Who Cares What You (or I) Believe?

Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote in the section on religion of his Notes on the State of Virginia, “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  He wrote this in the midst of a discussion on religious freedom, wherein Jefferson argued that opinions could not rightly be subjected to coercion, writing just prior that “[t]he legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” in limiting rights to expression.  At its core, though, it is a call to live and let live, so long as what my neighbor does is not injurious.  My neighbor's religious opinions are harmless to me, so long as he does not seek to impose them on me.

However, there are people for whom the formulation that an opinion is harmless so long as it picks no pockets nor breaks any legs is anathema.  Indeed, they see the opinions of their neighbors in some cases as declarations of war on fundamental beliefs.  There are, of course, the usual suspects—those conservative Christians, especially evangelical Protestant Christians, who seek by various means to maintain the ascendancy of their symbols in the public square; Catholics and evangelicals who oppose abortion, and in some cases contraception, and seek to write their beliefs into law; opponents of the teaching of Darwinian evolution, or who seek to “balance” it with the canard known as Intelligent Design.  In other countries, we see this or that religious sect trying to enforce its own particular brand of a given religion on the populace, to the (occasionally violent) exclusion of others.  Less formally, there are those whose mission is to convert everyone to their belief, whether they are willing to use the power of the state or not, and whether their targets find what they had heretofore held lacking.

But another group that seems to find this notion problematic is a vocal minority the growing non-theist segment of society.  This is the segment that finds religious belief (by which they never mean their own belief, only those traditionally perceived as religious) so odious that it must be purged not only from the public square but from the minds of men.  As the gospel of Matthew says of false prophets, “By their fruit you will recognize them,” and these evangelical atheists are easy to pick out.  They inveigh—on Twitter, on various Internet forums, on television, in bestsellers, and wherever their voices might be heard—against the irrationality of religious belief, and seek confrontation to bring believers face-to-face with this irrationality, an approach that I have argued elsewhere seldom brings about the desired result.

These non-believers seem to believe that, once we as a species are shorn of our religious beliefs, which is to say once they have successfully evangelized people of faith to faithlessness, an age of enlightenment will follow.  An age of peace, too, since it seems that only religious beliefs lead to war and privation and other forms of strife.  It is akin to the sort of re-ordering of the world that Christians believe will occur after the arrival of the messiah; it is millenarian thinking at its core.  It is also a pipe dream; history shows us that people will always find things to fight over, and that most of these battles seem to stem from a perception of who is “in the tribe” and who is not.  Religion is certainly a part of the process of determining who is us and who is them, perhaps the most visible in certain areas today, but it is not the only one.

They also seem to think this is achievable.  But religion is going nowhere.  It is part of our cultural equipment, itself at least partially the result of natural selection. That it endures means it must have had some utility in ensuring the differential reproductive success of religious people when measured against the non-religious.  It serves as one of the binding forces in societies, encouraging altruism towards in-group members and cohesion against outsiders.  Religion continues because it provides a source of meaning for its adherents and does not, apparently, negatively affect the ability of those adherents to pass their genes to the next generation, despite what we might perceive as a lack of truth value.

In attempting to eradicate religion in order to bring about a better world, in attempting to make non-believers out of believers, non-theists make a serious mistake and, ironically, it is similar to the one religious fundamentalists make.  They reduce believers to a caricature, indeed, they have reduced believers to their belief, an essentialism that denies the reality that we all travel in multiple cultural contexts.  It's the same sort of thing that fundamentalist Christians do when they decry atheists as ipso facto immoral, a position that I, as an atheist, certainly reject.

Though beliefs certainly inform the way people act, people are not their beliefs.  And, often in the case of religious belief, people find themselves driven to act in ways that are socially useful to all, involved in ways that, as pope Francis recently put it, serve "to defend human dignity, in building a peaceful co-existence between peoples, and in carefully protecting creation."  As I have argued elsewhere, atheists and those among the "nones" should take up this offer.  When Christians, for instance, take the opportunity to follow Jesus’ radical message of love for all their fellow humans,  atheists should meet them with open arms and work with them, not try to change their beliefs.  This non-evangelization pact should go both ways.

This, then, is the main point that I wish to finish on and that brings us back to Jefferson.  I don't care one whit what you believe concerning any deity or deities.  Really…I don’t give a damn.  Your beliefs are harmless to me.  Nor should you be overly bothered by my opinions about the existence or not of whatever deity or deities you might follow.  Because your beliefs (and mine) are not what make the world a better place for all of us.  Changing my belief to yours (or yours to mine) will not make the world even slightly better.  Our actions do that, and if your actions are consonant with my values, human values that so many of us, theists and non-theists alike share, then you are my ally, whether you believe in one god, or twenty, or none.