“So-and-so is just like a religion. It inspires the same sort of blind trust. It encourages tribal loyalty and ‘us against them’ thinking. It places some individuals above others, in a position where their goodness and worth can’t be questioned. It asks people to hang on to ideas and beliefs that are flatly untrue. It’s a hierarchical system of authority and obedience. It’s just like a religion. Heck — it is a religion.”
I think it’s a bad argument. And I’d like to persuade atheists to stop using it. Here’s why.
Either religion is fundamentally different in some way(s) from other human activities/ institutions/ ideas, or it’s not.
If religion isn’t different — then the things that are bad about it aren’t special or unique. And it’s not accurate or fair to claim that any particular bad thing that anybody does is “just like religion.” You might as well say that any particular bad thing that anybody does is “just like business,” or “just like non-profit political organizing,” or “just like sports.” There’s no reason to single religion out.
And if religion is different — then we need to be very careful, and very rigorous, about what that difference is.
I, for one, do think that religion is different. I even argue that what makes religion unique is exactly what makes it dangerous.
But the thing that makes religion different from other human activities/ institutions/ ideas is not a tendency to blindly follow authority, or a tendency to be loyal to an in-group to the point of stupidity, or a tendency to be unquestioningly devoted to leaders, or a tendency to hold onto beliefs and ideas we’re attached to long after they’ve been shown to make no sense. Those are common human tendencies. Atheists engage in them; agnostics engage in them; lukewarm “spiritual but not religious” believers engage in them; fervent believers engage in them. These are not religious behaviors. These are human behaviors. We all do them, and we do them in just about every conceivable context.
So it doesn’t make any sense to say that a secular institution — such as Penn State, or the Tea Party, or Stalinist Russia — is “just like a religion,” or is a “pseudo-religion.” As much as you may dislike Penn State or the Libertarian Party or Stalinist Russia, they did not and do not promote belief in the supernatural. (Or if they do, they do so only as an ancillary activity: it’s not their mission statement.) They may promote authoritarianism, tribalism, stubborn attachment to irrational ideas, blind loyalty, unquestioning devotion to leaders, and/or any combination of one or all of the above. But they do not promote belief in the supernatural.
And that means that they’re not a religion. It means that they’re not like a religion — except insofar as many human activities/ institutions/ ideas, including religion, have some or all of these dangerous tendencies in common.
Now. I do think that religion, and the stuff about religion that’s unique, has a strong tendency to amplify these dangerous tendencies and make them worse. As I’ve written before: Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality. So I do think that, in religion, the tendencies towards authoritarianism, tribalism, stubborn attachment to irrational ideas, blind loyalty, unquestioning devotion to leaders, etc. are far more likely to be cranked up to an alarmingly high degree. The lack of a reality check dials this bad shit up to eleven.
But that doesn’t make these tendencies unique to religion. And it doesn’t turn an activity/ institution/ idea into a religion, just because it shares these tendencies.
We don’t get to have it both ways. We don’t get to say that religion is unique — and uniquely harmful, and uniquely deserving of our efforts to persuade people out of it — and then, whenever anyone does anything stupid or harmful for any secular reason, turn around and say, “It’s just like religion!” It’s not. If it’s not a belief in supernatural entities or forces with an effect on the natural world, then it’s not religion. Let’s please stop saying that it is.
I think there’s some merit to this, but it’s certainly fair to point out that Stalinism, etc. are much more like dogmatic religions than they are like freethought/humanism.
Well, it is an easy shorthand and gets the point across effectively. How rigorous do we need to be in our language, and in what contexts? That’s a tough question, and I don’t think a simple declaration of “don’t do X” answers it well enough.
Improbable Joe @ #2: What point?
My argument is that this language doesn’t get across any accurate point effectively. What point do you think is conveyed by using this language?
My proposal: If you want to say that a secular activity/ institution/ idea is being authoritarian, say they’re authoritarian. If you want to say they’re encouraging blind loyalty, say they’re encouraging blind loyalty. If you want to say they’re promoting irrational attachment to false ideas, say they’re promoting irrational attachment to false ideas. Etc.
Why would religion be any different from other human activities?
Hate to be the one to invoke Godwin’s Law, but:
I think, at least to some of its followers, Naziism was ‘just like a religion’.
The SS was based on the Jesuits.
The “Blood Flag”: the flag bloodied during the Munic putsch was used to ‘consecrate’ other flags, usually with Adolf holding the flag and passing its power to other flags by his magic touch.
The apotheosis of martyrs, like Horst Wessel and the ‘fallen heroes’ of Munich.
The whole Hitler-as-savior-of-the-people thing.
The imposition of new holidays, myths, vows, symbols and rituals to replace existing ones.
Wewelsburg, the fantasy castle Himmler built to celebrate the SS and its relationship to the Teutonic mythos.
For some people, to some extent, Naziism was a religion. That was part of its reason for success.
My experience with “real-existing socialism” i.e. Marxism à la GDR says that it gets too close to supernaturalism to bother about a distinction. In name, all is based on presumed laws of history. In fact, it’s bovine excrement.
While the existence of anything supernatural is vehemently denied, “historical necesseties” are invoked to justify the thought system a) without ever bothering to flesh out a foundation, and b) extrapolating wildly beyond even the factual basis CLAIMED.
Supernatural by any other name.
I agree. Another example is the cult of worship surrounding Kim Jong Il and the other S. Korean leaders. Like the Nazi examples above, it is very intentionally a religion, and it demonstrates who unscrupulous leaders manipulate the elements of religion to maintain power.
[…] December 14, 2011By T.X. WatsonIn Greta Christina’s recent article, “(X) Is Just Like A Religion” — No, It’s Not, she argues against one of my favorite hobbies — conflating certain kinds of fandom, and […]
I don’t buy the argument that what makes religion district is the presence of the supernatural. For one, I rarely encounter people who hold beliefs in undetectable things. Yahweh is understood by most pious Christians as quite real, with attributes that may encompass notions like infinite power but which don’t essentially differ from any other force, except when presented as the source of reality as we experience it.
Conversely, social scientists studying religion are more likely to look to the way religious beliefs derive from textual sources of authority as their defining characteristic, and philosophers at the metaphysical components of dogma – not what form of entity is thought to exist but how that entity is connected to the structure of reality.
It’s a valid point that religion’s supernatural elements set it apart from all secular beliefs. I’m just not convinced that this makes much of a difference to the dogmatic way some people follow their ideologies.
They may not have a “God works in mysterious ways” response to fall back on when things don’t work out, but people still find plenty of other ways to deny reality. Blaming any failures on “enemies”, real or imaginary, has worked very well for a lot of people.
Any “reality check” effect doesn’t seem to prevent people from completely ignoring extremely strong evidence that challenges their views, or stop them from presenting long refuted claims as absolute truth. The kind of evasion tactics and fallacious arguments you see in some political discussions will give anyone who’s debated Creationists a sense of deja vu.
For the most part I’d agree that “X is just like a religion” isn’t helpful, but when you get into personality cults and extremist politics “pseudo-religion” seems like a pretty reasonable description to me. If people are believing something on faith because the word of the “Dear Leader” is treated as infallible, it may as well be words in a holy book. I think the 20th century provides plenty of evidence that that kind of supernatural-free faith can dial bad shit up just as high as any religion.
The problem with belief in the supernatural is that it’s a faith based belief that short-circuits reasoning and denies the importance of empirical reality. Beliefs can have those flaws even without being classically supernatural.
Sports fandom is, in most cases, just a readily-acknowledged-as-subjective entertainment preference, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is entirely mystical and dismissive of empirical reality in its claims about how markets function with and without government intervention. Libertarianism is a religion.
People often go overboard in calling things that aren’t generally considered to be religion “religious,” but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole lot of beliefs that aren’t classically deemed religious or supernatural that share the exact same flaws and dangers as claims universally deemed religious.
This post was, for me, thought provoking in the same way that analogies are often thought provoking.
I think it’s often useful to say X is like Y in some significant way. It encourages people to think about or discuss the nature of X and Y. And sometimes, such as with your post, it encourages them to discuss the significant differences between X and Y.
Of course saying X is Y is going too far, but that’s a fairly common error with analogies in general.
The concept of the “invisible hand” guiding free markets always sounded like a religious belief to me. It’s a belief that somehow the mob or more likely a handful of executives will always be right requires a great deal of faith.
We4ll, if something contains all the elements that we associate with religion except the supernatural beliefs, which it replaces with equally irrational beliefs, why isn’t it accurate to describe it as pseudo-religious, cult-like, or like a religion?
Or maybe it is just that religion isn’t actually that much of a special interaction on a social level? Maybe not so different after all?
Wouldn’t that make Buddhism “not a religion”?
Maybe it’s more useful to parse the meme of “religion” and look at the ways various entities intentionally or unintentionally co-opt various elements of the meme. Not every religion necessarily all of these elements; and not everything that incorporates religious elements would be recognized as a strictly-defined “religion”.
Off the top of my head, I would say the elements of a religious meme would include (+)supernatural being(s), (+)absolute authority, (+)ritual acts, (+)devotion to idealized persons or entities, (+)membership in a community of the faithful; and (-)independent inquiry, (-)skepticism, (-)dissent and (-)acceptance of “outsiders” or apostates.
Again, not every religion would include all of these elements, at least not to the same degree, and many social and political phenomena, from authoritarian regimes to sports fans, incorporate many of these elements to expand and consolidate their influence, without necessarily being classified as “religions”.
If you were an alien, observing life on Earth for the first time, ask yourself which of the following things you would characterize as examples of “religious” behavior:
-A rally for the Great Leader in South Korea
-A Presbyterian Pancake breakfast
-Footage of the Beatles’ first concerts in America, Circa 1964
-A funeral at Arlington National Cemetery
-Pittsburgh Steelers Fans at a home game
-Catholic Mass on Christmas Eve
-Footage from “A Triumph of the Will”
What is “the supernatural”, other than a rejection of objective reality? Stalinism certainly rejected objective reality, even if it made no claims to a clearly supernatural agent.
[…] 15th, 2011.A friend directed me to a freethoughtblogs.com blog post by Greta Christina entitled (X) is Just Like A Religion… No It’s Not. It’s a sensible post written from an atheist point of view that seeks to shape the […]
If belief in the supernatural defines it as religion, then sports is most definitely a religion. Have you ever heard of “lucky underwear”?
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/phys-ed-does-lucky-underwear-improve-athletic-performance/
I’m one of those who think that religion is not fundamentally different (in my opinion it is all rather about differences in degree).
I can’t see a problem. Indeed, various things can be singled out. And in practice various things are singled out. These are just analogies, after all! How do we single out something for an analogy? We do it contextually. The similarities employed in an analogy don’t have to be “metaphysically deep” or “fundamental”; the analogy just has to be useful in a given context. Are you a Marxist hating private initiative? The analogy “just like business” might be effective against you. Are you mad at the football fans? Then “just like sports” could be useful. Take your audience into consideration and pick your choice – that’s what we do in practice. What’s the problem with that?
Greta, doesn’t it amount to accepting the doctrine of non-overlapping magisteria? A quote from your older piece
Have you changed your mind since then? (Nothing wrong in changing one’s mind, of course, I’m just being curious.) Anyway, it seems to me that you can’t have it both ways.
@Comment #15
Buddhism would still be a religion because a) as far as I know, most forms of Buddhism accept reincarnation, which is a supernatural phenomenon and b) many forms of Buddhism incorporate various beliefs in the supernatural (for example, many Buddhists pray to Guanyin because they believe that she can help them with her supernatural powers). Now, I would not be surprised to learn that there is a form of Buddhism which has no belief in the supernatural (including reincarnation) whatsoever, but most Buddhists do not practice that kind of Buddhism.
Furthermore, the cult of personality around Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il should definitely count as a religion, since WPK (Workers’ Party of Korea) propaganda attributes supernatural powers to both of them.
Sara:
-Isn’t karma at the heart of most forms of Buddhism? If so, the idea of karma is most definitely a supernatural one.
Tony
There may be nothing supernatural in, for example, communism, but there is no reality check either. In the end that’s the most important difference, and the reason that ideology is just as dangerous as religion. Heck, religion is ideology!
I just finished reading “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer and I’m about halfway through “Why We Believe in Gods” by J. Anderson Thomson, and I’d like to recommend them to everyone interested in understanding religion. These books do a good job of describing what is unique about religion, what makes religions successful, and why human minds are susceptible to religious thinking.
“If you want to say that a secular activity/ institution/ idea is being authoritarian, say they’re authoritarian.”
I think ‘cult’ is also a useful word, here. There are personality cults and groups that encourage isolation from family, weird diets, wealth extraction, sexual abuse, sacrifice, submission and so on that aren’t religions.
What unique effect ‘religion’ has is something I’m really thinking about at the moment. Is there anyone, anywhere who genuinely ‘doesn’t murder’ because of God? That seems like the ultimate straw man to me, the image of a Christian who would love to kill, but God said ‘no’. So … turn it around. Are religious people who kill murdering ‘because of God’? The obvious example would be a suicide bomber … but even there, aren’t there entirely secular reasons why you would be driven to do that? And the most prolific and earliest suicide bombers were Tamil atheists.
Is there a class of behavior that only the religious engage in? Is there a combination of behaviors that only the religious engage in that somehow adds up to a ‘perfect storm’ that allows extreme behavior (good or bad)?
I think my provisional answer is that religion is license, it’s social compliance, it’s validation. It’s an excuse, basically. It allows and justifies behavior that wouldn’t be ‘normal’ otherwise. Again, good and bad.
But … where’s God in that? Where’s the supernatural component, or whatever?
@Fryonic #12 Yes! I think that “x is like y” is useful rhetorically speaking. But x does not equal y. In what way is Penn State like the catholic church? In what way are they different? I think both of these questions is relevant. The similarities are not necessarily more important than the differences.
The root problem, in religion, politics, or anything else is absolutist dogmatism. It’s the antithesis of reason and pragmatism.
Once dogmatism floods a person’s mind, all reason goes out the window. Grover Norquist’s bullying politicians into signing his no tax raising pledge is a great example of the destructiveness of such an approach.
There seems to be a lot of “but certain creeds, like libertarian ideology, ARE denying empirical reality in favor of an effectively faith-based dogma!”
I think Greta’s point is pretty simple. I don’t hear this from libertarians (or from other creeds that get the pseudo-religion label) at all. Where do libertarians insist that free-market capitalism is mystical and spiritual in origin? Since when do libertarians bristle at the suggestion that faith is miserably insufficient for their ideology? Who is the messiah of libertarian dogma who cannot be questioned? (okay, okay, Ayn Rand pretty much answers that one; that was a bad example, but the other examples stand, you see where I’m going with this …).
Libertarians do NOT claim to have any supernatural aspects to their ideology. They do not claim to have a literal dogma. They do not claim to actually worship Ayn Rand or the founding fathers any other libertarian messiah.
Honestly? Insisting that Ayn Rand and her objectivist capitalism is literally a religious dogma seems to be as meaningful as religious folks insisting that Darwin and evolution theory is literally a religious dogma to us unbelievers. Yes, Darwin was right, whereas Ayn Rand is not, but that’s the difference in the theories. Evolution has good evidence and experiment backing it up, and libertarian ideology does not. The difference is NOT that evolution is naturalistic, and libertarian ideology is supernatural.
Greta,
I agree that belief in supernatural and therefore externally unverifiable phenomena is what makes religion different from other critically flawed systems of human thought and organization. But I don’t think that means that we can’t *compare* religion and other things. When you survey anti-atheist bigotry in this country at the hands of religious hegemony, you’re not criticizing religion’s unique immunity from criticism, you’re criticizing another salient aspect of its expression. You could quite rightly compare it with other cases of political repression, even though no analogy would be perfect. Conversely, if I say someone is “as blind as a bat”, I’m not basing my comparison on bats’ single most distinctive characteristic, which is being the only mammals that can truly fly and not just glide; I’m basing it on the fact of their poor eyesight, which is hardly unique. Yet the comparison is perfectly serviceable.
I have actually had a christian tell me they didn’t believe in the supernatural. Apparently, to their mind, god was real and OTHER supernatural entities were un-real. That’s the problem. They can’t accept the idea that god even may not be real. When I explained that god didn’t exist in the real world and why (I was christian at the time) they gave me a worried look and kinda zoned out, like either they must ignore what I said or I was committing blasphemy or something like that.
The difference of religion is that they think it is real and it cannot be, but they refuse to entertain even the possibility it is false.
I agree with Greta.
The thing with religion’s lack of a reality check is that it can therefore justify anything. Sports players may wear lucky underwear out of casual superstition, but they’ll stop at little, trivial things like underwear being lucky, unless they also happen to be religious. If the coach says “If you kill this goat, you will be empowered with a magical ability to win the next game”, without religion of any sort being involved, the players are just going to decide he is nuts. The supernatural aspect of religion in particular is a very important part of what makes it so much more insidious than ordinary groups of followers and a leader; while some things may be similar, comparing them is misleading and diminishes the real power of religion to make people crazy.
Really I think that saying things like “Socialism/Environmentalism/Capitalism/whatever is a religion” is just laziness. Why don’t you just admit that you know next to nothing about this set of ideas, except that you mostly disagree with or feel threatened by what they’re saying? Yeah but then you’d have to learn something about the group of people who disagree with YOUR position, and you might even have to change your views.
I’m coming at this from several years of reading about climate change in various forums, where this kind of statement is made by people on both sides, with embarassing regularity. Mostly by THEM!
—
BTW, you don’t have to look far to find Buddhists who aren’t interested in talking about karma or reincarnation.
This idea that Reincarnation in particular is a central feature of Buddhism is more just a part of our Christian, Western worldview. This allows both Christians and Atheists to think, “Buddhism is based on a supernatural explanation, same as Christianity, therefore I know where they’re coming from.” Again, I think this is taking the easy way out.
Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs is a good introduction to this view of Buddhism.
[…] – like button',unescape(String(response).replace(/+/g, " "))]); }); Greta Christina has written a post that admonishes us to stop equating non-theistic institutions with religious ones. Her assertion is […]
Dang, I wrote something like this before. Regarding Stalinism and Naziism et. al., I make the point that there are two orthogonal mistakes at issue.
Most people here would understand why supernatural ‘explanations’ are a mistake. But there’s also the issue of dogmatism. Refusing to test one’s ideas, refusing to admit of any possibility of revision, is just as dangerous.
So I try to be a “flexible non-supernaturalist”. But it’s possible to be a ‘dogmatic non-supernaturalist” or even a “flexible supernaturalist”. (Though accepting ‘unknowable untestable things’ is a risk factor for dogmatism.)
And I try really hard not to have anything in common with “dogmatic supernaturalists”…