I always thought that the term apologist was an oxymoron. My idea of an apology is a regretful acknowledgement of error, and offering a humble gesture to compensate for any damage that might have been caused. Apologists, on the other hand, are people who do not apologize often. They rationalize religious behavior and belief. They make excuses for outdated traditions. They make arguments in defense of contradictory religious doctrines.
When I saw the article, “An Open Letter to Atheists,” written by a Catholic apologist, this was exactly what I expected – empty rationalizations. To my surprise, that wasn’t what I found. In fact, the letter begins with:
As Catholic apologists, we want to do something that our name would suggest we do far more often:
We’d like to apologize.
By that we mean exactly what you would think; we want to say that we’re sorry. We understand that you might be suspicious right now, that you may be thinking that this is another “tactic” for drawing you in. It isn’t. In fact, having tactics is one of the things we’re sorry for.
In the letter, this particular apologist conceded that, historically, apologists didn’t know what to do with atheists or how to respond to them. They were threatened by the very notion of an individual who refused belief, worried that his lack of faith could weaken their own. They didn’t know how to deal with modern atheist rhetoric that challenged the divine purpose of human suffering.
The apologist himself admitted that he finds the notion of “defending God” with rhetoric rather unnecessary, “God can take care of himself; he doesn’t need our defense like that. Neither do we need to defend ourselves from looking foolish or from seeing what you see as clearly as you see it.”
The point he’s trying to make is that a true Catholic will not bother defending his faith. He will not be afraid to admit that his beliefs are irrational. He will not be afraid to acknowledge the merits of an atheist’s arguments without his faith being threatened.
The open letter was what it said it was: an apology to atheists.
In all honestly, I liked it, and not just because it was a sincere apology to atheists. I think it makes a lot of sense. Matters of belief require faith. A Catholic can’t defend his religion with reason. He must do it with his faith.
He must be able to say, “Yes, there is overwhelming evidence that evolution is a fact, but I still have faith that my God exists. Yes, there is no scientific or historical evidence that the Bible is fact. For all I know, it could be a book full of metaphors, but I still have faith that my God exists.”
The faithful are not supposed to need evidence, because the point of faith is to believe without guarantees. Faith does not require facts, but neither does it require ignorance. You don’t have to deny evolution to believe in God. You just need to interpret the Bible in a way that would accommodate your new knowledge, like the Vatican did.
Faith is not static. The religions of today are practiced much differently from how they were practiced in the past. It undergoes its own evolution. The key is to allow one’s faith to accommodate facts, not the other way around.
I believe that a person’s personal, subjective, belief in God should not be used as a basis for matters that need facts, such as: science, health, gender, & sexuality. But I also believe that a person’s faith, if it is strong, welcomes new knowledge and evolves. I believe that the faithful should re-interpret and re-contextualize religious doctrine when they come across new information.
The conflict between atheists and the faithful is not caused by a religious person’s faith in his God, but in a religious person’s insistence on using his personal, subjective “faith” as the basis for facts. As long as we can all agree that religious doctrine should not be the basis for facts about the observable universe, I don’t think I’ll ever have to argue with another person about religion.
Here’s a confession from me, an atheist:
I don’t hate people who have faith in God. In fact, I like a lot of people who have faith in God. My mother, whom I love dearly, believes in God, the law of attraction, and other new age stuff. My girlfriend believes in the dhamma and in a non-anthropomorphic higher power. A close friend of mine is a deeply Catholic poet. Another is an Islam convert who used to teach about the Koran. I seriously don’t mind that people love and worship God.
But you know what? I should apologize too.
I have often criticized religion, in general, and blamed it as something that generally caused pain and misery. But it’s not really religion, in general, that I don’t like. What I don’t like is when a person’s faith in his or her God is used to rationalize homophobia, hypocrisy, misogyny, slut-shaming, censorship, violence, and medical malpractice.
But whether or not God exists, acts of kindness will still help people and acts of hate will still hurt people. I don’t think atheists and faithful people should be arguing about the existence or non-existence of God. I think people, in general, should simply discourage hateful behavior and encourage kindness and tolerance in everything that we do, regardless of what we believe.
Instead of insisting that knowledge and faith are mutually-exclusive, atheists, like me, should start encouraging the faithful (everyone, really) to see scientific knowledge not as a threat to their faith, but a tool they can use to assist them in their own personal spiritual journeys.
As S. N. Goenka, a pioneer of the secular meditation movement, once said:
“Rather than converting people from one organized religion to another organized religion, we should try to convert people from misery to happiness, from bondage to liberation and from cruelty to compassion.”
I agree. Converting people from one religion to another, or from faith to un-faith, should not be the priority. I used to think that I had to disagree with faith, in general, to achieve my secular goals. I now believe that encouraging the pursuit of knowledge would achieve a lot more in spreading good will than criticizing, or ranting about, what I perceive as ignorance.
After all, it doesn’t really matter what people believe as long as they treat each other well.
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Dustin C. I agree partly with what you said (I am i_dde BTW), it is our responsibility as thinking people, but there is only so much we can do. And religious moderates blur the line and cover for the fundamentalists whether they like it or not. They insist that they don’t adopt the fundamentalist mindset and reveal that there are thinking religious people. However their thinking still contains a level of cognitive dissonance and has limits. They will still shy away from discussing their delusions, and it is this fact that enables the fundamentalist to draw on the moderate’s reputation for (limited) reasoning that enables them to hold credibility. How do you think we should remedy this?
I think it matters less whether one believes in divinity or not as long as each of us recognize and accords justice to the humanity in one another.
I realize how my last comment might be misinterpreted as me saying that “religious people are more ignorant than atheists.” That’s not what I meant. My point is that if we can’t find a way to bridge the gap between science and religion ourselves, we’re similar to them in that we, both them and us, can only see the world from one perspective: that of science OR religion. Like I said, I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive. Instead of arguing why religious people can’t be scientific, we should argue that it’s possible, we’re just not trying hard enough.
I_dde, I think another thing that makes it difficult is a non-believer’s general aversion for anything labeled as religion. We, atheists, have a tendency to stereotype the faithful as much as they stereotype us. I believe that there are ways to be religious without being harmful. And I think it’s our job, as individuals privileged with almost unlimited access to information, to help even the people who criticize us the most. Unlike them, we don’t have to struggle with the contradictions of faith. If we make the same conclusions that they do, that science and religion are ultimately incompatible, if we are just as ignorant as they are, then we are in no position to make judgments about religion. Not all Catholics are homophobic (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/lgbt-church). Not all forms of Islam disagree with evolution (http://scienceislam.com/evolution_creation.php). Even Judaism embraces scientific progress (http://www.myjewishlearning.com/beliefs/Issues/Science/History/Modern.shtml). What I’m saying is we should not label religion as harmful, as a whole. It’s people who are harmful 🙂
Well said. If i may focus on your last statement, which i wholeheartedly agree with, religion tends to make this more difficult, as evidence shows. Thus i contend that religion, as a whole, is still harmful.