctors, outlawed stem cell research and rampant homophobia all stand as painful reminders that religion is anathema in the western world, as if the historical example of the Inquisition weren't proof enough.

Pessimistic fatalism is no solution to this predicament. I endorse fear in the hopes that it may stir confident but polite unbelievers from the prevailing attitude of tolerance. We can no longer view our neighbors' religiosity as quaint or harmless. Should we then campaign for governmentally imposed secularism? In what may at first blush seem a paradoxical response, I must emphatically say "no."

To outlaw religion would be to silence the song of liberty, and to replace religious dogmatism with political extremism. This would be a lateral movement, not progress. Legally codified mind control is no antidote to poor philosophy. Instead, it seems that the only moral and efficacious course of action is a wholesale refusal to accept faith as a valid means to knowledge. Any attempt to legally impose this outlook on the nation as a whole would be to sacrifice the ethical high ground that non-believers currently occupy.

Perhaps the brightest glimmer of hope lies in the continued, rigorous study of the human mind. Surely an empirical, scientific understanding of how faith arises and operates can only serve to temper the reckless irrationalism which makes religion so dangerous. Darwin's work outlined the research agenda. Watson and Crick discovered and explained the exact genotypic mechanisms. We now await another breakthrough that allows us to rationally deal with the imperfections of the massively intricate minds which nature has selected for.

In the meantime, we must never let intellectual pursuits blind us to the very real threat that religion poses to our day-to-day existence. Weapons of mass destruction are no longer prohibitively large or expensive. Deterrence is a meaningless concept for an enemy who truly looks forward to the afterlife. The very concept of "infidel" is sufficient justification for genocidal violence in the eyes of many of the faithful. These facts comprise a dismal and frightening state of affairs against which politeness and liberalism seem devastatingly na've. For the sake of our species, we must not "keep the faith."

Derek Bronish is a graduate student in Computer Science & Engineering.