The Simpleminded Atheist

I have a bone to pick with our militant atheists. I think they're less effective than they could be because they focus on the negative side of religion and ignore its positive side. It's this positive side that keeps religions going, despite the horrors that are performed in the name of its darker side.

I am not religious. I think religion is an outdated philosophy based on superstition, fantasy, and the over-projection of various Parent metaphors onto the world 'out there'.

I have read The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchins, and I pretty much agree with everything they have to say on the subject. Nevertheless, I regard them as about as useful as that idiot Southern Baptist preacher (who I shall not glorify by naming) who announced he was going to burn some copies of the Koran in 2010, which resulted in 14 innocent UN workers being murdered in Kabul.

Dawkins' and Hitchens' books are basically one-sided rants. 'Here's a list of all the things that are shit about religion...' They should know better, especially Dawkins.

Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, and then went on to give us the meme as a way of thinking about the transmission of, and competition between, ideas. To survive in either the gene pool or meme pool, a gene or meme should have some utility to its host, or at least do it no harm. Genes and memes that actively harm their holders should weed themselves out of circulation sooner or later. If you listen to Dawkins and Hitchens then it's hard to believe that the religion meme has any benefit to its host; in their writings it does nothing but harm. So why hasn't it been weeded out of the meme pool?

I want to explain why the religion meme stays in circulation by drawing an analogy with a harmful gene - the sickle cell gene.

The sickle cell gene produces an abnormal variant of haemoglobin. People with one copy of the gene produce a mixture of normal and abnormal haemoglobin. The sickle cell trait is so called because it results in abnormal sickle-shaped red blood cells. Holders of two copies of the gene are especially vulnerable to sickle-cell anemia and can typically expect to live only into their forties.

Like Dawkins and Hitchens religion, the sickle cell trait would seem to do nothing but harm to those afflicted by it. So why hasn't it been weeded out of the gene pool?

The sickle cell trait has persisted because although it shortens the lifespan of its holders, it has an upside, too. It confers some degree of protection against the malaria parasite. In the right environment, i.e. one where malaria is prevalent, the sickle cell trait has a marginal benefit to its host, and so it persists. Those with the gene may live a shorter than normal life, but they are less likely to die very young from malaria.

Religion has thrived in the human meme pool for millennia, despite all the negative effects catalogued by Dawkins and Hitchens. This is because it has also conferred benefits on those afflicted by it.

The benefits of religion are primarily social and psychological. Religion can result in a sense of community on a small scale. Humans are first-and-foremost social creatures and functional relationships with other humans is essential to our well being. Religious practices can define and maintain a framework for those relationships. Religion, being a meme, can also evolve to suit its environment. Thus, the Angry Bastard god that was suitable for a small tribe of Israelites surrounded by numerous other hostile tribes was able to evolve into the Submissive Christian god when that tribe had to survive under the heel of the Roman Empire. They wouldn't have got very far if they'd adhered to their Angry Bastard god's command to kill everyone else and take their women for slaves. Rome would have smited them. Instead, they adapted their religion to allow them to survive under their oppressor's, and that's why Christianity is such a good religion for slaves and those effected by both natural and man-made disasters. Christianity provides its believers with the psychological and psychotherapeutic tools for coping with poverty, oppression and disasters by binding its practitioners together in mutually supportive communities, telling them to submit to their fate, and promising them that it will all be better once they get to heaven.

If Dawkins and Hitchens could somehow (miraculously?) remove all the religion memes from everyone's head while they slept tonight, what kind of world would we wake up to?

I don't think things would be much different in the first world. The effect of the Enlightenment on the West's meme pool was to introduce of a meme that conferred resistance to religion, so long as people live in relatively well-off circumstances. Stress a westerner and the religious meme is likely to flare up again, like shingles, hence the outbreaks of religious warfare in Northern Ireland and Serbo-Croatia. The downside of the Post-Enlightenment Western model of civilization, though, is the weakness of community and the absence of religion's psychological benefits. Nowadays, community is based around jobs, X-Factor and Facebook, and these are no substitute for face-to-face encounters with our fellow human beings. The metaphor for life now has changed from 'be good, and you'll get into heaven' to 'he who dies with the most stuff wins'. Success in this world is not measured by friendships, but by how big a house/car/HDTV you can afford. As for psychological coping strategies, it's Prozac or Oprah, take your pick.

Meanwhile, in the third world, the effect of taking away people's religion overnight would be outright slaughter. Think Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, North Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, except EVERYWHERE. It doesn't bear thinking about.

The West is full of quietly religious people who do no harm. They aren't out there strapping suicide bombs to themselves. They aren't holding barbecues fueled by someone else's religious text. They're just getting along. If you ask them if they believe in god they'll say they believe in 'something, a higher power'. They get some of the benefits of religion without all the nasty side-effects. Dawkins and Hitchens would take their delusion away from them, and in the process they'd take away its benefits, too, and give them nothing to replace them.

The sickle cell trait survives because malaria survives. If we could eradicate malaria, then the sickle cell trait would weed itself out of the gene pool.

Religion survives because people live in adverse circumstances. If we could eradicate those adversities then religion would weed itself out of the meme pool.

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris makes a brave attempt to sketch a world in which morality is grounded in maximizing human well-being, rather than obeying the tenets of religious texts designed for a very different world. Well-being is rather a vague concept, but there are governments out there that are starting to ask how they can measure it. It's a start, and I hate to be a party-pooper here, but it's not enough.

If we focus on human happiness then there's a danger that we're all going to end up with bigger houses, cars, and HDTVs, because at the moment we equate happiness with success in the consumer lifestyle game. Meanwhile, the system that keeps us alive - the Earth's biosphere - is getting trashed. I tell you now, if we don't get the relationship between our happiness and the Earth's resources sorted out then in 50-100 years time you are going to see a resurgence in religion, and religious warfare that'll throw us back into the stone age.

The shrill, simpleminded atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens is no basis for sustaining a world with 9+ billion people on it. Their breed of atheism is however a great way to get that population down to 5- billion.

Harris' anthropocentric, well-being model is no answer either, because we could so easily shop ourselves to death.

What we need is an attitude towards life that is grounded in both the nature of ourselves and the world that we live in.

And that's what I'm going to write about in future posts.