Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion
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been observed in an extraordinary variety of species, from birds to elephants to
primates.
As de Waal reminds us, social living depends on social "regularity," which he
characterizes as a "set of expectations about the way in which oneself (or others)
should be treated and how resources should be divided."24 Individuals without
some sense of what to expect from others-and of what others expect of him or
her-would not be properly "social." And this social regularity entails some
method for handling exceptions and deviations: "Whenever reality deviates from
these expectations to one's (or the other's) disadvantage, a negative reaction
ensues, most commonly protest by subordinate individuals and punishment by
dominant individuals."25
Thus, a certain amount of regularity and predictability in behavior is a
requisite for social coexistence and for the eventual formation of "morality"
However, it is only one component. As in the case of religion, "morality" is not a
single, monolithic thing or skill but a composite phenomenon of multiple skills
and interests. To reach premoral behavior, and ultimately human morality, a
variety of other pieces must be in place. One of the essential pieces is a certain
degree of "intersubjectivity," the ability to understand (and therefore hopefully
predict) the thoughts and feelings of others. Beyond the mere awareness of
others' thoughts and feelings is the capacity to share them in some way, what de
Waal calls "emotional contagion." As beings approach "moral" status, they
develop the capacity to experience the experiences of others. Fortunately, some
of the most fascinating recent work has identified a basis for this phenomenon in
socalled mirror neurons in the brain. Mirror neurons, as the name suggests,
imitate or mimic the activity of other parts of the brain-or of other brains.
Experiments have shown that "neurons in the same area of the brain were
activated whether the animals were performing a particular movement ... or
simply observing another monkey-or a researcher-perform the same action."26
This provides a literal biological foundation for empathy: individuals with mirror
neurons, including humans and other primates, can actually feel what others feel.
Other premoral habits and skills include the ability to inhibit one's own actions
and to remember, which is crucial for preserving and learning from previous
interactions with the same individuals. A third is the ability to detect and respond
to "cheaters" or those who violate expectations. A fourth is "symbolic" thought,
ultimately in the form of language and even quite abstract thought about "rules"
and "principles." Few, if any, nonhuman animals meet all of these qualifications,
but then neither do very young human children-proving that "morality" is a
developmental achievement. However, many or most of these talents exist in
nonhuman species, and by the time these talents all appear together in one
species, namely humans, we have a patently unmysterious and unsupernatural
"moral" sensibility. The fact that nonhumans do not have human morality, de
Waal reminds us, is no reason to discount the natural, prehuman roots of
"morality":
To neglect the common ground of primates, and to deny the evolutionary
roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to
declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of
"tower" ought to be reserved for its summit.
Are animals moral? Let us simply conclude that they occupy several
floors of the tower of morality. Rejection of even this modest proposal can
only result in an impoverished view of the structure as a whole.'?
CONCLUSION: WHAT'S RELIGION GOT TO Do WITH IT?
We have proved that Christianity is not the only basis for morality, since religion
of any kind is not required for morality nor is humanity even required. Let the
silly and biased claim never be uttered again.
But what is the relationship between Christianity and morality? There
certainly appears to be a connection. The relationship is the same one as between
any religion and its local morality system. It consists of two parts: first, the
religion as a source of specific moral claims and second, the religion as a
legitimation of those moral claims.
We have seen that all religions contain behavioral instructions or norms of
some sort or another; however, the details of these instructions vary wildly. Each
religion advances its particular version of morality and backs it up with its own
promises and threats (hell, reincarnation, bad karma, or whatever). To be sure,
there are some commonalities across these religion-inspired moral systems, but
what is specifically religious in moralities is not universal or important, and what
is universal and important in moralities is not specifically religious. Humans,
like all social beings, have codes and con sequences for behavior; religions add
to that natural and nonreligious base a layer of diverse, trivial, irrational, and
divisive-and as often as not, immoral, viewed from outside the religion-bits and
pieces. Frankly, human morality would be better off without the religious
additions.
More critical, but regularly overlooked, is the legitimation effect of religion on
morality (and on many other aspects of human life, like marriage or political
institutions). The problem comes down to this: why this moral claim or moral
system as opposed to some other? Why is this way of marrying or eating or
dressing or living "moral" instead of that way? In a word, on what authority is
this moral claim/system based? There are various possibilities: a moral (or
social) system might be based on tradition or popular opinion or majority vote or
some theory (like Marxism) or, in the end, force. None of these is a very
adequate base, though, because (1) we could disagree and (2) we could be
wrong.
What religion does for morality and for society in general is move the
authority, the responsibility, for rules and institutions out of human hands. Each
religion adds some idiosyncratic elements to the nonreligious human tendency to
create and enforce behavioral norms and appraisals and then attributes the whole
system to a nonhuman and superhuman source. Individually and collectively, our
relationship to (putatively) religion-given morality is thus not creation or
criticism but obligation: "the moral" is that which we as members of the group
must do and which is the most praiseworthy to do and the most reprehensible not
to do. This also solves the problem of the diversity of moral codes and
commands: the moralities of different religions and societies have little in
common except the fact that those behaviors are the most obligatory in their
group. Other rules exist, but their seriousness is not as great: violating a lesser
obligation might be impolite or childish or abnormal, but violating a big
obligation is immoral. But what is a big and "moral" obligation in one religion/
society may be a small one in another-or not a moral obligation or issue at all.
In the end, the return of morality back to earth, to the natural world and
the
human world, puts morality in the hands of the humans who create and sustain it
in the first place. It does not "solve" the moral problems of humanity-since there
is still no agreement on what the solution or what the very problems are-but it
empowers us to be the ones to decide. It is humans and only humans who must
struggle and negotiate and compete to arrange "moral" affairs, but then we were
always alone on this mission, and religionas history plainly and painfully shows-
was never much help anyhow.
NOTES
1. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious
Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
2. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust-The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), p. xvii.
4. Robin Horton, "A Definition of Religion, and Its Uses,".7ournal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 90 (1960): 211.
5. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil Why People Cheat,
Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (New York: Times Books,
2004), p. 7.
6. Kai Nielsen, Why Be Moral? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p.
39.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 40.
9. Shermer, Science of Good and Evil, p. 31.
10. Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, "When Morality Opposes Justice:
Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize," Social
,justice Research 20 (March 2007): 98.
11. Alan Dershowitz, The Genesis of.7ustice.• Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice
that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law (New York: Warner
Books, 2000).
12. Deeteronomy 31:19. The analysis for these commandments (notes 12
through 19) comes from "A List of the 613 Mitzvot" published on "Judaism
101," http://www.jewfaq.org/613.htm. The published list, in turn, is explicitly
derived from the writings of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, also known as
Maimonides, whom the list compiler regards as the most widely accepted of the
mitzvah commentators. Readers may find that the original passages in scripture
do not always appear to support these interpretations, which only goes to show
how subjective such "moral" regulations are.
13. Deuteronomy 6:8.
14. Leviticus 19:9; Leviticus 23:22.
15. Deuteronomy 24:5.
16. Ibid.
17. Leviticus 18:6.
18. Deuteronomy 23:20.
19. Exodus 21:2.
20. CBS News, "Saudi's `Miss Beautiful Morals' Pageant," http://www
.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/07/world/main4998112.shtml?source=RSSattr
=World 4998112.
21. [Editor's note: Although Dr. Eller still finds them unconvincing, for two
defenses of this kind of secular moral realism, see Richard Carrier, Sense and
Goodness without God (Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2005), pp. 291-
348, and Gary Drescher, Good and Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).] Sam
Harris also defends this in his talk, "Can We Ever Be Right about Right and
Wrong?" seen here: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/can-we-ever-be-
right-about-right -and-wrong/.
22. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
2nd ed. (London: John Murray: 1882 [1871]), p. 98.
23. S. M. O'Connell, "Empathy in Chimpanzees: Evidence for Theory of
Mind?" Primates 36 (1995).
24. Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 44.
25. Ibid., p. 44-45.
26. Thomas S. May, "Terms of Empathy: Your Pain in My Pain-If You Play a
Fair Game," Brain Work 16 (May June 2006): 3.
27. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 181.
n his remonstrance against the New Atheist's claims that religion has led
to massive human slaughters, Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative commentator,
assures us that "Nazism ... was a secular, antireligious philosophy that, strangely
enough, had a lot in common with Communism."1 Thus, D'Souza is able to
charge atheism in Nazi Germany with some 10 million deaths, including that of
6 million Jews. Actually, for D'Souza, the atheist regimes of Joseph Stalin and
Mao Zedong take the top two spots in the list of atheist violence. Altogether,
D'Souza affirms that these big three atheist regimes have killed about 100
million people.2
D'Souza is typical of many Christian apologists whose best response to the
genocides committed by self-described Christians is that atheists have killed
even more. In fact, D'Souza calculates that "deaths caused by Christian rulers
over a five-hundred year period amount to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by
Stalin, Hitler, and Mao in the space of a few decades."3 Witches and Jews are
some of the groups that D'Souza grudgingly concedes may have been killed due
to Christian violence.
I have already discussed at length the fallacies of viewing Stalinist violence
just in terms of atheism.4 Most of Stalinist violence resulted from forced
collectivization, and recently published documents show the complicity of
church authorities in the Stalinist agenda.' D'Souza does not provide a single
document or statement by Stalin that shows that he was collectivizing or killing
for atheist reasons.
Moreover, communism, in the sense of a system of collectivized property, is a
biblical notion found already in Acts 4:32-27. That Christian communist system
also results in the killing of a married couple (Acts 5:1-11) that reneged on their
promise to surrender their property. Thus, the principle of killing those who did
not conform to collectivization of property is already a biblical one. The defense
that it was simply lying about turning over property that was the motive for the
deaths of Ananias and Sapphira overlooks the brute fact that the value of life was
put below handing over all their property. For instead of just being expelled, they
were killed. Stalin or Mao probably would have done the same thing. Since
communism is advocated by some biblical authors, then Maoist and Stalinist
deaths cannot simply be attributed to atheism, as enforcing collectivization can
be deadly in both atheist or Christian forms.
In addition, D'Souza does not have the competence to evaluate claims of
Maoist violence because it requires extensive training in Chinese language and
documents to check the accuracy of the information provided in English sources.
Since I also do not have the expertise in Chinese to evaluate Maoist violence, I
will not address Maoism here. What I do know is that D'Souza does not provide
a single quote from Mao or even a translated Chinese document for his
assertions that Mao killed because of atheism.
In any case, this chapter will analyze in greater depth the argument that the
deaths caused by Hitler should be attributed to some form of Darwinist atheism,
something especially argued by Richard Weikart in his book, From Darwin to
Hitler (2004).6 Weikart's book is one of the sources for D'Souza's
&n
bsp; pronouncements. In fact, I shall argue that:
• Hitler's holocaust, rather than the result of some form of Darwinist
atheism, is actually the most tragic consequence of a long history of
Christian anti Judaism and racism.
• Nazism follows principles of killing people for their ethnicity or religion
enunciated in the Bible.
In addition, I will show that many of D'Souza's claims rely on poor research
techniques and a superficial knowledge of Christian anti Judaism.
ETHICAL PRINCIPLES AND NUMBERS
According to the United Nations Convention against Genocide (also called the
first Geneva Convention), genocide describes "acts committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." 7 There
is no ethical distinction between killing a religious group or an ethnic group.
There is no ethical distinction between killing a racial or a national group. All
are equally banned by the United Nations standards. This is important because
D'Souza often tries to mitigate religious violence by claiming, usually without
documentation, that some acts attributed to religious violence are really cases of
ethnic/racial violence.
Moreover, D'Souza often leaves unexplained what it is about warring ethnic
groups that makes them so opprobrious to each other. D'Souza fails to see that
ethnicity can be created and/or exacerbated by religious differences. For
instance, according to biblical accounts, the creation of the Hebrew ethnic group
is traced to the calling of Abraham to form his own separate lineage (Genesis
12:1-7), even though he was not different "ethnically" at that point from the rest
of his kinship group.8 Abraham's lineage was further differentiated by adhering
to monotheism and adding some religiously mandated practices (e.g., endogamy,
circumcision) that set them apart from their neighbors (see Genesis 17:12, 24:3-
4).
A similar phenomenon occurred between Christians and Jews. The initial
conflict was between Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and Jews who did
not (SeeJohn 5:18, Acts 17:2-5, Galatians 2:11-16). SuchJews really did not
differ "ethnically" from each other. While it is clear that some persons in the
New Testament (NT) regarded themselves as Jewish and Christian, eventually
"Jews" became those who retained the traditional religion of their ancestors, and
did not accept Jesus as the Christ. The Catholic Church then reinforced the
separate religious identity of Jews through marriage laws, professional
restrictions, spatial separation in ghettos, and distinctive garb, which made Jews
even more different and even more identifiable targets .9 Yet it was a perceived
Jewish antagonism to Christ that was often the stated initial reason for such
actions. Thus, when Pope Paul IV issued his bull, Cum nimis (1555), which
established a ghetto for Jews, his introductory rationale was that the Jews' "own
guilt has consigned them to perpetual servitude."10 Thus, one cannot divorce
ethnicity and religion as easily as D'Souza attempts to do.
D'Souza also focuses on numbers more than on the ethical principle that it is
wrong to kill groups of human beings based on their race, ethnicity, nationality,
or religion. But if, as D'Souza seems to think, genocide is always evil, then the
numbers don't matter as much as does the principle. If D'Souza does not think
genocide is always evil, then he is no less a moral relativist than atheists, and
now we would have only his arbitrary reasons for justifying it.
So, let's suppose that two genocidal groups, X and Y, were following the same
principle of killing all members of some group that they had targeted for ethnic
or religious reasons. We will label the victims of Group X as Target 1 and the