I find the topic of religious faith incredibly interesting. I was reading
Religion Beat Became a Test of Faith and was reminded of something by the following paragraph.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

I’ve had the great fortune to have been befriended by some wonderfully intelligent priests in my life and our conversations invariable touch on faith as conscious act. My mother often speaks of her faith as an enterprise of great effort as I suspect many faithful feel. If I recall correctly, Dawkins has described faith as requiring a critical suspension of intellectual faculties. In fact, I recall being told that the attempt to apply the human intellect to understanding faith, god, etc., is an ultimately futile endeavor as the human intellect was designed specifically to not understand these things. I personally would be profoundly disappointed if the whole story were true- if god created man is his own image, required man to worship god, but did not provide man with the faculties to understand god. I believe that conversation ended with some explanation of intellect being a tool of the devil or some such.

The point, though, is that faith is extremely interesting. I’ve watched some seem to draw from a bottomless well while others believe it to not exist. I’m particularly interested in the point that Dawkins et al. make about the inherent dangers of faith. Specifically, as the argument goes, uncritical thinking and denial of evidence which contradicts the message of the faithful, often in willful ignorance, are extremely dangerous. Certainly, many would argue that the faith of fundamentalist Islamic martyrs angling for a boatload of virgins in heaven is dangerous. The relationship between poverty, education, and faith is a fascinating topic, too.

A friend and I were at lunch yesterday and the conversation turned to progressive atheism.  He proposed this question: Why do progressive atheists support causes, such as universal health care, that have no or little impact on them?  This question also applies to greenhouse gas emissions and many currently relevant topics.  I found it a very thought provoking question.  There are some implicit assumptions in the question that I found troublesome, but it was a worthwhile topic.  I’ll share my answer.I suspect many progressive atheists are humanists a la William James.  Disbelieving divine retribution but desiring a better world, progressive atheists value life and, not believing in afterlives, work to improve the quality of this life not only for themselves but for all.  I described environmentalism as a moral decision, which led us to discuss the source of morals in the absence of religion.

I related an NPR piece I recently heard featuring  Joshua D. Greene discussing his research into morality using neuroimaging.  My friend suggested that perhaps religion is a justification and codification of morality rather than the source.  This fits with Greene’s experience showing that people of all and no religions make the same moral decisions.  It was Greene’s theory, if I recall correctly, that morality is an evolutionary adaptation to social interaction.

My mother and I once had a conversation in which she said that she would expect atheists to all be murders as a result of not fearing god.  In fact, I hear this a lot in the media.  I suspect that if those people, my mother included, lost faith they would not immediately turn to murder.  I imagine they’d find that morals can operate independently of religion.

Bertrand Russel as quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (p.97):

The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.

Certainly I find this to be true in my experience and I have not worked anywhere I consider progressive. In fact, I am always interested to read about how liberal academicians are, but have seen precious little of it. Admittedly, I would guess my collegiate coworkers to be left of those in big pharma, but not so drastically as the mainstream media would suggest.

More interesting, though, is the Dawkins’ claim that atheists presently hold the most persecuted religious belief. It’s interesting for the response it elicits in people of faith all clamoring to hold that title. Although I couldn’t say to which group belongs that distinction, I find it odd to argue for it.

I was just reading a brilliant conversation between Sam Harris, atheist and intellectual, and Rick Warren, Christian. From the article, The God Debate:

WARREN: Why isn’t atheism more appealing if it’s supposedly the most intellectually honest?
HARRIS: Frankly, it has a terrible PR campaign.
WARREN: [Laughs] It’s not a matter of PR.
HARRIS: It is right next to child molester as something you don’t want to be. But that is a product, I would argue, of what religious people tell one another about atheism.

It is my opinion, and I’m not alone, that atheism is the most persecuted religious belief in American today. My own mother has wondered aloud what keeps atheists from murdering and raping innocent people. In the mind of many people of religious faith, ethics are the exclusive domain of the faithful and atheists, having no fear of eternal punishment, are free to do as they please. I left that conversation amazed that fear of damnation is the only thing keeping people of faith from committing horrendous crimes. Of course, the truth is that faith does not prevent those things. Anyway, Harris was right in that the public relations battle is being won mightily by fundamentalists.