Why Atheists should defend Judeo-Christian culture
This afternoon, I found the following reply to one of my posts:
"Abortion is good, we need much more of it. it's not "just a religion" it's an insane Judeo-Christian ideology and it should be illegal."
- My reply turned into 2 huge essays, but this statement raised essential issues:
Abortion and its ideological roots and social consequences - Judeo-Christian culture as foundation of western civilization
This is the 2nd part of my reply:
Is Judeo-Christian ideology really evil, as the writer of the opening quote stated?
Benefits of religion
For starters, it's obvious that religions persisted for pretty much all of human history for a reason: they have provide benefits that enhance the survival chances of their followers. It is also obvious that religions encapsulate a lot of archaic values that we can no longer relate to - along with other more universal values that are still valid today.
Religions give psychological support to the individual, create a shared belief system and a - originally tribal - narrative, which forms the foundation of the moral and legal values of the societies that adopted them.
It is much easier to trust people who have a shared belief system and trust is essential to the success of any society. Religious people tend to be more successful, on average, have more kids, are less in doubt and less depressed.
Judeo-Christian culture
Let's start with a simple observation: I've lived for my entire life surrounded by Christians and Jews and never experienced any kind of conflict based on religion - not at my personal level.
Many people who live in Judeo-Christian societies but are not Jewish or Christian do not realize just how intimately all the positive features of western societies are connected with Judeo-Christian values and extensive ancient Greek and Roman contributions. Christians greatly admired those ancient cultures and integrated them into Christianity, preserving the ancient texts and teaching them in their institutes of higher learning.
Our modern concepts of liberty and individual rights are based on this Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman tradition, including all the human rights, the legal system, the abolition of slavery etc. The Abolitionists were Christians who decided around 1750 that slavery was totally incompatible with the values taught by Jesus in the New Testament, which itself overrides the Old Testament.
Judeo-Christians were free to develop a scientific understanding of the world. Leading Christian philosophers actively questioned the Bible since the 3rd century. Newton was a strong Christian, which didn't stop him from thinking rationally the world he lived in.
Lord Action was a Christian who strongly opposed oppressive government. Ludwig von Mises, one of the strongest defenders of a free market economy and individual liberty, was a Jew.
Political vs religious power
Historically, religions have always been a tool of power and social control. The representatives of the political and religious establishment worked hand in hand, strengthening each other. Political leaders always needed a justification for their power and religion was a very convenient pretext. What stronger claim than to say that some god wants a given individual to hold power?
Christianity started out in a position of weakness before being adopted as state religion in the late Roman empire. It then went through a phase that was historically unique when emperor Barbarossa openly defied the catholic church, which was supposed to bestow his power upon him.
The people of Europe were forced to pick sides - either for the catholic church or the emperor. Which opened a 3rd option: neither. The intellectual development of Europe shows this rupture very clearly. The political situation that triggered it was over after a few decades, but the intellectual impact persisted.
Further conflicts between various Christian factions allowed an ever greater separation of religious and political power until classical liberals demanded a complete separation of religion and government, as expressed clearly in the US constitution.
Religious extremism
Any religion comes with fanatics and extremists as well as with people who are indifferent, purely social followers. Christianity has not been spared its share. The question is: to what degree is religion inherently extremist?
Successful societies manage to marginalize and ultimately ignore ancient barbaric elements contained in their religious texts. The New Testament directly invalidated most of the barbaric rules of the Old Testament when Jesus says "He who has no sin, cast the first stone".
The Inquisition, Calvinism and witch hunts appeared only during brief periods in very specific social and political contexts and were not representative for Judeo-Christian culture in general.
Since the very early days, Christian leaders declared that the Bible was "man-made" and only "of divine inspiration". In other words, they recognized that quite a few of the texts were obviously self-contradictory and imperfect. They also interpreted biblical stories as allegories, not to be taken literally.
They also admitted that many aspects of the biblical texts had to be taken in historical context. Not to forget: in the early days of the Christian church, the Old Testament was already 3000-4000 years old.
If we go back 4000 years, that places us in 2000 BC. Imagine how remote and legendary the days of the old Testament were to early Christians...
How do other religions compare?
Islam is INFINITELY much worse. Although invented in the 7th century, Mohammed's main sources of inspiration were Arab polytheism and the Old Testament. The most fundamental claim of Islam is the alleged perfection and direct "godly" origin of the Quran and the assumption that Mohammed got all his verses directly from "Allah" (originally the Arabic moon god, hence the prevalence of the moon as symbol of Islam).
Mohammed could make up the most grotesque, immoral nonsense, even over the most trivial issues and claim that it was "from Allah", Muslims still accept it as absolute truth. His "favorite wife" Aisha openly mocked him in her own hadiths, questioning how obediently Allah delivered verses to his "prophet" even when it concerned something as trivial as a conflict with his wives.
The flat earth theory is still the official one, according to Islam. A famous cleric who founded a political movement that is currently very strong, in Tunisia, said in the 1920s that anyone who claimed that the earth was not flat was to be executed. It should surprise no one that the university of Tunis accepted a PhD thesis that claims that the earth is flat...
This nonsense was attacked in the "Gulf News" by an opinion writer who correctly identifies such absurd beliefs as a huge part of what prevents the development of the Arabic world:
Slavery was practiced by Mohammed himself. He enslaved, traded slaves and approved of sex slaves in the Quran. No Muslim can be against slavery or he will be considered an apostate, which implies a death sentence. Criticizing anything Mohammed did is totally prohibited, in Islam.
Buddhism is relatively tolerant, but that's from a position of weakness. In the past, Buddhists could be quite aggressive. And what Buddhism says about women is no better than any other religion. Most of the beliefs of Buddhism are tolerable.
Hindus are generally peaceful, too. I have never felt threatened in any way by Hindus when I visited India. They are even quite modern and women now have extensive rights. Unfortunately, their entire caste system was created to keep everyone in their social slot, without any social mobility, which still causes enormous conflicts between reformers and traditionalists.
To illustrate: a woman who worked for a friend I stayed with, in the Himalayas, was from the warrior (Kshatriya) caste. She only accepted the job because she thought that my friend was Brahman (he's an intellectual). In reality, his family was from the trader (Vaishya) caste. If she had found out, she would have been extremely upset.
Communism is a religion, too. Communists only oppose other religions because they occupy the same mental space. It's as bad and genocidal as the worst religions ever invented.
Woke ideology - basically Marxism with extra steps - is one of the worst ideologies ever conceived. The followers of this cult are some of the dumbest, most evil fanatics in history, entirely willing to commit a colossal genocide. The fact that they ally with Islam should surprise no one. So did the Nazis.
The immense majority of American atheists I debated are not really atheists at all - they are just anti-Christian and most of them actually support Islam, which is beyond irrational. They are typical for a certain US-centric worldview, which I also observed among libertarians who seem to think that the US government is the only evil force in the world, worse than far more evil regimes such as the Iranian Mullahs or the communist dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba - they think that those are just "victims of US bullying".
Conclusion about Religion
It is pretty obvious that religions fill a necessary psychological and social role. When people stop believing in a religion, the immense majority end up filling that void with some other ideology that will become a substitute religion - if not just another religion.
My former girlfriend - still a good friend - is an ex-Muslim. She literally went through hell to gain her intellectual freedom. And she could only do so in a country of Judeo-Christian culture.
That's why I defend Judeo-Christian culture as foundation of what we can call "western culture". It is the only one that truly supports individual liberty. And I say that after traveling the world for 50 years.
Footnotes
Judaism, Communism, Antisemitism
Jews had a very flexible legal framework that evolved rapidly. I'm not aware of any Jews practicing stonings or other barbaric punishments for at least 1500 years, to say it cautiously. Most accusations against Jews were and are slanderous, generally involving fake versions of Jewish religious texts. 95% of the quotes of alleged hate speech in Judaism I verified, I found that the "quote" was either completely fake or a mistranslation and completely fell apart in context.
Worse: antisemites typically justify their hatred with the alleged evils of Judaism, then extend their hatred to anyone who is ethnically Jewish, including openly non-religious individuals who clearly are not the least bit following the values of Judaism or even openly opposing them, e.g. Marx, who hated Jews and Judaism, as did pretty much every famous communist ideologue of Jewish ethnicity, while other Jews - some religious, some not - openly opposed communism. Despite all this evidence, they claim that communism is somehow "Jewish". So an ideology is suddenly based on an ethnicity, not a religion, although they claim that it is the religion that inspires the evil they pretend to oppose? The irrationality is off the scale...
The Quran and the flat earth
Mohammed clearly believed that the earth was flat and very small, covered by several skies that cover the earth like domes. The sky closest to the earth is supposed to be decorated with stars. Mohammed never says in which sky the earth and moon are to be found, but they "swim" in the same sky, "chasing each other" - and they are supposed to be of the same size.
The Hadith in which Mohammed claims to have flown to the moon on a winged mule, which he also claimed to have split in half with his sword, shows that he thought that the moon was very close to the earth and no larger than what it appears to be in the sky... 🙄
Zakir Naik is an Islamic fundamentalist who became very popular among young Muslims on the Internet, as he claims to be a doctor (hard to believe...) and makes up ridiculous lies, pretending that the Quran does not really say all the nonsense it clearly says.
Here is one of his most famous torturous attempts to rehabilitate the Quran: allegedly, the Quran defines the earth as "shaped like an ostrich egg". He arrives at that conclusion by pretending that the Arabic term for "spread out", i.e. "flat", refers to an ostrich egg, because it was used to describe the flat nests of ostriches by Arabs who discovered the existence of ostriches in South Africa centuries after Mohammed's death.
No one, ever, used the term to designate an egg. But that totally convoluted and absurd argument was lapped up by believers who were frustrated when they were mocked for believing in a book that said that the earth was flat...