On my customary Monday morning weekend news-and-blogs catchup, I ran across two posts extolling the not-badness of religion:
-Roy at Alicublog, and how even the non-religious can experience a taste of the divine. I respect Roy and all his writings, and despite my known and unapologetic disdain for religious belief, I’m familiar with the feeling that he describes. For me, it’s whenever I find myself inside a Catholic church, there’s a sense of grandeur that moves me on some level, although unlike Roy I always feel kind of filthy about it afterwards. And I have had a similar experience when listening to religious-inspired music (remember kids, everything J.S. Bach wrote was for the church).
-Sifu Tweety at The Poor Man, also praising Roy while tut-tutting about how counterproductive it is for atheists to criticize religion. This one completely loses me: the argument (if I follow it correctly) is that we’re hard-wired for religious belief, which I have no problem agreeing is probably true, but we’re also hard-wired for men to eschew monogamy, and no reasonable person would argue that we should encourage men to go tomcatting about. It’s exactly the same argument from Evolutionary Psychology that feminists have (rightly) been railing against for a decade, and to suddenly have it be okay when religion and not sex is on the table is not convincing.
All of which is meant to lead up to PZ Myers’s latest masterpiece at Pharyngula, in which that most happily disagreeable of atheist bloggers (and to anyone who thinks my occasional atheist rants are intolerant? Read PZ’s Godlessness posts) calls bullshit on the popular conception that all of us believe that atheism and evolution entail one another. More specifically, he is tired of being told that he has to downplay his atheism before he can be allowed to talk about evolution:
“Ken Miller writes a book on evolution that’s also a defense of religion in general and Catholicism specifically, and do we hear these same people decrying the introduction of the theist/atheist “squabble” into the evolutionary argument? No, his book is recommended all over the place (even by me—the science is good, but the religion is bogus). We can praise the clergy for getting involved, but atheists? Regrettable. Tactically bad.
“Tough.
“We also get arguments that criticizing religion hurts the pro-evolution cause. So what? You could also say that criticizing creationism hurts the pro-evolution cause, because it pisses off all those millions of creationists. The claim completely misses the point. Atheists reject religion, so we aren’t at all worried that the targets of our criticism dislike our criticism. We aren’t going to stop.”
A while back I tried to argue that it does atheists as a group no good to kowtow to the moderate religious majority, even if they’re our apparent allies in the current ID scuffle. I did not succeed. PZ says everything I was trying to say, in a much simpler and more user-friendly way:
“Why shouldn’t I feel that many who should be my allies are making excuses for a broader irrationality that undermines the more specific argument for evolution that they want to support? While utility in the short term is nice, I’m not in favor of losing to superstition in the long run.”