All Religions Are Not Equally Valid

14 October, 2008

Thanks to the tradition of religious freedom and the protection of
religious expression that Americans enjoy, many of us labor under a
terrible misconception.  This misconception is that religion,
because it is a personal, experiential, and wholly
subjective state, condition, or system of belief, is above or
lies outsid the realm of criticism.  Because we cannot experience
another’s spirituality, because we cannot intrude on and in his
experience of the Divine, we often (wrongly) conclude that it is not
possible to examine his religious belief critically.
 The First Amendment guarantees one’s freedom to believe as one
wishes to believe, and thus we as Americans are more than happy to
extend this univeral, unitarian, live-and-let-live approach to
virtually any religious faith or spiritual-political dogma, regardless
of content.  While we may feel very “open-minded” in so doing, we
are making a grave mistake.

Logically, only atheism is
supportable, because there is no credible, logical proof of the
existence of God.
 There are a variety of puzzles and questions that can be explored
and posed (and have been) by deist apologists, and many of these form
compelling inductive arguments asserting the possibility or likelihood
of the existence of the Divine.  (The “uncaused first cause” is the one
I find most persuasive.)  Regardless, we must stipulate when discussing
religion and spirituality that the experiential component
of religious belief exists outside of, and is impervious to, logical
analysis. It cannot be proven and is not repeatable or reproducible
from one individual to another.  In evaluating religion(s), we
cannot therefore speak to the Divine or its nature.  We are left
with what we can examine.

“What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires,” said Ayn Rand, “is not an ‘open mind,’ but an active mind — a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically.” Religion is
philosophy, and vice versa; what we must do, in evaluating any religion
or system of spiritual belief, is to look at both the source and the
expression of that faith.  These do not exist outside the realm of
logic or of critical thought; they can be studied and the facts
concerning them can be identified in a non-contradictory manner.
 We may find, in so doing, that a religion can express itself in
acceptable, even beneficial ways, despite being based on questionable
or even absurd foundations.  We may find that a religion can be
based on benign or even laudable foundations, but that its expression
— then, now, or both — ought to be questioned or even decried.
 We may also find that a religion fails in both its foundation and
expression.  The gauge we use in all cases is objective reality.
 When logic and reason are applied to a religion’s foundations and
to its expressions, that religion can be analyzed critically and we may
form conclusions about its validity.

All religions, then, are not equally valid, no matter how understanding we try to be concerning freedom of religion.  An invalid religion, therefore,
ought to be the subject of ridicule at best and of actual government
sanction at worst.  Let us look at some examples that run the
gamut.

Take, for example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
 The Mormons, as they are commonly known, are a powerful church
whose humble origin story unfolded not far from my home town in Upstate
New York.  Founder Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by an
angel, Moroni, who gave him the Book of Mormon on golden plates.
 Smith’s church grew and, despite sometimes violent persecution,
is now an established American faith.  I’ve personally attended
the Hill Cumorah pageant more than once.

In the expression of their faith, the Mormons are a laudable group.
They are friendly, engage in survivalism and preparedness (they store
food, for example), are morally upright (they are represented
disproportionately among certain government agencies for this reason),
and are extremely welcoming to those who visit them in Palmyra each
year.  When one examines the foundations
of their religion, however (a task made easier by the fact that the LDS
is not very old, and thus good records of Smith’s activities exist),
it’s painfully obvious that Smith was a fraud who concocted the
religion for his own gratification.  The Book of Mormon reads like
something crudely created to sound like the Bible.  The Mormons once believed black people were the cursed descendants of Noah’s son Ham,
and treated them accordingly as official church doctrine.  Smith
himself famously “translated” a set of artifacts known as the
Kinderhook Plates — and later analysis revealed he was making up his
fraudulent translation as he went. There’s much more, but the point is
that the Mormon faith is rooted in fraud and fabrication (on the part
of Joseph Smith), yet its expression is not harmful and is in fact arguably beneficial.

By contrast, consider Scientology, the extremely bizarre spiritual
faith made famous by the couch-jumping exploits of Tom Cruise (not to
mention other Hollywood Scientologists).  When one delves into the
actual tenets of Scientologist belief, one finds a bizarre amalgamation
that reads like it was concocted by a science fiction author — which,
of course, founder L. Ron Hubbard was.  The tenets of Scientology are
as strange and illogical as the expression of this “religion;” they
range from the belief that we are inhabited by the ethereal corpses of
deceased space aliens, to the idea that psychology and psychiatry are a
conspiracy that should be shunned (Cruise’s famous denunciation of
Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants while coping with
post-partum depression is the most famous example), to strange
practices involving quack quasi-medical do-nothing devices such as the
“engram machine.”

Ridiculous and fraudulent as Scientology’s foundations and tenets
appear, its expression is more worrisome.  The Internet-based
group Anonymous protests Scientology events for this reason; they claim
the Scientologists wage war against free speech and engage in a variety
of extralegal practices (not to mention legal harassment, drawing on
the organization’s deep pockets and legal resources), when not simply
leading people astray in spreading their ill-conceived belief system.
 The conclusion one logically draws, therefore, is that when
examining Scientology critically, both its foundations and its
expressions should be questioned.

Finally, let us look at a powerful religion whose foundations are
arguably benign (by the standards of the era in which they occurred):
 Islam.  Islam is upheld as a “religion of peace,” whose
foundations with the prophet Muhammad are now a matter of historical
record.  In its earliest days, Muhammad, who claimed to bring the
literal word of God (Allah) as set down in the scriptures of the Koran,
even preached tolerance for other faiths.  Compared to these
foundations, the contemporary expression of Islam is argued by Muslims
and non-Muslisms alike.  Islamic apologists argue that the
violence and terrorism perpetrated globally in the name of Islam is
carried out by a minority of “radicals” and “extremists.”  They
point to the scriptures within the Koran that preach peace and
tolerance to make their case.

What many people do not realize is that the Koran as it exists now
is not in chronological order, which is very important.  The concept
of “abrogation,” applied to the Koran, instructs followers to obey
later verses when thsoe verses conflict with earlier verses.  All
scriptures preaching tolerance and peace are therefore abrogated by
later scripture in which Muhammad preached violence and subjugation of
infidels, of non-believers.  More importantly, those Muslisms who
today seem capable of living at peace with non-Muslims are essentially lapsed practitioners of their religion.  The surge in violent, terrorist Islam is a return to the fundamental tenets of the religion itself.  It is the legitimate expression of what the Muslim religion actually teaches.
 As such, unless we are to believe that a majority or even a
plurality of Muslims don’t actually believe in the religion to which
they lay claim, we cannot help but conclude that the majority of
Muslims (excluding lapsed practitioners) at least tacitly accept the
doctrine of doing violence to non-believers.  The alternative is
to ignore what their religion preaches and to illogically conclude
that, while they claim to believe in the scriptures of the Koran, most
Muslims simply do not really mean it.

This brings us back to freedom of religion.  While we cannot
afford to empower the government to police religious beliefs, we ought
to, as a society bound by the rule of law, at least acknowledge that
some “religions” are not worthy of protection because they actively violate the rights of other Americans
while using the aegis of the First Amendment to do it.  A
questionably founded religion like the LDS, whose expression is
arguably harmless, is not the problem.  An absurd organization
whose quasi-religious activities may skirt or violate the law, such as
Scientology, could be, and
whether such an organization should be considered a tax-exempt church
(or a dangerous cult that intimidates critics illegally) is something
we ought to revisit, often.  A violent, terrorist religion
conceived in primitive times whose followers refuse to moderate their
beliefs in today’s age most definitely is a problem,
and I do not think Western society can afford any longer to protect
Islam as a valid religion when its fundamental tenets preach death and
subjugation of all non-Muslims.

When examining religion, then, we must look to that religion’s
origins and to its visible effects.  We must do so objectively,
dispassionately, and critically.
We must resist the urge to accept, in some unitarian spirit of
toleration, that all religious faith must necessarily be equally valid,
because clearly it is not.  Only when we are willing to be candid
about these issues will we have any hope of overcoming the problems
caused by invalid spiritual beliefs.  >>

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