Q: What do you have against religion?
A: It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know. I'm especially concerned when these certainties are operative at the level of our national discourse, at the level of the kinds of motivations people find to not do certain kinds of medical research, or not fund it, like stem cell research, the kind of motivations people find to go to war, to blow themselves up in certain circumstances we see in the Muslim world. These are ideas that really are operative and translate into behavior and emotion inevitably. I think there's a myth in our society that belief is private. Belief is only private if it's not really believed and it's not making a point of contact with the world. But if your beliefs are about the world on any level, they are engines of behavior and emotion, so then it really matters what people believe is going on. If they believe the creator of the universe wants all human beings to live in a certain way, their beliefs are going to find a way into the public sphere, and no amendment to our Constitution is good enough to keep it out.
Q: What's the best example of the harm religion can do?
A: There are so many examples. The obvious examples of violence that would not otherwise occur but for what people believe about God --for instance the conflict in the Middle East. We have Muslims and Jews by and large making incompatible claims upon specific real estate in the Middle East, believing that God is an omniscient real estate broker who has doled out these parcels of land as witnessed by the Bible or the Koran. My argument is that really we have a situation here where people have defined themselves in religious terms, they have made incompatible claims on real estate, and they are fighting for God. It's nominally over land, but the only reason why they can't live happily side by side there is because they believe incompatible things about the nature of the universe based on their faith.
Q: Do you see the harm in religion manifesting itself in our government?
A: Yeah, on many levels. The fact that we are not funding stem cell research is an explicitly religious constraint upon our medical research. This is the effect of having millions of people, one of whom is the president of the United States, believing that the human soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and therefore you can't privilege one soul over another, even if one of those souls happens to be in a petri dish and the other soul is a little girl with a spinal cord injury. This seems to be an ethical dilemma which requires strenuous debate to resolve, and at the moment the debate has been resolved on the side of let's do nothing. Let's not fund this research.
Q: Do you think our country is in the trouble it's in because of religion?
A: To a large degree I think it is. I think it could be in much more trouble. I think we could have a country that is really explicitly in a religious war with the whole of the Muslim world. I feel like we are meandering into that now in the way we are conducting our foreign policy, but it could have been worse. We could have had someone like Pat Robertson in the Oval Office as opposed to George Bush. I think George Bush is sufficiently irrational in his beliefs about the world based on his evangelical Christianity that it worries me, but he's not nearly as scary as some of the people who put him in office, some of the people who really think they are going to be raptured in their life time. Grown men and women really believe this stuff, and it really has consequences.
Q: Many religions people feel they need their religion, that it sustains them, comforts them, gives them solace, makes them better people. What about that?
A: It's actually not an argument for the truth of any specific religious doctrine, and we recognize this easily on any other subject. The usefulness of religion, the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of thecreator of the universe. You can only believe those things or you should be only able to believe those things if you think there are good reasons to believe those things. It seems to me that either the Bible is a magical book or it isn't. Either it is the word of God or in some sense a unique book, unlike any other book, not the product of mere human beings, or it's a book like any other book -- well written in parts, not so well written in other parts, very inspiring in parts, not so inspiring in other parts. I happen to think it's a book like the plays of Shakespeare and the Iliad. It's literature. If it is just a book, if you are a religious moderate who is not being a literalist about it, and you're willing to acknowledge that it's a book that has a lot of wisdom in it, there is no impediment to taking that wisdom and using it as part of our twenty-first century conversation about ethics and meaning and the nature of the universe. So we can take the golden rule out of the Bible and say this is about as wise as it gets. We want to use the golden rule; it is supremely useful. It captures our ethical intuitions on so many questions. It's not unique to the Bible, incidentally. Other people have come up with the golden rule. So the golden rule is great, let's keep it, but let's jettison all the barbarism we have in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and stoning people for working on the Sabbath or killing a girl who is not a virgin on her wedding night. This we recognize is barbarism. We can do that. We don't have to get rid of all the buildings, the art or the music. What we have to get rid of are these divisive certainties that separate, that fracture the human community into these separate moral camps, where we have Muslims siding with other Muslims reflexively because they are Muslim, and Christians likewise, and Jews likewise. We have to find a way to a future somehow where we are simply human beings talking very much in the way we speak in science about just the way the world is, in a way that just floats free of culture and country. There's no such thing as American science as opposed to French science as opposed to Japanese science. There's just science. There's no such thing as Christian science as opposed to Muslim science, and ultimately I think there is going to be no such things as Christian morality or Christian spiritual experience. There is going to be morality and spiritual experience, and it is going to be part of a truly nondenominational conversation we have in the modern world.
Q: Do you believe that there will be a time when religion goes under? Is that what you are saying?
A: Yeah, I think that there must be. It's hard to imagine that 500 years from now we are going to be happily living side by sid, devout Muslims and devout Christians armed with unimaginably destructive technology. Already our technology is getting so destructive and is proliferating so readily that I think it is increasingly obvious that there's no future where aspiring martyrs are going to make good neighbors for us. If you are not deterred by death, if you think death is the best thing that can ever happen to a person in the right circumstances, as millions of very committed religious people believe, you have ceased to be a rational actor in world affairs, and given the right destructive technology, which as I said is proliferating -- we are not stopping proliferation -- I think it's a deal breaker. We are not going to get a hundred or a thousand years into the future still holding on to our separate identities in this way.
Q: Are you saying either we give up religion or we are all going to kill each other?
A: I think we are killing each other. It's not the only reason why we are killing each other, but it is a reliable reason. There would be sources of war without religious dogmatism, but the scariest of us-them thinking at the moment, and I would argue historically, has been these divisive religious certainties. There are so many conflicts, principally between Islam and her neighbors at the moment, which are being generated purely on the basis of what people believe about God, only nominally on the basis of material concerns and economics. Literally we have a circumstance where in the Muslim world disproportionately well off and well educated people are blowing themselves up and forming these jihadist cells, and we have physicians organizing terrorist cells. It's not an easy equation between ignorance and religious extremism. That is a scary fact -- that it is possible to be so well educated you can build a nuclear bomb and still think you are going to get the 72 virgins in paradise. That marriage of twenty-first century sophistication and medieval religious credulity, I think, is something we have to keep our focus on it, because it's just a true pathology of discourse, because certain beliefs about God and the afterlife are just immune to criticism in our discourse, and we have to find some way of changing that.
Q: Do you really think people are going to give religion up? It is so pervasive. What will make millions and millions of people stop being religious? Is that a realistic hope or a good hope?
A: It seems incredibly quixotic in our society where 90 percent of people believe in God, 87 percent of Americans claim to never doubt the existence of God, according to one Gallup poll. But if you just compare us to the rest of the developed world. Western Europe is profoundly secularized compared to us, apart from their Muslim immigrants. Western Europeans view us as a religious backwater.
Q: Why are we different from them? Why has this secularization happened in Europe and not here? Why are Americans so religious?
A It's a question for which I don't think anyone has put forward an adequate answer. There are some ideas about the difference between having a thriving marketplace of competing denominations, which we have in the States, and state religions by and large in Western Europe, where the state religion becomes kind of moribund and boring and just ceases to be a vibrant domain for religious people, whereas here anyone can put up a shingle and argue that their religion is the best religion, and we have this marketplace of ignorance, I think.
Q: You have likened religious people to lunatics. Explain that.
A: I think most people would agree that you have to be a lunatic to be certain of Poseidon, for instance. If someone was going to run a political campaign and as part of their stump speech they said these hurricanes in the Gulf have become an increasing concern, and we have to start praying to Poseidon, the god who deals with the ocean. This is a manifestly crazy thing to say. Everyone would recoil, it would be the end of that person's political career, and yet we are talking as though there was some epistemological difference between talking about Poseidon and talking about the God of Abraham, and I would argue that there really isn't, apart from numbers of subscribers. I actually get hate mail from people who really do believe in Poseidon. It's not impossible to believe in Poseidon. But it is so fringe an object of fixation that everyone immediately recognizes it as being in some sense basically unreasonable. My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that. There are some very smart, perfectly sane people who believe these things. And that is what is so scary about our discourse. I think Osama bin Laden is both intelligent and psychologically healthy. I do not think he's crazy. He would not fit on any spectrum of pathology that we have, in psychodynamic terms. Maybe he's got some grandiosity, but basically he is a very well integrated person who could be doing anything he wants with his life and his talents, but he wants to be living in caves, scheming about how to kill infidels given what he believes about God. And it is rational for him to do that given what he believes about God. So what concerns me is that it is possible to be even a good person. A lot of these jihadists are probably not evil people. There are people who are evil in this world. There are people who are sociopaths, who don't feel compassion, who want to harm children, etc. But there are people who are good people who will fly planes into buildings given the right circumstances, given what they believe, and that is the scariest situation of all.
Q: So you are saying that religion can turn people into sociopaths?
A: Yeah, effectively so. While I believe that they feel genuine compassion and concern and genuine religious ecstasy -- I think for instance that a suicide bomber before he pushes the button is probably in a very transfigured state that is incredibly positive at the level of his emotions. I'm sure if you could check in with him at that moment, you would find that he would feel his entire existence had summated to this moment, and he will feel just incredible meaning and probably rapture.
Q: Because of his religious beliefs?
A: Yeah, and because he is putting it all on the line. He is sure of paradise, he's sure he's going to get all his loved ones into paradise, he's sure this world is a sacrilegious mirage, and he has no doubts.
Q: There are religious people who will say that religion is the best, some will say the only way to teach morality. What about that?
A: I think that is delusory on many fronts. One is that these are not the most moral books that we have. The Bible for instance endorses slavery. If the Bible is the best book we have on morality, it should get slavery right, because slavery is one of the easiest and most consequential questions we have ever had to face, and the Bible gets it wrong. God tells us how to keep slaves, he tells us not to beat them so badly that we knock out their eyes or their teeth, but he tells us to keep them, and Jesus clearly expected us to keep slaves, so that alone rules out the Bible as the best source or morality. When you look more specifically at what people claim to be the basis of morality in the Bible, like the Ten Commandments, you find that the first four have nothing to do with morality: Have no other gods before me, no graven image, keep the Sabbath holy, don't take God's name in vain. These are theological crimes, the penalty for which is death. You are supposed to kill people for working on the Sabbath in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus. We live in a country where 75 percent of the people think that those commandments should be on our public buildings. Perhaps they want the penalties for breaking them on the public buildings, too. This is just not the most articulate source of morality we have.
Q: What evidence is there that people would be as moral without religion?
A: There is much evidence. One is that clearly morality not only precedes exposure to religion, it precedes our humanity. We can find the precursors of moral behavior in other mammals. Mice have been shown to be more agitated at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar mice. Monkeys will starve themselves so that their cage mates don't get shocks, whereas they won't do that if their cage mate happens to be a rabbit. If it's another monkey they are concerned, if it's rabbit they are not. These are the kinds of things you would expect to find in the natural world if our morality were coming out of evolution or biology on some level, and then you can just look at the behavior of religious people and atheists. You go to the National Academy of Scientists, and this is effectively an atheist organization. Ninety-three percent of its membership rejects the idea of a personal God and seventy-one percent would be strictly atheists by any definition. These guys are not raping and killing and stealing. If religion were somehow necessary for morality, wherever you found an atheist you would find an immoral person, and I think the opposite is the case. I would bet if you went to the prisons in this country you would not find a high percentage of atheists, and you would probably find a lower percentage of atheists.
