Dec 03 2009
Imperfect Flowers: Religious Violence and How Simple Answers Misinform
Valerie Talerico is a fairly vocal, non-believing writer who frequently has articles appear on the Huffington Post.
I have read a couple of these recently, and have criticisms about each.
1) When Science Teachers Don’t Believe In Evolution
As an example of positive criticism, I give Valerie an enthusiastic huzzah! for this idea she expresses:
These people, in my mind, worship an idol with clay feet. They don’t worship a Power that is actually great enough to create the intricacies of the natural world, but rather a golden calf called the inerrant Bible or the inerrant Koran. (Call it bibliolatry—text worship. In an age of widespread literacy and printing presses, what better golden calf than a literally perfect book?)
Bibliolatry indeed! Most educated/liberal folk consider this particularly crazy, considering the many versions/translations of the Bible and the many different “holy” books found worldwide. But I wonder: is bibliolatry simply a relatively retrogressive, rigid way of supporting beliefs in a god, and conservative notions of what that god wants?
While god-belief not strictly tethered to the writings in ancient texts may strike some as a “more enlightened” version of religion, this form strikes me as merely better streamlined for acceptance by educated minds. Though the fat has been trimmed away, the rotten meat remains.
2) Like Alcohol, Religion Disinhibits Violence, Doesn’t Cause It
In this article, Tarico argues that religion doesn’t outright “cause” violence, but instead disinhibits it. Like alcohol disinhibits violence.
Here’s the problem: Our thinking about the cause of specific behaviors is tremendously flawed if we persist in attempting to find the cause of some behavior or class of behaviors, verses attempting to identify the causes, plural.
When I taught introductory psychology I would include in my very first lecture this analogy about why seeking simply answers can be problematic and naive:
Think of human behavior as a “spilling of beans.” Akin to the old Milton Bradley game, Don’t Spill the Beans, human psychology spills over into a given behavior not due to a single, causal bean. Instead, there are a number of beans that topple the pot. While we habitually focus on one “bean” as being the most important, or unimportant, this can be deeply misleading.
Consider the reasons, plural, that one person might take the life of another (engage in homicidal behavior): jealously, anger, social stress, fear, self-defense, hormone levels, mental illness, drug use, etc, etc.
Clearly, one reason alone infrequently causes homicidal behavior. Rather, a number of factors are usually involved.
Turning to religion “inspired” violence, it is foolish to insist that religion alone is or is not THE cause. Yet can religion be one of the causal factors? Definitely.
In some circumstances (when combined with other “beans”) religion can be part of the group of factors that result in a person tipping over into violent behavior. To claim otherwise, including arguing that religion merely “disinhibits” a pre-existent tendency, seems to me borderline apologetic folly.
[...] a behavior, you are looking at things far too simplistically. For more on this topic, see my post, Imperfect Flowers: Religious Violence and How Simple Answers Misinform. (Particularly the simple answers misinform [...]