{"id":4881,"date":"2011-11-17T11:38:58","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T16:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=4881"},"modified":"2011-11-17T11:51:10","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T16:51:10","slug":"resolved-the-world-would-be-better-off-without-stale-question-begging-public-debates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/17\/resolved-the-world-would-be-better-off-without-stale-question-begging-public-debates\/","title":{"rendered":"Resolved: The World Would Be Better Off Without Stale, Question-Begging Public ‘Debates’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This report on a debate at NYU<\/a> on the subject \u201cThe World Would Be Better Off Without Religion\u201d is depressing.<\/p>\n

If one is going to produce a staged re-enactment of a late-night dorm-room bull session \u2014 without even the benefit of pizza and alcohol that such conversations generally require \u2014 then at least try not to include rabidly dishonest racist jackwagons like Dinesh D\u2019Souza.<\/p>\n

The New York Times\u2019<\/em> Jennifer Schuessler captures my own reaction to this stale ritual when she quotes Charlie Dunbar Broad for describing such debates \u201cas having\u00a0 \u2018acquired the repulsiveness of half-cold mutton in half-congealed gravy\u2019 (and that was in 1939).\u201d That\u2019s just as evocative and somewhat more polite than the image I first thought of, which was that things like this are a pointless wankfest.<\/p>\n

Whether one regards it as a good or an ill, religion is a pervasive and persistent aspect of the world we live in. \u201cYeah, but what if it wasn\u2019t?<\/em>\u201ccould provide the basis for a fascinating work of speculative fiction \u2014 whether utopian or dystopian \u2014 but not for a constructive or meaningful \u201cdebate.\u201d Similarly academic debates were held in the 19th Century on the topic of \u201cThe World Would Be Better Off Without Alcohol\u201d and they proved just about as practical and enlightening.<\/p>\n

Those debates, at least, began with more of a shared definition of terms, with both sides roughly agreeing on the meaning of \u201calcohol.\u201d The debate described above, like most such plates of congealed gravy, consists of one side begging the question by arguing that the world is a better place due to the presence of \u201creligion \u2014 the well-spring of virtue, meaning and goodness\u201d and the other side begging the question by arguing that the world would be better off without \u201creligion \u2014 that fantastical and harmful set of superstitions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yawn.<\/em><\/p>\n

My main complaint with such debates is not that one side is required to argue against religion, but that both sides wind up arguing against pluralism.<\/em> I am fiercely committed to pluralism, not just because it\u2019s a central tenet of my own Baptist sect, but because I cannot see how we could do without it without finding ourselves in a monstrous situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 Gods or no God,\u201d Thomas Jefferson said. \u201cIt neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.\u201d But once we decide that such pluralism is unacceptable \u2014 that we would be \u201cbetter off\u201d if everyone<\/em> believed there are 20 Gods, or if everyone<\/em> believed in one particular notion of God, or if everyone<\/em> believed there is no God \u2014 then pockets will be picked and legs will be broken.<\/p>\n

The opposite of pluralism is coercion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not suggesting that any of the cast in the NYU debate was advocating such coercive intolerance of religion\/non-religion. The formulation of \u201cbetter off\u201d seems deliberately vague and flaccid so as not to suggest that. But once we conclude that we would be \u201cbetter off\u201d is<\/del> if everyone embraced temperance, the next step always seems to be advocating measures to assist or encourage or require everyone to do so until \u201ctemperance\u201d becomes \u201cprohibition.\u201d<\/p>\n

I addressed this a bit in a footnote to a post a few years ago<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The world seems wrong<\/em> and we want to see it made or remade right<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Every religion worth anything addresses this dilemma in two ways. First by requiring that its adherents practice both charity and justice here in this life. And second by extending the hope that such unfairness will ultimately be rectified, if not in this world, then in the next.<\/p>\n

When religion goes awry or becomes corrupt, it often results from or results in an emphasis on one of those two aspects to the neglect of the other.<\/p>\n

Corruption A: <\/strong>Emphasize the hope for eschatological justice to the neglect of justice in this world and you end up with the \u201cpie in the sky when you die\u201d opiate used to justify every oppressive caste system from Bombay to Alabama.<\/p>\n

Corruption B: <\/strong>Emphasize justice in this world to the neglect of the hope for eschatological justice and you begin thinking that you can impose perfect, infallible justice here in the temporal realm \u2013 an idea that quickly gallops off into oppressive theocracy of one form or another.<\/p>\n

Our history books and newspapers are so full of examples of both of those errors that it can be tempting to think that maybe religion itself is the problem \u2013 that if we could just stamp out religion, we could end oppression and establish perfect justice. If that idea seems attractive to you, see again Corruption B above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This report on a debate at NYU on the subject \u201cThe World Would Be Better Off Without Religion\u201d is depressing. If one is going to produce a staged re-enactment of a late-night dorm-room bull session \u2014 without even the benefit of pizza and alcohol that such conversations generally require \u2014 then at least try not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nResolved: The World Would Be Better Off Without Stale, Question-Begging Public 'Debates'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This report on a debate at NYU on the subject "The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion" is depressing. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Resolved: The World Would Be Better Off Without Stale, Question-Begging Public 'Debates'","description":"This report on a debate at NYU on the subject \"The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion\" is depressing. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}