Render Unto Caesar the Things Which Are Caesar’s

Atrios:

No one finds it particularly troubling when it's pointed out that an "out" atheist couldn't get elected dog catcher in most of this country, let alone to Congress. ... [So,] I'm a bit sick and tired of White Christian Males pretending that they're the persecuted ones.

In addition, I'm a bit fed up with people hand-wringing about anti-religious sentiment from "the Left." First of all, "the Left" which has any clout or power in this country is explicitly "pro-religion" to a degree which disturbs me. My retinas still burn with the image of the members of Congress on the steps of the Capitol screeching out "UNDER GOD" while performing the pledge of allegiance. ...

I'm tired of liberalish Christians telling me it's my job to reach out to Christian moderates who feel that "the Left" is hostile to them. Screw that. It's time for liberalish Christians to tell their slightly more right-leaning brethren that those of us who fight to maintain the separation between Church and State do it to protect freedom of religion - not destroy it. It's time for moderate and liberal Catholics to take a stand against their Church's assault on Democratic (and only Democratic) politicians who deviate from doctrine.

I'm not hostile to religion. I'm hostile to those who cloak their hate [and] bigotry in religion. I'm hostile to those who want to impose their religion on me and everyone else. I'm hostile to those who have no understand[ing] where their freedoms come from, and why they're important. I'm hostile to Christian Exceptionalists who believe that simply by being religious they're immune from all criticism.

The militant versions of the two religions causing most of the religiously-inspired trouble in the world - Christianity and Islam - require a sense a victimhood, of being threatened, to sustain themselves. I have more exposure to the American Christian flavor of this, which is a kind of insanity. It requires its adherents to believe that the "world" is implacably Evil and hostile to Christianity, while actually participating in a society in which Christians and their religion are ubiquitious and the holders of the reigns of nearly all political power.

It's not that liberals are hostile to Christianity per se, it's that Christians have a built-in sense of resentment that society doesn't conform to their view of the good. I think that for many American Christians, one of the factors driving this is the cognitive dissonance generated by their acceptance of the evidence that their faith is irrational and probably the product of their own psychological needs. One can't be militantly religious and an empiricist. This conflict produces a dark cloud of foreboding in many believers, and rather than examine the roots of those feelings, they attach them to an external source - unbelievers, the world, you name it. No amount of good wishes from liberals will make that internal conflict go away. And until that conflict is resolved, it's pointless to try to compromise with believers as a whole - irrationality has no coherent set of positions to compromise with.

There are only two ways to resolve the situation. One, we could capitulate completely. One Christian friend once asked me, "Wouldn't we be better off if everyone was a Christian?" To which the answer undoubtedly is, "Yes", in the way that we'd be better off if we were totally homogoneous. We'd be better off if we were all atheists, or all pedophiles. Unanimity has its benefits. The other way is as Atrios suggests: tell religious people that their beliefs have no privileged place in politics simply because they are religious, and that they will be subject to the same terms of debate as everyone else. The religious in America control the secular political process already. They can't also demand that they be immune from criticism, too.

Comments

[PZ Myers]

But they don't want the same terms of debate-what they want is a privileged place. I run into this all the time in the creation/evolution wars, where the religious right will tell legislators that they just want fairness and representation in the science classrooms, but when told that a fair representation of creationist ideas in a biology class would consist of 5 minutes of scathing, contemptuous dismissal of their fact-free nonsense, they will turn around and demand protection from such criticism.

[Mithras]

Right. Exactly. What they really want is not equality of treatment but equality of respect, which isn't possible in a scientific way. I think they know this, since they often frame their arguments not in scientific terms but in terms of the "pernicious" effects of believing in evolution; i.e., "If people believe we're descended from monkeys, we'll all act like animals." Superficially, their argument is that modernity is bad, but really what it comes down to is they feel discomfited by the concepts that challenge their prejudices.

Same old story, same old song and dance.

[Factory]

"Wouldn't we be better off if everyone was a Christian?"
Yeah, just like the reformation.