Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat
What do you do when a religious authority is abusing you?
What do you do, if you believe that the creator of the universe has specific demands about the way that you lead your life, and specifically about your religious community, your religious beliefs?
What do you do if you are trapped in a universe with a divine dictator ho is going to punish you with never ending pain if you get it wrong?
Well, you write a book like, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat. That's what you do.
We are getting close to the end of this podcast because this podcast is just about one book and it's not a very long book. It's just a little bit over 200 pages, and honestly, it's kind of fluffy toward the end.
All of the things that Ross Douthat is writing about at the end of this book presume that you have agreed to his profoundly weak arguments that he makes at the beginning of the book about why you should be religious and really why you should be Christian in particular.
We are now on pages 179 and 180. That's almost at the end. On these pages in particular, Ross Douthat is bringing up concepts of punishment in a strange and not very self-aware kind of way.
The main idea that Ross Douthat is talking about in this of the 7th chapter, with the title, The End Of Exploring, the main idea is that if you happen to belong to a religion just because your parents taught you that you have to belong to that religion, that's fine. If you just are following along with what you were told to do as a child, that's just fine. Don't worry about it. God is gonna be totally cool with that.
But then Ross Douthat opens up the next section of the chapter with these words:
“This advice doesn't apply, indeed, it's useless or perverse, if your experience with your ancestral faith was miserable or punishing or abusive.”
So, according to Ross Douthat, you should belong to a religion, you should just follow along and go ahead and just conform to what you've been told to believe, just believe what you were raised to believe. You don't have to question it too much.
First of all, Ross Douthat is going 180 degrees in the opposite direction of what he promised us at the beginning of the book. He promised us he was going to give us a rational, reasonable, logical approach to understanding religion, and now he's saying, just don't think about it too much. Stick with what you’ve got. Don't question it too hard.
However, Ross Douthat has one exception to that rule: If your religion is punishing, miserable and abusive, that doesn't count. Don’t follow along in those circumstances.
That’s awkward, because, just two paragraphs before, Ross Douthat wrote about how his Christian god is going to punish you for failing to conform.
“You will not be penalized for failing to reach the same exact destination as your neighbor in the course of your spiritual or moral journey. The punishment is reserved for refusing to choose or act period, for believing in a God, or universe that will punish you for taking any steps at all.”
Ross Douthat is saying that the people who are going to be punished by God are those who refuse to join religion. Those who refuse to join, those who refuse to believe in these religious organizations that they're told to join when they're children, those who refuse to conform to the social order of the churches or the temples, will be punished. Ross Douthat tells us that people who refuse to obey human religious leaders, will be punished by God.
Then, two paragraphs later, Ross Douthat says you shouldn't join in with a religion that is punishing or abusive.
Under Christianity, the entire universe as Ross Douthat describes it is one in which the only reason people do anything is because there is an all-powerful magical spirit, a god, who controls it all and is going to punish or abuse you if you don't do what it tells you to do.
Ross Douthat is describing his own religion as punishing and abusive.
We know that children are raised to be religious using threats. They are told at an early age that if you don't do what the church says, and if you don't do what that priest says, when he takes you to that secret little place in the Catholic church, and if you don't believe, if you don't conform like Ross Douthat is telling you to, you're going to burn. You're going to be punished. You're going to be tortured by God.
Oh, what a loving God, who is going to torture you if you refuse to go along.
You're going to be punished, punished and abused, punished and abused.
You know what's really funny? As we read ahead a few pages later, in the beginning of chapter 8, Ross Douthat finally acknowledges that the Roman Catholic Church has been abusing people.
“I can understand why the entanglements that Catholicism has accumulated, the long history of corruptions make it hard for many people to believe in the church as a divinely founded institution, certainly 25 years of sex abuse revelations have given me a much clearer sense of the church's institutional failings than I had when I converted. Perhaps foolishly, my own impulse still runs in the opposite direction. The sins of Catholicism seem inseparable from its sheer significance in history. It's in-the-arena influence on civilizations.”
So what he's saying here is, yeah, sure, the Roman Catholic Church is punishing and abusive, but it's powerful. The power of Roman Catholicism is what attracts Ross Douthat. He loves looking at the power.
Ross Douthat can't even go nine pages without contradicting himself. I mean, he says that you shouldn't belong to an abusive religion, but then he's admitting the abuses of the Catholic church. Ross Douthat say, you shouldn't belong to an abusive religion, but then he says he belongs to the Roman Catholic Church because it's politically powerful, and he finds that power attractive.
This kind of simpering attitude, this kind of moral hypocrisy when it comes to punishment, and the way that it's all centered around social power, is what turns off so many people from religion.
It’s a huge red flag. It shows that the people who are in this religion are not motivated by some actual relationship with some actual invisible spiritual being who somehow sets down a divine law.
This religion looks like it's organized around social control, and conformity, and political power, just putting the face of the supernatural woo woo on top of that, asking us to be gullible fools, to keep on belonging and participating and supporting religious organizations that abuse and punish us, that make us miserable.
No, Ross Douthat not everybody's going to go along with that. Not everyone believes.