Nov. 26, 2006





By Harry T. Cook





The gauntlet has been flung in the tiresome battle between traditional religion and science. Oxford's Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist whose credentials are unassailable, threw it down with the publication of his The God Delusion - a work that has been criticized for being too barbed and hyper-critical of religion and its believers. Sam Harris' bestseller, The End of Faith, has garnered similar damnation. As one reviewer wrote of the Dawkins book, "It just isn't nice to pick on people for what they believe."


Call me "not nice," but I, for one, have a vocation to pick on people who insist on the basis of not a scintilla of evidence that gay and lesbian persons are somehow "disordered," or that people of color are somehow inferior or that women should fulfill their divine mandate by staying home and baking cookies. In fact, I have made a second career out of picking on just such people, calling them to account. By attempting to articulate their often dangerous and invariably obtuse nonsense, they are asking to be picked on.


As to religious belief - like the efficacy of prayer, or the virgin birth, miracles, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ - I do not set out to pick on people who believe in such things. Their credulity, however, leaves me slack-jawed and in wonderment about what leads to it. I know it can't be evidence of the kind a laboratory scientist or a judge in a court of law could or would accept.


A person remarked to me after a recent lecture I had given on the history of American fundamentalism and the Religious Right that the congregation I have served for almost two decades must be made up of emotionally and intellectually healthy people. My own rational, agnostic humanism had clearly been evident in the lecture. "Your members," she said, "must not be the needy, pious, dependent types who desire or demand that you mouth the platitudes of that old time religion."


I replied that by and large my congregation is, indeed, composed of mentally and emotionally strong people who are less concerned about being comforted in that typical "there-there-now" way and more interested in being challenged intellectually and given impetus to make a difference in the real world. I also had to admit that the congregation I serve is not in any way typical. Our pews are not full to overflowing like those of our neighboring mega-churches where, as one of my critics put it, they "actually praise the Lord." The unofficial motto of my congregation is: "YOU WANT ANSWERS? WE'RE STILL ASKING THE QUESTIONS, AND YOU'RE WELCOME TO JOIN THE DISCUSSION."


Although, being an Episcopal Church, we are still saddled with the mandated recitation of the historic creedal statements of Christianity and prayer language based on pre-scientific concepts, our congregation mainly accepts its pastor's understanding of himself as a scholar - in this case, of the Bible. Our members have grown accustomed or simply resigned themselves to my discipline of research in which a text or passage of the Bible is translated and analyzed in what can be known of its historical and literary context and then read in a way appropriate to what has been discovered about it. That discipline does not often lead to the affirmation of such abstract theological tenets as the doctrine of the Trinity or the resurrection of Christ.


Thus would Dawkins and other scientists look at my work and at that of others like mine and see that we apply the scientific method in our research:


· They would see us taking nothing for granted and going toward where the data seem to lead.


· They would know that we oppose, for example, the teaching of creationism or so-called intelligent design because we understand Genesis for what it is and isn't.


· They would know that we oppose neither reproductive rights nor embryonic stem-cell research on the grounds, say, of Psalm 139: 12, 15 (You, Yahweh, created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb . . . they were fashioned day by day when as yet there were none of them) because we understand it is not "the Word of God," but a strophe from the pen of a B.C.E. poet who was not commenting on obstetrics and gynecology.


· They would also know that the kind of inquiry I and others pursue and then share the results of with our congregations constitute a rare combination in the experience of contemporary American religion.


Dawkins' and Harris' points, therefore, are well taken. So much religious sentiment is based on delusion. It is not comforting to know that almost 50% of Americans polled say they believe Earth was purposefully created over seven days by the biblical god who was wont to converse with walking snakes. Nearly as many believe that Jesus will come again to end earthly life. (I wonder if some of these people are among those who believe Saddam Hussein had the atomic bomb and lockers full of WMDs?)



My colleague, Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, the founder of secular humanist Judaism, was once chided by his late mother who may have understood marketing better than her son.


"Shoywin," she said, "If you only believed in God, think how much bigger your shul would be." Of course, it would be nice if Shoywin's and my shuls were larger, but at least we haven't operated on delusion and wouldn't, even for the sake of numbers.


© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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