Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that goes through a book that was written by Ross Douthat. It's called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That's the title of the book, not this podcast.
I think you can tell by the title of this podcast, Not everyone believes, what this podcast is about. It is a critical examination.
Ross Douthat said that he was going to write a book that would be reasonable. It would be rational, and that means that it could withstand skeptical scrutiny. So, we're subjecting this book to some skeptical scrutiny, and it's not standing up at all.
Pages 118 to 119 are a perfect example of that. On page 118, he is writing about why you ought to belong to not just a religion, but to a church. Religious belief in itself really isn't the goal for Ross Douthat. Belief is part of what he'd like you to do, but really what's much more important is that he wants you to belong to a religious organization. Organized religion, he says, has benefits. We’ll get to one of those.
On page 118, Ross Douthat is trying to do away with an objection to what he's talking about. He is dismissing one of the most frequent criticisms of organized religion.
Even for those people who believe in magic and the supernatural and gods, spirits, you know, fairies, stuff like that. They will point out that organized religion is pretty vapid. It's pretty empty. It's filled with a lot of people who really can't be trusted, um, who who don't do what they preach, all of that morality that Ross Douthat was talking about. A lot of people in organized religion end up doing a lot of immoral stuff.
On page 118, Ross Douthat is arguing against that. He is acknowledging, “Certainly, in a society where professed faith is a default, and almost everyone is participating in a religious tradition, there is a grave temptation toward hypocrisy, fake piety, the kinds of empty spiritual practice that the world's great religions warn against, almost as often as they warn against active impiety, or unbelief, and there are certainly communities in our own society where this socially conditioned pretense of religion still exists, but in most regions of contemporary culture, and certainly for most people hesitating on the threshold of religion, the dangers of hypocrisy and fake piety are relatively distant ones, while the dangers inherent in spiritual individualism are more immediate and pressing. If your reason for avoiding institutional religion is the fear of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials or even just the stifling atmosphere of some pre Vatican II Catholic parishes or Protestant small towns, you are letting a danger that's increasingly remote push you away from the things that are necessary to mitigating today's perils, today’s problems, isolation rather than Pharisaism, narcissism, rather than authoritarianism, a world that leaves you alone in despair, rather than a society that's always nosing in your business.”
Ross Douthat is saying that if you're worried about religious authoritarianism, well, that's just a distant concern. That's not a big deal.
What you need to worry about is people doing what they want and just being individuals. That's the real threat.
I’ve got to ask you something: If you take a look at what's happening in the United States of America, do you really think freedom and individualism is wrecking this country?
We're about to have an election, a midterm election. Donald Trump is not on the ballot because it's not a presidential election year, but it is a de facto kind of test of his popularity, because a whole bunch of Republican members of Congress who have been giving Donald Trump pretty much everything that he wants, letting him do whatever he wants, not holding him to account.
They're up for election now, and in republican majority districts as well as democratic majority of districts, those Republican candidates are profoundly unpopular. This is one of the most stark anti-Republican voting moods in the electorate in a long time. In about a week and a half, I guess about a week, it's happening soon. We're going to see exactly how far that rejection of Donald Trump is going.
I just did early voting today, and if you live in a Democratic majority area where you can trust the Board of Election not to do shenanigans on behalf of Donald Trump, I encourage you to do early voting. Get it out of the way, make sure that it's not difficult for you to do voting. That's what early voting was set up to do to empower people, to empower democracy and the freedoms that it protects, which is why Donald Trump hates it so much.
Donald Trump also hates Donald Trump hates when people reject Christianity. He is so into Christianity and he talks about it all the time. You know Donald Trump was raised in a Christian church.
A lot of people say that Donald Trump has never set foot in a Christian church in his life. That's not true. The church that he went to when he was a young lad, and the one where he got his religious confirmation, there are photographs of him in that church.
You know what that church did? It forbade, it outlawed, it banned African-American couples from being members of the church. That church taught hatred. That church taught Donald Trump that religion and discrimination and oppression go hand in hand and you should use religion as a tool of oppression, of discrimination, of inflicting suffering on your enemies. That's the kind of Christianity that Donald Trump was raised on, and that's exactly what he's doing today.
We have a Christian Nationalist government that is taking food away from hungry people, not just here in the United States, but around the world. We have a country that is waging war, is encouraging war, that is threatening Greenland, is threatening Canada. We're bombing schools.
We're driving prices up. Donald Trump recently said, well, the oil companies are making a great profit on the oil, so what if the American people have to pay a little bit extra? That is the voice of Christian Nationalism.
Donald Trump is the same guy who's saying, yes, we're a Christian nation now.
He said that If I'm elected, you're going to have Christian visibility, this is going to be about showing what Christian Americans are really all about. Trump had the support of the majority of Christian voters in America, and you know what, he still does.
There's a Pew Research poll that shows that only one third of Christian Americans are planning to vote against Donald Trump's Christian nationalist fascist agenda.
We have people being shot dead in the streets by secret police. We have electronic surveillance all across the country being set up under a Christian nationalist authoritarian regime. We have concentration camps in which people are dying, in which people are being disappeared, children being separated from their parents. People are being shipped off to countries they've never been to, where people speak languages that they don't know, where there are yet more concentration camps.
This is being done in the name of Jesus, in the name of God, and yet, Ross Douthat is saying that there's not any big risk of any kind of religious hypocrisy, no religious danger. No religious authoritarianism. It's not a risk. He's saying it's just not happening.
Take a look at what's happening with digital fascism, the way that you're being watched all the time, not just with those flock surveillance cameras, but through your phone, through your activities on the web, through everything that you buy, every kind of electronic communication that you have. It's being swept up by the government and by corporations.
This is all being done to create a religious authoritarian state. At the same time, Ross Douthat is saying here on page 118 of his book, Believe, that the real risk is that you're free to be an individual who makes your own decisions about what you believe and what you don't. That, to me, is absolutely shocking.
There's something that Ross Douthat said at the end of this, that what the real danger is, what today's perils are really all about. Over on the next page, we have a new section of this 4th chapter. This new section is called Not Every Door Should Be Opened.
What is it about? You know what it's about?
It's about demons.
Yeah, we have Donald Trump wrecking, threatening to take away your right even to vote in the United States, absolutely ruining American democracy and replacing it with a corrupt kind of authoritarianism that is defined by Christianity.
Now Ross Douthat says that's not the big deal. What you need to worry about, says Ross Douthat, is demons.
I'm going to read to you a little bit of what Ross Douthat has to say about the demonic threat in his own words.
“Institutions offer spiritual protections that aren't available on your own. If the supernatural is potentially real, it is also potentially dangerous with more substantial stakes than most interactions in the natural and the everyday. Part of the point of the evolved technology of organized religion is to provide safety and security to travelers in this landscape to connect a secret to cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race, to help discern the difference between experiences worth pursuing and roads best left untaken, and to provide direct protection against the forces and experiences that seem destructive and demonic. ‘Don't mess around with demons’ might seem like too basic a message to require the structure of an entire religion to convey and reinforce, but in fact, what happens in horror movies, the people who go into that room or open that book or hold that seance, with predictably disastrous consequences, also happens in real life.”
Ross Douthat is saying not to worry about the technologies of Christian Nationalist authoritarian fascism to spy on your life, to send out fake messages and propaganda, to manipulate you, to control you. Don't worry about the way that Bitcoin is being used for public officials like the President of the United States to take massive bribes, so that only rich people get what they need and everyone else has to do without.
You know what that's about. The rising prices don’t come from nowhere. Inflation comes from Christian Nationalist fascism and the political corruption that undergirds that and undermines our democracy.
No, no, Ross Douthat is saying, don't worry about that, because what's important is that the Catholic Church has technologies, religious technologies, to protect you from demons. Do you know what religious technologies he's talking about? He's talking about exorcisms and sprinkling holy water on you.
Ross Douthat is saying, you need to belong to a church so that you can have guys in funny costumes mutter Latin phrases that are magic somehow, and sprinkle holy water on you, to protect you from demons, because demons and evil spirits are what you need to be worried about.
Ross Douthat is saying that all the scary monsters in horror movies are real, but fascism is not real.
Ross Douthat is saying also that if you are a Christian, but you don't belong to a church, and the right church, the kind that practices exorcisms, like the Catholic church, well then, you don't get any protection.
When he's talking about friendly cosmic powers, Ross Douthat said that the role of Christian churches is to introduce you to, “cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race.”
Who is he talking about? Who are the cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race? Is he talking about the Christian character that they call God, Jehovah, Yahweh? Is that the guy who is friendly to the human race?
Do I have to remind you what the Christian Bible says that God did to people in the past? Of course, there's the Book of Job, in which God thought it would be fun, just to prove a point, to torture a man for years and years and kill his family and make him absolutely miserable. That was fun for God.
Earlier, God encouraged genocide of entire cities of people just because they didn't worship him. God didn’t just provoke nasty battles in which a lot of soldiers got killed. God encouraged his followers to go and kill babies.
Are you pro-life? How can a person say they're pro-life and be pro-Bible? I wonder about that.
In the book of Genesis, where God decided, even though he made people, he didn't like them very much. God decided, “I’m going to kill them. I'm going to kill them all. I'm going to keep just one family together, and they're going to interbreed with each other and commit acts of incest to repopulate the earth, but I'm going to kill, kill, kill, kill. I'm going to drown everybody.”
This is the character that is supposed to be a “cosmic power that's friendly to the human race.”
Then we go to the New Testament. It’s not accurate to say that the Old Testament was brutal, but Jesus was all about bringing peace and love and changed everything to make it nice. That's not how it ended up, because actually, in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly threatens genocide against anyone who refuses to worship him. He says to entire cities of people that they’re going to wish that they had worshiped him and not turned him away and not refused to worship him as a god king, because Jesus is going to commit acts that are worse than what was done against Tyre and Sidon. Tyre and Sidon were two cities that were destroyed in genocides.
In these passages, Jesus is saying, effectively, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you all if you don't worship me, and it's going to be worse than those genocides in Tyre and Sidon.
People say that Jesus told all these lovely parables. Do you know the parable that he told about the king who rightfully ordered people to be brought in front of him and to be executed? Jesus said, I'm gonna be like that king.
Elsewhere, in the gospels, Jesus said, don't think I've come here to bring peace. I have come to bring a sword and divide people. Jesus came with a sword, and he said that, if you don't hate your own children in order to love me better, you're not a follower of me. Jesus actually preached hate.
Then there is the Book of Revelation. The Christian churches included Revelation in the Bible because it threatened bloody annihilation to everyone who is not a Christian. That part of the Bible threatens massive death and destruction with the approval of God, so that God will kill almost everybody on earth. Jesus announces that he will kill people in really nasty ways, torturing them first, and then bring them back from the dead, and then torture them more, just because they're not Christian.
Ross Douthat says that Christian churches are there for introducing you to that guy, that killer? Why? Because you need protection from demons.
It says in the Book of Revelation that it's God who's bringing on the monsters. God is bringing on the monsters.
Ross Douthat is talking about demons. He's saying that these monsters are real, but there's no evidence that demons actually exist. There's no evidence that angels exist. There's no evidence that gods exist. No evidence. None. Not a single bit.
There's nothing more a bunch of stories that Christians like to tell about this supernatural stuff. They’re the same kind of stories that people used to tell about Medusa and the cyclops and minotaurs and centaurs and griffins. People used to love to tell those stories, and some people believed that they were true. We now know that they are not true. In the same way, demons are not real.
Let's speak from a perspective of reality for a second here. If God is such a nasty person who is constantly torturing and killing people, and blaming them for what he's done, never taking responsibility, making people suffer pain because of God's own mistakes, if that's real, and you think that that's real, why do you think that demons are the real problem?
Maybe demons aren’t the biggest you have to deal with.
I want Ross Douthat to address this point, because he said he's going to be reasonable. He promised to be logical and said he was going to be writing based on the facts that we can gather from our own senses.
What are the facts that prove that demons are dangerous and evil and to be avoided? What is the evidence?
I'll tell you. Ross Douthat provides zero evidence that demons are dangerous and evil.
We are at page 119 of his book, out of what is barely more than 200 pages. There are just 206 pages of content in Ross Douthat’s book. We're over halfway through, and Ross Douthat hasn't provided any evidence that any of these magical creatures even exist, much less identified any evidence for what kinds of personalities different magical creatures have.
Maybe demons are the good guys, because God's kind of a jerk. Do you want me to feel differently about that? Do you want me to ignore fascism so that you can protect me from magical creatures that you can't even provide evidence for? Why would any sane person go along with that?
Ross Douthat can't vouch for their character of demons being evil anymore than you can vouch for the character of his god and the angels being good.
Ross Douthat has provided us with nothing to go on here. Zero.
That is why Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.
Not everyone believes.