‘(Religious) Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking’ – Bill Maher
What we are made to believe and allowed to convince others and their children to believe ultimately has no bounds. Freedom to exercise religion and cultural practices is fiercely defended in most civilised societies, and those that don’t allow for brutal indoctrination of one or another specific creed. Belief in something without evidence is considered a redeeming characteristic in most of the world and in the eyes of most of the worlds population. Questioning what we are told by a higher authority on the other hand, is considered abominable. Attitudes like this can manifest irrational credulity in other facets of life. The same governments and social systems that support them will also expect its citizens to accept what they are being told at face value.
Children naturally believe what their authoritarian figures like the parents and teachers tell them. We do not have the time to spend our whole lives in growing up, nor can we simply apply the scientific method of experimenting to find out every bit of knowledge. A child is not likely to live long if he or she had to learn that something like falling from a cliff is hazardous by trial and error. Educational institutions like schools, universities, churches and mosques are designed to teach not only empirical knowledge but also how to think and when it is or is not appropriate to apply the method of critical analysis. Indoctrination from a higher authority often leaves an indelible impression on a young and malleable mind and being taught to defend ones ineffable belief in something without supporting evidence can have a demonstrable connection to retarding an individuals reasoning faculty. The ‘Credo quia absurdum’ position that people of faith often take can have an impact on how they perceive new information that they hear from those in power, especially if the message is being redelivered by the Islamic Ulema, a pontifical council or their equivalent from any other sect or denomination that have been elevated above requiring supporting evidence for their claims and assertions.
Adults are far less susceptible to lies than children. Imagine a hypothetical thirty five year old man that has had no prior exposure to western, or any other culture. It is unlikely that he would believe you if you told him that a man named Santa Clause flies around the world in a sled delivering presents, even if overnight on Christmas he discovered a new electric razor in his stocking. Not even if you showed him pictures of a flying sled driven by an obese white man with a white beard with a sack no bigger than himself that allegedly contains the entire world’s worth of gifts is he likely to concede the possibility. Tell the same story to an eight year old child who finds a fire truck under the tree that same morning and you will likely be questioned on the subject not in a spirit of scepticism but rather curiosity and thirst for knowledge. It is much harder to convince a grown individual of truth by second hand information, be it a new concept or disillusion of an old one. Attitudes towards faith and scepticism can also be cultivated. Tell a child that belief in something without evidence is good and provided that enough reinforcement is given throughout the developing and maturing stages of his or her mind, the attitude will prevail later in life in a statistically significant majority.
Religious authorities quell the tendency of the human mind to be inquisitive by stipulating that questioning the creed, text or the hierarchy is intrinsically evil and often exact punishments for attempts to propagate free enquiry. The punishment for apostasy in Islam for example, is none other than death. Governments and religions desire as close to ultimate control over their people as possible because whenever the population is excessively critical of it and the policies the government will tend to lose power. In many instances this can lead to the invocation of martial law or fierce repression. In that respect, despotism is not unlike religious totalitarianism. In Stalin’s Russia or Mau’s North Korea, any criticism of the leader is seen as profane by its very nature. Reformist heretics are hunted down and often publically executed or imprisoned. The leader is thought to be infallible and omniscient and everything good is owed to their benevolence and the citizens are to praise them incessantly. Their creed is absolute and any hint of reform or criticism of it can see the source swiftly and justifiably destroyed. The ideal situation is where the individual submits to the leader or governing body, be it a man of flesh and bone or a deity and never questions the truth of what is being taught. Scepticism about the government and its messages is considered unpatriotic and not prudent in many cultures.
Biologically human beings are only partly rational. Our survival instincts like fear and aggression have meant that our ancestors lived on and prospered enough to have children of their own. Immediate reactions are governed by what our subconscious would define as a threat. For example, we are more likely to mistake our own reflection in the mirror at night for a stranger, than a stranger for a reflection or a shadow. Fear is often one of the greatest factors driving the machinery of propaganda through the populous. When lives are threatened, we turn to our symbols of defence, the protectorate. Terrifying and fear inducing images make the headline news in the mass media and we accept the preventative measures that are put in place by the people in temporal charge. The ‘Patriot Act’ was an example of the surrender of free will to legislators. The US PATRIOT Act of 2001 was passed by the senate and signed by George Bush that year. The ostensive design was to protect the American people from terrorism. Effectively, the statute allowed law enforcement agencies surveillance and investigative powers that they have never had in the history of the USA. Despite being grotesquely unconstitutional, the bill was passed with only one senator openly voting and speaking out against it saying that it blatantly infringed on civil liberties.
That senator was Russ Feingold who in December 2005 fought against the renewal of the bill and ended up with a compromise which he and ten other senators still voted against. Eighty nine voted ‘Yay’ and the renewed PATRIOT Act remains active. Later reviews of the original statute and interviews with members and ex-members of the senate revealed that most of them had not read through the three hundred page document in order to accelerate the legislative process and invoke the new laws that would, they were made to believe, make the country safer. As a result, liberty was subverted for over three hundred million US citizens and the government was allowed to tap phones, listen to voice mail and intercept private emails without warrants or even notifying the subjects that they are being investigated. One of the best known and well documented misuses of the powers stipulated in the PATRIOT Act is the blanket request by the FBI for millions of records of visitors to casinos and other establishments in Los Angeles which included employment, financial and health records. Another was the invocation of the PATRIOT Act to investigate a copyright infringement on a Stargate fan website by enacting a ‘search and seizure’ on the Internet Service Providers financial records.
Teaching children from the cradle in accepting notions without sufficient evidence or explanation is immoral and will undoubtedly affect the way they perceive and interpret new insights in the world as adults. Accepting spurious propositions on face value cannot remain a virtue if civilised society is to advance in moral and ethical capacity. Puerile attitudes towards critically important factors of life can never be the foundation for philanthropy. The seeds of credulity can be harvested by those that know how. Forty percent of the voters that chose George Bush for his second term were evangelical Christians. Billions of otherwise intelligent people are spending billions of dollars a year on alternative medicines that are only claimed to work by charismatic proprietors. Millions of people die and billions suffer every year over futile propositions, or otherwise utterly needlessly because of someone’s obscure rantism.
‘That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.’ – Christopher Hitchens