Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat ends chapter 6 of his book Believe by presuming that allowing celibate priests to control the details of people’s sex lives is a normal thing that people should have no trouble agreeing to. How does Douthat not see how weird that is? Ross Douthat ends chapter 6 of his book Believe by presuming that allowing celibate priests to control the details of people’s sex lives is a normal thing that people should have no trouble agreeing to. How does Douthat not see how weird that is? Does he think we don't remember how the Catholic Church helped its priests to sexually abuse little children?
Podcast Transcript:
Oh, Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat wrote this book called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. In this book, he's arguing that, of course, everyone should be religious, but also specifically that they should be Christian. That Christian focus pervades his entire book. He shows a great deal of ignorance about non-Christian religions, and just ignores them a lot of the time, while referring to the Christian God over and over again..
We're getting now to the end of chapter 6 of this book by Ross Douthat. This podcast is dedicated to reading through this one book by Ross Douthat, to examine whether it holds up to rational scrutiny. That's the threshold that Ross Douthat himself set down for evaluation of his book. The claim that he made was that he was going to write a book that would convince people through reason, rationality, logic.
He doesn't actually use logic in this book. On page 168 through 170, the last 3 pages of chapter 6, we’re going to see exactly how illogical his book is, how immense the gaps in his logic are.
This chapter is called Three Stumbling Blocks. In this chapter, Ross Douthat is claiming to address 3 of the major objections to Christianity or to religion in general.
he thing is, there are many more stumbling blocks, many more objections to Christianity and to religion in general than just these three.
Anyway, we're on the third stumbling block. The first was, why does God do so many terrible things, although, actually, Ross Douthat phrased it as, “why does God allow terrible things to happen”?
Then the third one was, why do religious institutions do so many terrible things? Those first two stumbling blocks Ross Douthat failed to adequately address.
The final stumbling block is this: Why are traditional religions so hung up on sex?
Once again, Ross Douthat is focusing on what he calls major religions, the big religions. He dismisses out of hand any religion that doesn't have very many followers. Douthat argues that a religion must not be worth looking at if it's not popular, if it doesn't have social dominance.
With the religious practice of social dominance, we get into what's really underneath this question of sex. It's not just about sex, it's about social control, and that is the stumbling block that Ross Douthat doesn't want to address: Why is Christianity in particular and why are religions in general so hung up on establishing social control? Why do they control people's private lives so much?
Ross Douthat wants to make it just about sex. In doing so, he's appealing to the prude in Christian religion who regards it as absolutely natural that sex should be controlled and doesn't want to think about other forms of social control.
Controlling sex is perfectly fine for these people, though. For a lot of Christians, sex is the gateway drug to broader social control. That's what we see in a lot of religious communities, large and small, whether you want to call them churches or you want to call them cults. They control your sexual activity, and by doing that, they control your life.
Ross Douthat doesn't really talk about that problem, but what he does talk about is kind of weird, and it's illogical. The following selection is from the bottom of page 168 to the top of 169 in his book.
“Once you accept that the universe was probably made with us in mind, that there is some cosmic purpose to human consciousness and human lives, then why wouldn't God or the cosmos care about the most important way that human beings bond with one another, create the most intimate, and the most sprawling intergenerational forms of community, and participate in the creation of new life? It would be a strange god, indeed, who cared intensely about how we spend our money, or what votes we cast, or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances, or terrible ones or form a lifelong bond or an addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate them permanently.”
In other words, if God cares about anything at all, hen God has to care about sex. But where do we start out?
Notice, what is the solid point, the premise that Ross Douthat thinks he has firmly proven? First of all, he thinks he's established that there is a God even though that's not been established.
Douthat is saying that if you accept the idea that the universe was made with humanity in mind, then you kind of have to assume that the universe was made specifically so that we could have sex only under certain circumstances. Wow.
What Ross Douthat is saying is that the universe was made for sex, but only some kinds of sex. Douthat is saying that the universe is a sex dungeon, where there is a universal cosmic dominator, a guy with a whip, and he's ready to punish you and torment you. It's a torture prison designed for sex, but only the kind of sex that its master says that you can have. That is really pretty damned kinky, but it's also illogical.
What were the grounds for the idea that Ross Douthat had that the universe was made so that people could exist, that the universe was made for people, and that there's a purpose to human consciousness? The grounds for that idea were that there is a mathematical observation of certain patterns in the universe, that there are certain mathematical patterns and that they work because we observe them in the universe. Ross Douthat thinks that this fact logically establishes that the universe must have been created by a magical being in order to create people, and to have people lead certain kinds of lives.
What about the purpose of human consciousness, and the believe that consciousness is somehow related to a god? The only evidence Ross Douthat could produce for that is that consciousness is mysterious, and scientists haven't figured out everything about it yet. That’s it
Ross Douthat is essentially saying is that because there are mathematical constants that have been observed by scientists in the universe, and because scientists haven't explained everything about consciousness yet, there must be a magical being who wants to be, and deserves to be, in control of the very specific sexual activities that you engage in.
It really doesn't follow. That's not a logical argument. Physics doesn't dictate the kind of sex that we have, at least not in the sense of anything religious. The existence of a constant speed of light in the universe doesn't mean that you're not supposed to have sex with your boyfriend or your girlfriend. It doesn't mean that churches get to decide who you go out with and how and who you get married to. It doesn't follow rationally.
Nonetheless, Ross Douthat goes on to say, if that's not enough for you, if you reject his argument that the rules of physics and the mathematical observations of the universe indicate that the Roman Catholic Church should have control of your sex life, if you don't believe that, well, just take a look around you at the suffering and the terrible things that are happening in society because people are not obeying the Pope, and the bishops and the cardinals and the priests, about sex, not following their commands. Look at what's just happening because of that!
Some people are not having children. That, for Ross Douthat, is justification for giving control over your sex life to priests in the Catholic Church. Seriously, that's the argument that Ross Douthat is making. Not enough people are having babies, and therefore, Catholic priests should be given control and should be able to forbid you from masturbating.
Yeah, that's that's pretty wild.
Let's take on this idea that fewer people having children is a social ill. If we take a look at what actual suffering is created in the world, a lot of it is created by overpopulation. We have finite resources on a finite planet, and they are quickly being used up, and the use of those resources is creating massive amounts of pollution and social inequality. Then there's climate change, which may end up absolutely devastating ecosystems around the world in a way that may take millions of years to repair. A lot of that is happening because we have too many babies, more babies than we can take care of.
Babies are lovely and cute, a lot of the time they are. I have children. I love my children, but not everybody wants to have children. Not everybody feels that they would be good parents or that parenthood is something that would be good for them.
If we give back control, to Christian religion, if we go back in history, we know what that looks like. We know that that means that people will be married off against their will. They will not be allowed to end their pregnancies, but they will also not be allowed to practice contraception. Remember, Ross Douthat's church forbids contraception.
So, under Ross Douthat’s plan, the church decides who you get married to and who you have sex with. The Bible declares that if you have sex outside of that, you get pummeled with stones and beaten to death. You're not allowed to practice contraception, so that you can’t control the number of children you have, or the time you have your children.
That's what Ross Douthat argues is a social good, and he's saying it’s a good thing because we don't have enough children.
We currently have over 8 billion people on the earth.People are not lacking. We're not about to go extinct. The population is still growing.
So what's the problem exactly that Ross Douthat is talking about? Actually, he doesn't it explain in this book. He doesn’t explain what the problem is with people not having children.
Next, Ross Douthat tries to do a judo argument. He writes that in recent years, thanks to the sexual revolution, fewer people are having sex. Isn't that bad? Don't you think people should be having sex more?
It’s weird because what Ross Douthat was arguing before that people are having too much sex, yet now he's observing that people aren't having sex enough.
You just can't win with this argument. Either you're having too much sex or you're having too little sex, or both things are true. People are having too many babies out of wedlock, and people are not having enough babies.
The one common thread throughout all this is that people are having sex in the way that they want to have sex, and not in the way that priests want them to have sex. Ross Douthat argues in favor of priests deciding how you have sex, who you have sex with, when you have sex, when you have babies, what your family looks like. They want to control everything about your life. That's what this is about. It's not about looking at the evidence of what's good for people or what's not good for people.
Then, at the end of this chapter on page 170, Ross Douthat wraps up this chapter by arguing that you might disagree with a lot of what religion has to say about sex, but hey, maybe religion gets one or two things right about sex, and therefore, shouldn't you follow religion and believe in religion?
Here's what he says:
“If the traditional emphasis on chastity and monogamy and marriage, the broadly shared consensus of the world's religions, (again, the world's religions being the big ones, not all of them) if that deserves critique or required some adaptation, if it leads to bigotries, cruelties, unjust discrimination, while it may also contain important wisdom, that you can't simply sweep under the brush of Puritanism or patriarchy. I submit, that acknowledging that important possibility, making that concession is all you need to enter sincerely into the exploration of a traditional religious faith.”
Ross Douthat is arguing that yes, there's been bigotry, cruelty, unjust discrimination, and a whole lot of other bad things that come out of the church controlling your sex life. It's true, but you know, don't you think that maybe it might be possible, possible that the church might be right about one or two things when it comes to sex? Therefore, you should just believe and follow everything that the church tells you to do in your sex life.
This is like a con artist coming up to you and saying:
“Okay, it's true. I have been in prison several times for defrauding people. Yes, I've been found guilty of exploiting people, selling them into slavery, punching them in the face. Yes, it's all true.There was that investigation in the newspaper last week, where yes, I was found to be ripping off people using new online methods to drain money from their accounts without their permission. Sure, yes, that's true, but don't you think that maybe, maybe there's a possibility that this scheme I'm telling you about today might make you a lot of money, and don't you think that you just should believe what I'm telling you? Because there's a possibility, that's enough for you, isn't it?”
No, it's not enough. It's not enough for us to give up control of our private sex lives in great detail, with no masturbation, no contraception, no birth control, and the church telling us who to marry, and how many babies we can have?
No, it’s not worth it, Ross Douthat, because there is a track record of remarkable, repeated sexual abuse, not just from Catholic churches, but from Protestant churches too.
There is no evidence that there is any God, and even if there was evidence that there is a God, there is no evidence that any God actually wants to have any kind of sex in particular going on between people. There's no evidence of this at all. Ross Douthat has completely failed to show that anything like that exists.
Even if that god exists, I would tell him to back the hell off, because it's not anyone else's business, what goes on between two consenting adults.
That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.