God, Suffering, and P.Z. Myers

For the past little while, I've been gelling (to borrow a God-awful meme from a Dr. Scholls ad) pretty well with Professor P. Z. Myers' consistent verbal poundings of Intelligent Design and Creationism. God knows he does a better job of that that I (but then again, he's got the Ph.D and I'm just a lowly worm of an undergrad). And I think I mentioned this in the past, but I even got around to sending him some gushing fan mail while trying to sound smart and pensive at the same time (which probably ended up being dropped into his Spam folder. Heh).

However, on occasion he does say things to which I take serious offense, and which I have to say, are really illustrative of the problem with religious people with Progressives and Liberals in general that I've been talking about earlier.

God offers you nothing, and accomplishes nothing, and his 'grace' is the squalor of a shattered city. This is the religion of the ineffectual. It's the language we've seen a lot of lately: Pray for New Orleans. Thank you, God, for only destroying my home and not killing me. The dead are in a better place now. God protect the members of my sect. Smite the unbelievers.

Is such a witheringly negative tone truly necessary? I understand his negative feelings towards Christianity, but I don't think there's any need at all for needless stereotyping of Christians as some sort of spiritual mafia.

No, Katrina was a natural disaster that killed thousands and has caused suffering to hundreds of thousands more. It was not the sword of your fictitious lord, and this kind of justification of people's pain as the righteous action of an angry god just leads to the sanctimonious hatred we see below.

I am in full agreement with Professor Myers that this idiotic spinning of recent events to support some foolish right-winged arrogant school of self-righteous thought is completely reprehensible. But that makes me think of Renee's similar sentiments that I've talked about earlier. Does the hate and scorn shown by those people justify your own hatred? And how much of a better person are you if you meet their hatred with your own?

I wish those were only rare and hateful kooks, but religion is the breeding ground of this nonsense, and far too many people wallow in lesser delusions that they will use to justify absurdities.

It's sentiments like this which both really sadden me and anger me. I wonder how many Christians (or other people of faith) he has talked to to give him a sensation of religion as a "breeding ground of nonsense". And who in those faiths has he talked to? People in the mainstream, or the marginalized, yet vocal few?

I'll readily admit that religion can very well breed a lot of evilness, but it can also be a source of wonderful things as well. Nothing is ever black and white, and to simply denigrate religion -- and I mean any religion, not just Christianity -- as just a source of utter nonsense is to really denigrate a potential source of much of humanity's most wonderful qualities. If you just ignored all of that, then all people of faith at the very least just misguided, blind fools, and at the very worst dishonest crooks -- that a Mother Teresa is on par with a Jerry Falwell, and that anything good done in the name of religion is to be regarded with the same scorn and mistrust as any similarly comitted sin. Personally, I don't think that even Myers is that jaded in his view of humanity.

And lest we forget, nationalism, racism, sexism...there are many other human "-isms" that can all too easily bring out some of the worst in humanity. Human beings don't need religion to be delusional or evil -- we can manage that just fine on our own, thankyouverymuch.

Secularism won't protect us from natural disasters, but it also won't encourage us to savor other people's suffering as a vindication of our own beliefs, and it will provoke more rational responses than begging for help from nonexistent deities.

Stop praying. Get out of the churches. Go do something constructive.

In a time like this, moral and spiritual support is just as important as material support. I saw Oprah Winfrey's special episode of her daytime talk show where she toured the New Orleans Superdome and later met up with the crowd of survivors that had been relocated to Texas. She may not have given away iPods, cars, or houses to each and everyone of those people, but she was there. She could have been in other places, doing other things with other people, but she was there.

For reasons known only to ourselves, we may not be able to donate tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and we may not be able to go out and collect canned food or assemble aid packages, but at the very least, what we can do is to take at least some time out of our own lives and think about the horrible tragedy which occured, and to integrate those thoughts into our daily living; to be appreciative of what we have, instead of longing for things we don't. To try to be a little more kinder to those around you, because someday, you may be needing their help.

Katherine told me in a phone conversation we had about the people at her church...they weren't doing anything to help the survivors in a material sense, but they were praying for them. It's true that a prayer won't feed or house a hungry family, and I totally think that spiritual aid always has to be followed up by material aid. But in someway, they are making a difference. They have at least motivated me to get off of my lazy ass and do something. That, I think, is something they've done.




*And just to cover my ass, I want to make it expressively clear to anyone who may be have come to this by way of a direct or indirect link to Pharyngula that I'm in no way attacking Myers for his views. He's got a right to his attitudes and I have a right to disagree with them.