The End of Faith

Ihave to confess. Yet again I have yielded to temptation. As I was thinking about how to introduce this sermon on the end of faith, out of nowhere Pat Robertson gave me an opportunity I simply couldn’t resist. Pat Robertson, for those of you who are not regular watchers of the Christian Broadcasting Network, is the one of the best known television evangelists in America.

Pat just returned from his annual end of the year prayer retreat. During his retreat God told him that a terrorist attack on the United States will result in a mass killing this year. In case you missed it, last year Robertson reported that God had punished Ariel Sharon with a stroke because Sharon had ceded some Israeli-controlled land to the Palestinians. In 2004 God told Pat that George Bush would win re-election by a large margin. Two years ago God told Robertson, among other things, that President Bush would be victorious in his efforts to change Social Security. Last May God told him that storms and a possible tsunami would crash into America’s coastline. It doesn’t seem to bother Robertson that God’s messages aren’t any more accurate than a horoscope or deck of cards. His faith seems unshakeable. It says something about our culture that our national media think these delusional tirades are newsworthy.

Goofballs like Robertson are a worse temptation than a bag full of organic blue corn tortilla chips. I just can’t resist ridiculing such silly beliefs. Yet I should resist. Televangelists like Robertson, Falwell and their ilk have gotten so nutty that there isn’t even much sport in poking fun at them. Sadly, they are the tip of an immense iceberg of ludicrous religious beliefs. Almost half of Americans say they believe in the literal story of creation given in Genesis (never mind that there are actually two quite distinct creation myths in Genesis). Tens of millions of our neighbors believe they will be whisked up to heaven in the rapture. Four out of five Americans believe that Jesus is going to return. One out of five Americans believe that Jesus will return in their lifetime.

In the Muslim world, things are just as bad. Millions of Muslims believe that nonbelievers should be put to death. Every day we see evidence that faithful Muslims believe that blowing up themselves and others is a righteous, heroic religious act that will get them to paradise. Incidentally, this paradise the suicide bombers are sure they are headed for is a rather shocking erotic fantasy for heterosexual men. Worse than this, recent polls show that about half of the world’s Muslims believe that suicide bombings are justified.

Faith is being used to justify and motivate horrific violence. And, sadly, this is nothing new. Think back to the Christian reign of terror during the Inquisition. Every single one of us in here today would have been a goner during the Inquisition. Consider our own witchcraft trials and hangings in Massachusetts. John Calvin believed he was doing God’s will when he burned Michael Servetus at the stake for criticizing the doctrine of the Trinity. There are lots of stories in the Hebrew scriptures of the mass slaughter of men, women and children whose only crime was living on land the Hebrews wanted. Those stories are not often taught in bible classes. Nor are passages about stoning adulterers to death. The accounts of religious faith as justification for murder is a theme throughout human history.

There is little wonder that some people believe we would be better off without any faith, without any religion, at all. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, the source of this morning’s reading, has been a best seller. So has Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Harris, while he targets most of his criticism at fundamentalist religion, also directs a lot of ire at religious moderates. Moderates, he argues, contribute to our problem by making religion more respectable and by making it more difficult to attack religion for the ignorant superstition he believes it is. He isn’t just against fundamentalism. Harris argues that we would be better off without religious faith of any kind.

The question of whether humanity would be better off without religious faith is a serious issue. It cannot be dismissed out of hand.

As I look around America, do I think that we would be better off without fundamentalism? You bet. Fundamentalism, especially the pervasive right wing evangelical variety, is not just wrong, it is dangerous. Fundamentalists who believe the world will soon end have been indifferent to protection of the environment. They oppose rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people. They oppose the teaching of biological science. Fundamentalists oppose medical research that uses stem cells. They have opposed rights for women. Our own president believes God is guiding his war effort. It makes me nostalgic for the cynicism of Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson. If we equate faith with much of what we see in America, I say faith cannot end too soon.

As we look around the world, the picture doesn’t get any better. Much of the world is infected by a militant Islam. This Islam sends suicide bombers to attack innocent people in the name of Allah. It oppresses its own people, stifling women and anyone who would express a dissenting point of view. Would we be better off if this militant version of Islam were to vanish from the earth? Absolutely.

So why don’t we just decide to get rid of faith and religion and be done with it?

Alas, the question of whether we would be better off without religious faith is the wrong question. Of course we would be better off without religious faith that calls people to hate others. Of course we would be better off without faith asks people to be willfully ignorant of the world of science and learning. 

Unfortunately, blind religious faith, along with all the terrible harm that it does, is not going to disappear because a small group of well educated skeptics wishes it would go away. I opened this sermon by poking fun at the conversations that Pat Robertson believes he has with God. I said that my poking fun at him was yielding to temptation. The trouble is that ridiculing the wacko beliefs of other people (as much fun as it is sometimes) doesn’t do any good. Believe me, I know. I have tried it for the past 40 years. Funny thing, when you make fun of what people believe they get their feelings hurt and get angry. Criticizing what others believe may be necessary sometimes, but it won’t get us terribly far.

The real question for us is this: what can we do to get past this sorry state of affairs? How can we help to move the world beyond a place where religious faith kills people and endangers every single one of us? Faith, as it exists in the world today, kills people.

One thing we need to ask ourselves is why so many millions of people believe things that are so fantastic and improbable? Why do they believe, wholeheartedly, that God wants them to kill people who do not share their faith? Why do the vast majority our neighbors believe that Jesus is coming back? Why do they believe in crazy ideas like the rapture? Why do people believe that Jesus and Mohammed floated off into heaven? Why do millions of people reject the compelling evidence of astronomy and geology—evidence that is right before their eyes—and instead believe myths and fairy tales about the origin of life and the cosmos? People who believe all kinds of impossible things are just as smart as you or I. People don’t believe stupid ideas things because they themselves are stupid.

People believe impossible things because believing these things helps to bring meaning and purpose into their lives. They believe them because to believe them makes you part of something larger. Religious faith brings order and suppresses the anxiety of doubt. Faith, even misplaced faith in mythological stories, gives people a sense of a special place in creation. Faith gives their lives shape and direction. Faith offers comfort. We see again and again throughout history that people would rather die for a misplaced faith than face a life that is an abyss of meaninglessness.

The problem I have with the criticism of religious faith made by people like Sam Harris is not that the criticism is wrong. The problem I have is that it will not, it can not, make much of a difference.

Harris’s argument, for example, hinges on the distinction he makes between faith and reason. He begins by making criticisms of religious traditions, criticisms with which most of us (but not all, to be sure) would agree. He points out the dangers of fundamentalist faith of all kinds. However, he then goes on to lump theistic fundamentalist faiths with beliefs held by Nazis and communists. Even though both of these ideologies are atheistic to the core, for Harris they qualify as “faith” because they are dogmatic and inspired people to do terrible things. Surely, there are similarities among systems of belief whether they are “religious” or not. Communists, however, would argue vigorously that their world view is rational and is utterly opposed to faith. So would Nazis. Who decides what is faith and what is reason?

The trouble with Harris and with people like him is that the distinction between “bad” faith and “good” reason is hardly objective. “Faith” tends to include those beliefs that Harris finds objectionable and “reason” are beliefs with which he agrees. On what basis do we decide which beliefs are reasonable and which beliefs are not? Harris would argue that those beliefs that can be empirically verified are reasonable.

The trouble is, “reasonable” beliefs (like scientific propositions) that can be empirically tested don’t help us much with life’s big issues. Harris believes that science can answer the fundamental human questions of good, evil and spirituality. He devotes an entire chapter to the science of good and evil. It is, in my opinion, a pitiful, poorly argued and meandering essay that comes perilously close to saying that what makes us happy is good. Big whoop. This is not very helpful or very profound. And what do we do when what makes me happy makes you unhappy?

More seriously, brilliant minds have struggled for centuries with attempts to create a purely rational foundation for ethics and for a vision of the good life. These attempts don’t affect very many people. In the last 50 years brilliant philosophers like the American John Rawls and the German Jurgen Habermas have written deep, thoughtful and ambitious works that attempt to create a rational foundation for a vision of the good. I doubt that anyone else in here today has read their books. (I only read them because they were assigned in a graduate seminar.) Nobody but a few academics read these things. For anyone to believe that science and reason are going to create an intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying vision of what in life is good is a leap of faith just as delusional as believing that the rapture is coming next week. Science and reason are not going to tell us the meaning of life.

So where does this leave us? On the one hand much of the religious beliefs that people possess are harmful. Their faith may give their lives meaning and create a community of faith that provides a sense of belonging. Their faith may give them a spiritual tradition that is a door into spiritual experience in prayer and contemplation. Yet traditional faiths do this at a terrible cost. They partake of a tribalism that leads to violence. Traditional faiths ask their followers to blind themselves to science and all modern learning.

On the other hand, we have those who see the evils inherent in such beliefs and call for and end of faith. But what do they give us in its place? They give us a vision of reason and happiness that is too cold, too erudite, too elitist, too individualistic and too hedonistic.

We need a better way. We need both an end of faith and the rebirth of faith. We need an end of faith that thinks that religion is about believing in the supernatural and in a god who directs one group of people to kill another group. We need an end of faith that advocates violence and nurtures ignorance. We need an end of faith that asks people to sacrifice in this life in order to be rewarded in the next one. We desperately need the end of this kind of faith.

Yet we just as desperately need the birth of a new kind of faith. We need a new alternative for people who seek depth, spirituality, meaning and purpose in their lives.

We need a faith that is both new and old. We need beliefs and a spiritual orientation that build on all the best things religious traditions have given humanity. We need a faith that builds upon the great teachings about compassion, community and commitment that lie at the core of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. We need also to retain the wisdom all these traditions contain about the power of religious practice. Every tradition emphasizes the value of reflection, whether it takes the form of prayer or meditation. Every tradition teaches the importance of new awareness and the power of love. Any faith we would make our own has to draw upon the past. To simply dismiss all of the past is to be both blind and arrogant.

We can, and we must, bring what is good and wise from the past. And we must also be willing to leave behind the limitations of another time. Anyone who looks to a text that is thousands of years old for an explanation of cosmology is a fool. These texts were written by people with great wisdom in some matters. They were also written by people who knew less about the physical world than any elementary school student today.

Our faith must have a place for all of human experience and a place for all people. The last thing we need today is one group claiming that God chose them. We need a faith that is not really about specific beliefs. We need faith today in the ancient sense of faith as deep trust. We need faith that is about depth—about deep love, deep experience, deep commitment. We need a faith that is open to the present and the future, not shackled to the past.

We can create such a faith. We can live such a faith. In our imperfect and halting way, we are already doing it. We can honor the past without worshipping it. We can have lives filled with hope, joy, and meaning. We can learn to love each other more deeply and to serve the world.

We must create and show another way. The only way beyond the limitations of blind faith that is a faith with its eyes wide open. The only way beyond a faith that justifies violence is a faith that teaches compassion. The only way beyond a faith imprisoned by the past is a faith that worthy of the future. The only alternative to a faith trapped by ignorance is a faith that delights in learning.

Our challenge is to help create such a community of faith and to share it widely. This is why it matters so much that we grow this little movement of ours. The world is crying for religious faith that can take us all into a future beyond violence, beyond superstition, beyond hatred, beyond fear.

Together we can do this.

Should there be an end of faith? Absolutely. The faiths of the past must die lest these faiths kill us all.

Should this be a time of a new faith? Absolutely! Let this be a time of the rebirth of faith. Let us have faith that is not about believing the impossible, but rather about being trusting all that is good and loving and gentle. Let us be faithful to our ideals of compassion. Let us be faithful to spiritual practices that open us to new awareness.

Love will guide our hearts while reason guides our minds.

This, I believe, is all the faith we will ever need. May we make it so.

Amen.