Sentilong Ozukum
Victor Stenger doesn’t think so. He is an American physicist and an outspoken atheist who advocates that religion is an evil force that keeps the world from advancing scientifically, economically and socially. Science is the saviour of mankind whereas religion is the dark force which brings destruction. In short, science flies you to the moon; religion flies you into buildings. Neither does Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion). The unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture, according to him, is religion. Faith is one of the greatest evils of the world comparable to the small pox, he says, but harder to eradicate. He writes, “From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” Dawkins has even gone to the extent of saying that forcing religion into a child is a form of child abuse. Daniel Dennett (philosopher and cognitive scientist) likens religion to cancer – it grows and is destructive. The late Christopher Hitchens (literary critic and journalist) wrote an entire book denouncing religion titled God is not great: How Religion poisons everything. In it he argues that religion is immoral, man-made and is grounded in nothing more than wish fulfilment.
What do all these writers have in common? They are the leading figures of the so-called New Atheist Movement and they want to abolish religion from the face of the earth. Religion is the green- eyed monster which brings about violence, destruction and hinders the progress of mankind and hence should be eradicated. They want to create a modern utopia freed from the shackles of religion. Religion is seen as a malignant disease and the sooner it is eradicated, the better it will be for the progress of mankind. Secularism has certainly become the banner under which the modern man wishes to march.
My aim in this article is not to present a catalogue of the wonderful things that religion has done for man since the dawn of civilization and then declare that it is good for mankind. Instead, I want to look at this debate from a different perspective and argue that the values and virtues of the so- called secular man are grounded in religion (read Christianity). In future articles, I will claim that the very root of ‘science’ itself is theological and also argue that the premise ‘religion is responsible for all evils’ is totally bogus, unwarranted and nothing compared to the horrible atrocities secular ideologies have given birth to in the last few decades.
In his New York Times bestselling book What’s so great about Christianity, the conservative American political commentator Dinesh D’ Souza argues that Christianity is the ultimate foundation of western civilization and also the roots of the values we cherish in a secular society. If we were to stop a ‘secular guy’ in the street and ask him to list down the virtues that he cherishes, he would certainly say, “I believe in the idea of equality, freedom, liberty and the individual. I believe in compassion, women’s equality, human rights and democracy. I believe in science…” The list would go on. Believe it or not, all these valuescame into the west and also into the world because of Christianity. How do we know this? If we look into various cultures of the world before Christianity we see that these values were either non-existent or suppressed. In other words, they were ‘not valued’. Consider ancient Greece and Rome, the two pillars on which western civilization was built. Human life had very little value in these cultures. It is a well-known fact that the Spartans would leave a sick child on the hill top in the wintry cold only to find it dead in the morning. Fathers who wanted a male child had few qualms about drowning their new-born daughter.Human beings were either mauled to death by animals or killed by another human being in the Roman gladiatorial arena. The interesting point to note is that the great classical thinkers of ancient Greece from Cicero to Aristotle who knew about this treated it with equanimity. It was for them ‘no big deal’. Christianity banned these practices and introduced the idea of the preciousness and worth of every human life in western society.
What about the idea of equality? The atheist philosopher Nietzsche condemns it saying it is a Christian invention and ‘that’s why he is against it’. Women had no status in the ancient world. In fact they don’t even today in many cultures most notably in the Islamic world. Aristotle expressed the opinions of many when he wrote that reason finds its fullest expression in men. In women, he wrote, reason is unused. It was Jesus who first treated women at par with men. He broke the taboo of his own culture and even permitted women to travel and eat with him. No wonder the Romans mocked Christianity as the religion for women.
One may argue at this point raise the issue of slavery and proclaim that the Bible doesn’t condemn it and that Christians practiced it for many centuries. In fact the popular philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris writes in his book, Letter to a Christian Nation, “Consult the Bible and you will discover that the creator of the universe expects us to keep slaves.” It is important to remember that slavery pre-dated Christianity by centuries. It was widely practiced all over the ancient world from India and China to Greece and Rome. For centuries slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics. But Christianity from the very beginning discouraged slavery. We read in one of Paul's letters that Paul himself interceded with a master named Philemon on behalf of his runaway slave. "Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while," Paul says, "so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but as a brother."Slavery the foundation of Greek and Roman civilization withered throughout medieval Christendom. Moreover, Christians were the first in the history to start an anti-slavery movement. The movement started in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century led by William Wilberforce and gradually it spread to the other parts of Europe and America. Where did the Christians get this idea of the anti-slavery movement? They got it from a theological premise- we are created equal in the eyes of God and no man has the right to rule another without consent. This notion not only became the basis of not only anti-slavery but also representative democracy.
The Christian doctrine of human equality is also the basis for all modern doctrines of Human Rights. Consider a legal doctrine such as the Declaration of Human Rights in the charter of the United Nations. This declaration adopted on December 10, 1948 in the United Nations General Assembly asserts rights common to all people in the world. The universalism of this declaration is based on the Christian premise that we are all created in the image of God and all human lives have worth.
Christianity is also responsible for our modern concept of individual freedom. The modern concept of freedom means the right to express our own opinion, the right to choose our own career, the right to our own life and so on. D’Souza writes, “Christianity emphasizes the fact that we are moral agents. God has freely created us in His own image, and He has given us the power to take part in His sublime act of creation by being architects of our own lives. But God has also granted to other human beings the same freedom. This means that, in general, we should be free to live our lives without interference from others as long as we extend to others the same freedom.” In short, my freedom to exercise my arm ends at your nose. D’Souza further notes that even John Stuart Mill’s influential doctrine of liberty is a direct inheritance from Christianity. “It is no use responding that Mill was a product of the Enlightenment understanding of human freedom and equality. That notion was itself a product of Christianity. Where else do you think the Enlightenment thinkers got it?” No wonder JurgenHabermas, the respected German sociologist and leading intellectual of our generation writes in his book Time of Transition, “Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source." It is so ironical that the modern secular man has no qualms about dismissing religion as ‘evil’ and ‘immoral’ without releasing the fact that he himself is sitting on a platform built by Christian doctrines and principles.
Today secular societies want to get rid of Christianity but retain its values. This is an illusion. Once we remove the foundation, the values will collapse too. Maybe values like equal dignity and equal rights will persists for a period of time out of sheer unthinking habit but their influence will erode over time. With the abolition of religion from the public sphere, new radical values are slowly emerging in our society inconsistent with the Christian ones. The secular man today wants to legislate infanticide (read abortion), redefine marriage and family and promote eugenic theories of human superiority. If the secular trend continues, it is not very difficult to imagine a day in the future when the values that we cherish today will erode away and be replaced by new values that will question the existence of life itself. Such a move would eventually lead us back to the Dark Ages.
Is religion really good for the world? I cannot speak for all religions but Christianity certainly is. TheBritish historian J.M. Roberts put it beautifully when he wrote in his monumental work The Triumph of the West, “We could none of us today be what we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again."
Sentilong Ozukum is a research scholar in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Hyderabad.
