| | Let me tell you why I asked the following question in comment #58: "If what has been said and implied in this thread by some is true -- i.e., that faith and religion are necessarily destructive in all cases -- is anyone asserting this prepared to conclude the following: that throughout the entire history of mankind, no practitioner of any religion, and no person who has accepted anything on faith, could possibly have led a happy, fulfilled life?"
I asked this because unqualified words from several posters maintained precisely that faith and religious ideas necessarily and always had dire, utterly destructive effects on the individual. That being so, the clear conclusion for any reader to draw was that, according to Objectivism, no such practitioner could possibly have a happy, fulfilled life.
Was I misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the posters? In the following, please note especially the unqualified language in boldface.
Here is Dennis, comment #14:
Of course, as Edwin Locke explains, if you do not take religion seriously, you can sustain the non-integration by using defense mechanisms—compartmentalization, as Robert acknowledged (daily life vs church on Sunday), evasion, rationalization, projection (“It’s God’s will”). But any therapist will tell you that, ultimately, defense mechanisms don’t work, and inevitably your mind becomes crippled, corrupted by faith, with the eventual suspension of your will to understand the world around you.
And then there are the other psychological consequences: Chronic guilt about being unable to practice religious virtues. Repression—introspection and self-awareness are a threat because they will likely reveal values and desires—the evil demons represented by all those things you want but know you should not want. The resultant fear of the self eventually and inevitably translates to hatred of the self because of all the values you have forsaken.
And here is Dennis, post #26:
But, Robert, the wholesale arbitrariness of religion is the whole point. That’s the key that makes it all so utterly destructive. I never said that the religious ideas I mentioned are “inherent” to any given believer’s worldview—just adopting a few of them is enough to wreck anyone’s rational epistemological functioning.
But after I asked my question, there appears to be some backpedaling. Here is Dennis, comment #61:
According to the Objectivist view of human nature and cognition, disintegration (or misintegration, per Peikoff’s DIM hypothesis) should be a killer. And it often is. One day the science of psychology will have advanced to the stage where such differences between people can be explained. The major theme of this thread, however, is the pernicious impact of religious ideas on the future of America. On the micro level, certain individuals clearly have the capacity to insulate themselves from the damaging consequences of their basic premises.
But why does the actual reality of human psychology that we witness in real people and experience in ourselves, introspectively, part company from what Dennis calls "the Objectivist view of human nature and cognition"? Is a revision of the view in order?
Similarly, here's Jon, comment #54:
It's inconsistent to say that faith outside of the public realm is fine because it's inspirational and then to say that faith is inimical to the mind on the other. The fact that faith can inspire people to do good things doesn't mean much if it comes at the price of their rational functioning, does it?
That seems pretty dire and awful. But then, after my question, here's Jon, comment #63:
I'd say that to whatever extent that a person diverges from the principles of Objectivism, that person isn't going to have a happy life.... A person who pays lip service to Catholicism or Judaism or Islam, but who holds rational contradictory beliefs that guide his actions, can have a happy life. That's only because such a person doesn't really take their own faith seriously; it's just a label. A person who truly accepts the Torah or Bible or Koran as the literal word of god and consistently follows it won't be "happy" in the Objectivist sense. At best, such a person will feel a strong relief from his own irrational guilt and fear. Of course, most religious people will fall somewhere in between.
Here, the loss of "rational functioning" is cast as a less draconian impairment.
Like others here, I believe Rick Pasotto, post #69, has it right:
"Destructive" does not necessarily mean "makes impossible". If you take it to mean simply "detrimental to" then I think the contention most certainly is true. Something can be destructive of one's maximum possible happiness and well-being without making happiness and well-being totally impossible.
That's right. "Detrimental." In some cases, acceptance of religious ideas can lead to total psychological self-destruction, or fanatical jihads against non-believers. But in the vast majority of cases, it means only such things as intellectual fuzziness, occasional vulnerability to harmful ideas, and less-than-ideal cognitive and moral functioning.
Which brings me to what prompted my posts here in the first place.
When I made my initial objections to the claims being made on this thread, several posters assured me that they were not be made against "religious people," but only against "religion as such." But observe that what was being said about "religion as such" were claims that it was having "inevitably" destructive consequences to the cognition, self-esteem, even personal identities of religious adherents. Religion and faith were not dismissed for merely being arbitrary, cognitively invalid, and opening the door to possibly harmful beliefs; they were cast as toxins so deadly that the tiniest drop would "inevitably" poison the thinking abilities and completely destroy the moral characters of practitioners.
It is a credit to those making such claims that when challenged, they have backed off from them, and taken much more reasonable and defensible positions. What bothers me is why the unreasonable, indefensible claims were made in the first place -- and why so many Objectivists reflexively share them and tend to voice them...unless challenged.
I am weary of sweeping, transparently false generalizations made in the name of Objectivism. Unqualified and hysterical claims, laughable on their face, discredit the philosophy in the eyes of millions of people who might otherwise find Objectivism's most profound insights compelling.
When, for example, the daily experiences -- social and introspective -- of millions of religious people clash with brash claims by Objectivists as to religion's "inevitable" personal, psychological, and social destructiveness, then our philosophy becomes a public laughing stock. When believers go to church and see around them a multitude of happy, smiling, singing people who are finding inspiration and hope to face the challenges in their lives, how are they to take seriously claims that faith or religious ideas will necessarily "wreck their psycho-epistemological functioning" -- that because of them, "inevitably your mind becomes crippled, corrupted by faith, with the eventual suspension of your will to understand the world around you"?
Part of the problem with typical Objectivist cultural (and personal) analyses of this sort is that they are rationalistic and purely deductive. Because we are so adept at tracing the logical implications of premises deductively to their conclusions, we assume that everyone else does that, too.
But few do.
It is one thing to say, "If you practice faith, altruism, and certain religious ideas consistently, then they will lead to horrible, destructive consequences." But, in fact, most people are not logically consistent, and do NOT take such ideas to their logical conclusions. Far more frequently, they often take these ideas only up to the point of their first collision with practical reality or personal happiness -- and then they change course, dropping those ideas like hot potatoes.
Why? Precisely because their more basic and fundamental premises are not irrational.
There are two ways to look at their inconsistency. One way is to damn the inconsistent for a lack of integrity, and for not taking their ideas seriously. And that is true in some cases.
But another way to look at it is that many people hold, both implicitly and explicitly, a mixture of clashing good and bad ideas. And when bad, explicit ideas aren't working to further their lives and happiness, most Americans -- implicitly committed to their own lives, well-being, and happiness -- will abandon their bad, explicit ideas for their good, implicit premises.
Here, I must disagree with Joe's point (comment #13): "2a.) In times of crisis or tough decisions, your explicit morality will become more dominant than your implicit morality. You'll use it when it hurts the most."
Not necessarily. In fact, for many people, not even usually.
Most people's (especially most Americans') implicit premises are rooted in core personal values, while their explicit ideas are often simply notions and preachings they've picked up by cultural osmosis, and to which they have no personal emotional commitment. Their implicit, personal, value-driven premises are usually far more compelling and motivating than the stale abstract slogans they've been taught to accept.
That's why most Americans' positive sense of life -- based on the idea that it's good to seek individual success, achievement, and happiness -- consistently trumps Kantian teachings about duty and self-sacrifice. That same sense of life is what causes them to "cherry pick" from among religions -- and within a given religion, from among its various doctrines -- to cobble together a personal collection of views generally compatible with life, well-being, and happiness on earth. They pick from among religions because they have never been taught any alternatives.
So, what are they to think when shown an alternative that claims to be "rational," but which makes claims that contradict their own direct personal knowledge and experience? Are they "irrational" for rejecting an Objectivism which characterizes their religious beliefs in ways that completely misrepresent what they have experienced or understood? Or which claim that they are in the process of psychological and moral self-destruction merely for going to church?
The moral of all this is:
Beware hasty generalizations, especially moral and psychological generalizations. Unqualified generalizations about classes of people, or about their psychologies or moral characters, are certain to be wrong -- and certain to discredit Objectivism, when they are made in the name of the philosophy.
Let us, by all means, criticize religion and faith as such, as well as the specific content of various religions and faiths. But let's not expand those criticisms to make spectacularly stupid generalizations beyond what is factually demonstrable.
|
|
