In Defense of DeoLogic

Clay Farris Naff

Dec. 20, 2001 (rev. 1/6/02)

Foreword

This essay, presented in two parts, comes in response to a public presentation I recently gave in Omaha. It seeks not only to clarify but to fortify the central arguments of DeoLogic. I invite readers to be as skeptical as they wish. Anticipating that they won’t hesitate to be so, I offer two guiding questions:

Is DeoLogic necessary? Is it sufficient?

The Argument, Part I

> Is DeoLogic Necessary?

1. What is the aim of the DeoLogic project?

The aim is to nurture a rational, purposeful, and hopeful alternative to supernatural beliefs. To be more particular, I envision a movement to persuade people that there's a better way to believe in God, a natural way that holds faith in a future God, arising from our deliberate efforts now and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. The hoped-for results of this movement are:

a) the substitution of natural faith for supernatural beliefs,
b) the uniting of humanity in a common, rational purpose, and
c) the creation of a global civilization focused on continual survival and progress.

2. Is this necessary? Why should we even spend time thinking about this, when we have secular humanism to fill the bill?

Secular humanism has failed, and will continue to fail, to attract more than an elite corps of highly educated, self-sufficient followers. You might respond, so what? Chacon a son gout! You might say, let those who want to waste their lives and fortunes believing their reward awaits in heaven do so, while the rest of us get on with real life.

But I retort that you cannot, if you care about the survival of civilization, and quite possibly the survival of humanity, ignore the resurgence of fundamentalist religions. They threaten to bring us to Armageddon. Specifically, we face a quite palpable, imminent danger that global religious war will erupt from "the war on terrorism" beyond all ability to control it. As Karen Armstrong writes in The Battle for God, "Fundamentalists feel they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values."

It's not just about war. It's about the values that guide our collective journey into the future. Supernatural beliefs have many self-serving and malignant effects on our chances of successful navigation through the rapids of history. One consequence: no policy of zero population growth stands a chance while supernatural religion holds sway. You might object that religions don’t necessarily oppose birth control, but an insidious evolutionary logic dictates that religions that promote the idea of many children grow faster than religions that hold an opposite view. Hence, after one generation, there is bound to be a greater increase of Catholics than Unitarians.

But an even more threatening worldview arising from religion is the widespread belief that God wants followers of the One True Faith (whatever that may be) to subdue, convert or destroy everyone else, so that God’s Plan may be fulfilled. This kind of thinking, by the same evolutionary logic, predominates among the most aggressive, expansive religions. There are, perforce, lots more Christians than Jews, even though things started the other way around.

 

3. Why pick on religion? There are other kinds of dangerous belief-systems around. What about Nazis and fascists and so on?

At a terrible price, the world wars of the 20^th century did, bring about an uneasy consensus on the preferable form of government (representative democracy) and economy (relatively free markets). There is even something of a global, egalitarian, consumerist culture emerging. I'm not claiming that racism, nationalism, or other ideologies are no threat at all -- I'm saying they are reduced, largely contained threats.

Religion stands in stark contrast. In much of the world, notably America, the malign influence of fundamentalism is growing. But even nonfundamentalist, mainstream religions make faith claims that are not merely incompatible but are mutually hostile. However much ecumenical progress may be made, the Catholic Church continues to maintain that it is God's chosen instrument of salvation, while various Protestant sects denounce "the whore of Rome"; many Muslims seethe at the failure of their countries and the rest of the world to submit to the will of Allah, and the Jewish rabinnate continues to view itself as the guides of God's Chosen People. These are irreconcilable views. Does this matter?

It is popularly believed at the moment that fanaticism is the province of Islam. Leaving aside the recent allegation that the Jewish Defense League in Los Angeles was caught planning a series of terrorist bombings, let me offer you a few quotations that give a sense of how things stand with Christianity in our own nation:

"I believe that America is locked in a life or death struggle that is a battle of allegiances. It's a covenantal battle. On one hand you have those who self-consciously adhere to the Law of God and believe that's the foundation of civilization. And on the other hand you have those who don't."

--Randall Terry, Founder, Operation Rescue

"[O]nly one group can occupy a prominent place in the public square. It's either going to be God's people out there enjoying the neighborhoods, breathing the air or it's going to be God's enemies owning the public square and polluting it. It's not ever both. "The righteous hate the wicked" and "the wicked hate the righteous" it says in the Proverbs. That is simply a truism. So which would we rather have governing the public square, righteousness or wickedness? I know when I look now I see wickedness."

--Steve Schlissel, pastor of Messiah's Congregation, Brooklyn

"The world and men must be brought into captivity to Christ, under the dominion of the Kingdom of God and the law of that kingdom. [T]his requires that, like Paul, we court-martial or ‘administer justice upon all disobedience’ in every area of life where we encounter it. To deny the … mandate is to deny Christ and to surrender the world to the devil."

--R.J. Rushdoony, Founder, Christian Reconstruction Movement

 

With the possible exception of the last, I suggest to you that the views embodied here are not fringe but mainstream in America today. They are consistent with the popular views expressed daily on hugely popular Christian radio and television broadcasts. What's more, since 9/11, polls suggest that a large majority of Americans subscribe to the following views: that ours is a Christian nation, that separation of church and state is wrong, that attempts to maintain a 'wall of separation' have led the nation into moral decline, and that the answer to our troubles is more faith in God.

Should the religious right succeed, through its friends in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, in demolishing the church-state wall, sectarian conflicts would immediately arise.

The first difficulty is, of course, that no one agrees on what Christianity should be. Anyone who doubts that a "Christian" America would immediately descend into sectarian strife should take a look at the recent spat over the appointment of a congressional chaplain – the one public office where qualifications are truly beyond hope of rational agreement.

The second and more profound difficulty is that there are other religions whose followers are equally convinced that God wants them to prevail over the "wicked." The challenge of peaceful pluralism cannot be met in an officially 'Christian' America. Diana Eck of Harvard makes this abundantly clear in recent book A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Most notable in America's growing diversity is the world’s No. 2 faith, Islam.

For a powerful argument about the hostile intentions of radical Islam (if any is needed!), see Bernard Lewis’s article, "The Revolt of Islam" in The New Yorker of Nov. 19. And, of course, you don’t need to go back any further than 1995 to see that Buddhism, too, is capable of spinning off an apocalyptic revolt against modernism. Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult, you’ll recall, poisoned more than 5,000 people in the Tokyo subway with Sarin gas, killing about a dozen and sickening the rest.

All of this amounts to what I call "The Ideology Bomb." The explosive device is simply a belief that God wants his true followers to subdue or destroy all the worshipers of false idols. These idols include all the "wrong" varieties of one's own religion, all the other religions, and of course, atheism.

Secular humanism, far from defusing the Ideology Bomb, helps to drive people deeper into religiosity by serving as a whipping boy for propagandists ranging from Pat Robertson to Philip Johnson. Clearly some sort of alternative is needed to disarm the Ideology Bomb before it goes off. The fuse has already been lit.

Let me close this section by letting others make the argument of necessity for me. I’ll start with the Bard of Science himself, Carl Sagan:

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

Evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigluicci is among the emerging leaders of the rational humanist movement, and in quoting him I don’t mean to imply that he has endorsed (or even considered) DeoLogic. Nevertheless, consider the implications of his closing words:

"Now, if the need for religion is not a need for irrationalism and transcendence, but rather a basic need for a model of the world that makes sense, what is the alternative to widespread religion as an engine of social betterment? We need both science (to provide the real answers to questions concerning the world and its meaning), and a positive humanist movement." (Massimo Pigliucci, Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science. [Smyrna, Ga.: Freethought Press, 2000], 111.)

And last, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, who looks at religion and remarks, "The question naturally arises whether there is any way to capture the splendid consequences of mythical beliefs without the associated self-delusion and without the intolerance that often accompanies it." (Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex [New York: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1994], 279.)

To conclude this section, it is apparent not only to me but to these disparate secular thinkers that humanity at large needs something more than ‘mere’ secular humanism. It is unlikely in the extreme that religion will disappear in the next century. Yet, if we are to survive it must move away from the supernatural beliefs that make it so dangerous. To do so, it will need a sturdy guide to some
rational yet inspiring alternative. That is what DeoLogic aspires to be.