A few years ago an investment index called the VIX was created. The Volatility Index is a measure of how volatile the stock market is at the moment. The VIX doesn't measure whether the market is going up or down. It measures how much it is bouncing around without moving in any one direction. If their was a VIX that measured how volatile society is at a point in time and if we studied the Social VIX for the twentieth century, 1968 would win hands down. A hell of a lot happened that year.
I was in college in 1968 and a lot was happening on campus. But it wasn't just the campus of the school I was attending. It was true of campuses across the U.S. It was also true of campuses in many other parts of the world, something I was not really aware of at the time. And it wasn't just campus volatility, volatility was everywhere.
But that was a long time ago and I had pretty much forgotten about it. Then I was at a social event and somebody said "boy, there's a lot of stuff going on now". A friend of mine said "this is nothing compared to 1968". So that's once. Then my brother sent me a book called "Postwar" by Tony Judt. It is a history of Europe after the end of World War II. It was my first introduction to the student unrest on campuses across Europe, a lot of it in 1968. That's twice. And then CNN started running an excellent series called "The '60s", that was produced by Tom Hanks, among others. One episode was simply and appropriately titled "1968". That's three times. I can take a hint. It's time for a blog post.
Now the approach of the Hanks series was thematic ("The Space Race", "Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll", etc.) rather than a strict chronology. But 1968 was justifiably singled out. And in the "1968" episode one of the talking heads was Mark Kurlansky, author of a book simply called "1968". At that point I just had to get the book and read it. I am glad I did. For those who were not around then, or for those who have forgotten, let me review some of the major events of 1968.
1968 came toward the middle of the Vietnam war. It turns out that U.S. casualties peaked in 1968 at 14,589 U.S. servicemen killed. The total U.S. deaths for the entire war was just under 60,000 so about 25% of them happened in 1968. And, to provide even more context, this number is higher than all the 9/11 deaths plus all the U.S. deaths in Iraq plus all the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan added together. But 1968 marked a turning point in Vietnam for other reasons. The My Lie massacre happened in 1968. U.S. soldiers wiped out a Vietnamese village killing over 300 civilians, many of them women and children. But details didn't become broadly known until 1969. In the mean time something even more important happened.
At the end of January the North Vietnamese launched what was later referred to as the Tet Offensive. They launched simultaneous attacks across pretty much all of South Vietnam. One of the most well known attacks (it happened close to a large media presence) was the attack on the U.S. Embassy in what was then called Saigon. The attack was a failure for the North from a military perspective but it ultimately turned out to be a giant political success. Up to this point the U.S. approach was "kill bad guys". The theory was eventually enough of the bad guys would be dead and victory would be ours. With this in mind, the official line was "we are killing a lot of bad guys so we will achieve victory soon". But Tet resulted in a large shift in the number of people who believed the official line. Walter Cronkite, then the most respected name in journalism, went to Vietnam. Cronkite came back and characterized the situation as "mired in a stalemate". It took some time but the U.S. strategy shifted from aggressive U.S. military led action to "Vietnam-ization", essentially declaring victory and leaving after turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. The U.S. military got out, although the CIA stayed. And, in 1975 the North won. So, for a number of reasons 1968 was the turning point in terms of the U.S. and the war in Vietnam.
1968 was notable for one particular civil rights event. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. By 1968 the civil rights movement had peaked to some extent. The movement was very effective in the '50s and early '60s. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. But with the passing of the act the focus moved from the South to the North. The movement was broadly popular when what we were seeing was vicious white people in authority beating up clean cut black people in the South. But when the focus moved to blacks getting blue collar jobs historically held by whites and blacks trying to move into traditionally white neighborhoods, as it did when the focus moved from Selma Alabama to Chicago Illinois, then the movement became much less popular.
And the civil rights movement had been successful by employing nonviolent means. But a new generation of leaders came to the fore who were much more comfortable employing violent means. So Dr. King was being overshadowed by others like the Black Panthers. King felt this deeply in the weeks before his death. An attempted demonstration organized by King to support Memphis garbage workers just before he was killed ended up turning violent. And, of course, his assassination was a quintessentially violent act. And the riots that followed the news of his assassination were marked by violence. So 1968 was important to civil rights but in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary sense.
Kurlansky dates the feminist movement to 1968. A number of women held a demonstration at the Miss America pageant that got a lot of coverage. The feminist movement, like many others is often more accurately characterized as a evolution rather than an revolution. "Sex and the Single Girl" had been published in 1962. "The Feminine Mystique" had been published in 1963. The National Organization for Women had been founded in 1966. But none of these events had broken out into the broader public context. The Miss America demonstration was widely covered in the media and got people talking. People started talking about bra burning and equal pay. "What is the proper place for women in society" became a legitimate subject for discussion. And in 1968 the first woman was allowed to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. And the first union to represent then Stewardesses now Flight Attendants won major concessions from airlines in 1968.
So in the U.S. you had civil rights, the Vietnam War and Women's rights on the agenda and stirring things up. (I'm skipping over the Assassination of Bobby Kennedy while he was running for president and lots of other things in the interests of brevity.) This led to a lot of student unrest on college campuses across the country. Even if you think the students were crazy it makes some kind of sense that there was a lot of student unrest in the U.S. But Judt spends a lot of time documenting similar student unrest broadly across Europe. And Kurlansky talks about student unrest in Mexico, Italy, France, and Germany. What's going on?
The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were specific to the U.S. And Kurlansky does a good job of documenting the roots of the women's movement in the civil rights movement. Women's rights are civil rights and a lot of the early leaders of the women's movement got their early training in the civil rights movement. So they knew what to do and how to do it because of earlier civil rights experience. But none of this was true of these other parts of the world. So what was up with all that? That's a question I will get back to later. But for the moment I want to talk about Czechoslovakia.
Another major event in 1968 was the "Prague Spring", named after the capital of Czechoslovakia. (Czechoslovakia has since been peacefully split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.) For unique and peculiar reasons an experiment was tried out in Prague in the spring of 1968. Communism is the name of a philosophy developed by Marx and Engels in France in the 1800s. The first country that was ostensibly governed according to communist principles was the USSR (now Russia) starting in about 1920. As the father figure of communism, the story goes, the USSR is "first among equals". But is that really true? In Prague they ran the experiment. They did not try to move away from Communism. They did not try to move away from a close relationship with the USSR. What they did try was to move toward democracy and a free press. Now on paper communist countries had always been democratic. They held elections regularly and had extremely high voter participation. It just so happened that the communist guy always won.
A long time communist with close ties to the USSR named Dubcek rose to the top spot in Czechoslovakia. He was a true believer in communism so he didn't want to change that. He wanted to keep the communist party in charge and use communist principles to guide policy. But he did not see this as incompatible with a free press and a general relaxation in what was permitted behavior. But it turned out to be too much for the leaders in the USSR (Brezhnev and Kosygin). They organized a military invasion from neighboring "east block" countries. Dubcek lasted the year out but just barely.
This event had lasting consequences. It exposed the leadership in the USSR as not so much communists as your run of the mill autocratic dictators. In a clash between maintaining power and communist ideology the call would always be made in favor of power. This completely destroyed the intellectual underpinning of the communist movement. It took another 20 years to sweep communism away as a governing philosophy. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia completely delegitimized communism as a philosophy. After the invasion any action associated with a "communist" country could only be analyzed in a pure power politics framework. This is a weakness. It may not seem to be that big of a weakness. But countries depend on being seen as acting out of a sense of good will and moral rightness at least some of the time. It was no longer possible to see actions of communist countries in this light and the seemingly small hurts accumulated as a result eventually built up to the point where they became fatal. Now let me return to the broader picture.
Kurlansky spends considerable effort trying to figure out why "1968" happened in 1968. He points out the critical role played by the media. If an event wasn't covered in the media it effectively didn't happen. The media has a lot of flexibility when it comes to "editorial judgment", deciding what to cover and how much to cover it. But there is one thing the media can't resist. In the context of foreign conflicts it goes by the alliterative name of "bang bang" footage. Footage of people getting beat up, shot, or blown up almost always makes it on the air. Another way to put it is a phrase often associated with local news coverage: "if it bleeds, it leads".
Kurlansky describes a telling incident involving a sheriff named Pritchett who presided over a place called Albany, Georgia. Early in his career King ran an extensive civil rights campaign in the area. It was a total bust. It wasn't that bad things weren't happening. They were. And it wasn't that King was unable to pull off mass demonstrations resulting an large numbers of arrests. He was. But sheriff Pritchett was unfailingly polite and scrupulously avoided violence. So there was no "bang bang" footage. There were no pictures of bleeding bodies because no shots were fired and nobody was beat up. As a result the media stayed away in droves and no one has heard of the Albany Georgia civil rights campaign.
King and other civil rights leaders learned from this experience. In the future they sought out people like sheriff "Bull" Connor and various other representatives of entrenched power who could be reliably counted on to provide lots of bad behavior for the TV people to put on the nightly news. In the absence of actual blood and gore it was occasionally acceptable to substitute behavior like that of Governor Wallace when he blocked doorways and proposed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" as the cameras rolled. But in terms of explaining why "1968" happened in 1968 this attribute of how news decisions are made actually predated 1968 by quite a bit. So we must look elsewhere.
Kurlansky attributes it to changes in the technology of how news gets from the scene to the TV screen. I think he is right in his general thesis but that his details are wrong. The first thing to note is the intrusion of "TV screen" in the above sentence. TV news was a very primitive business in the '50s generally resembling those old timey newsreels that used to be shown in movie theaters in the '30s and '40s. But things improved quickly and by 1968 most people were getting the bulk of their news from TV. And moving pictures are much more compelling than text or even still pictures. "bang bang" footage is wonderful at attracting eyeballs, even on a black and white TV. A TV news broadcast that could routinely show "bang bang" was definitely going to take up most of the "news oxygen" in the room.
Kurlansky talks about two innovations. One is video tape and the other is satellite transmission. Let me take each in turn.
The importance of satellite transmission was that it made it possible to move pictures great distances (i.e. from Saigon to New York) quickly. And by 1968 we were getting a lot of pictures from Vietnam. But satellite transmission at that time was too primitive to be reliable. It was only suitable for the odd stunt in the '60s. Instead I think the actual key innovation for international stories like Vietnam was the jet airplane. Jet planes are faster, more comfortable, more reliable, and cheaper than propeller planes. So by 1968 air travel had expanded massively. With jets you could throw some film or video on a plane and move it great distances quickly. This made it possible to get moving pictures from Vietnam to New York, the center of the U.S. news universe in 1968, in less than 24 hours.
Another technological innovation, one that was very helpful in covering domestic stories, was "cable". These were high tech wires that permitted TV signals to be transmitted long distances. At this time they were far too expensive and persnickety to be used as part of a "cable TV" system, the way we now think of "cable". But starting in 1956 NBC was technologically able to have its flagship news broadcast feature two anchors, one in New York and the other in Washington DC. The show switched between anchors as it moved from story to story. This was just barely possible in 1956. By 1968 it was possible to use intercity cables to instantaneously ship video to New York from many medium and large cities scattered around the country. So if a riot happened pretty much anywhere in the country during the day, video from the riot could air on the news on the same day.
Kurlansky's point on video also has to do with increasing flexibility and speeding things up. Before video news footage was shot on 16 mm black and white film. The film then had to be developed, printed, and edited. Both the film stock and the processing were expensive and time consuming. This caused camera men to be very careful what they shot. Shooting 15 minutes to get 1 minute of useful film was ok. Shooting three hours was not. But video tape was reusable. If you shot 3 hours and only used a minute you just recycled the rest. And video was quicker and easier to edit. So it became possible to shoot a lot more. This in turn, made it more likely you got the "money" shot. The thinking changed from "be careful" to "shoot everything". The problem with this is that video based news cameras did not really become practical until Sony introduced the Betamax in 1975. But by 1968 studio video equipment was available at TV stations around the country. Film (now often color film) could be shot, rushed to a nearby TV station, transferred to video, edited, and cabled to New York in hours not days. The switch to end to end video was not realized until the late '70s but the general speedup of the hybrid system was making an impact by 1968.
Another thing that is well documented in Kurlansky's book is that various groups were learning from each other. A technique would be pioneered in the civil rights movement. It would then move to the anti-war movement. And it would eventually be used by the feminist movement. In the same way that by the '60s rock 'n roll artists were intimately aware what other musicians were doing, the various protest movements were very aware of what other protest movements were doing.
And there was a cultural thing going on that can be summarized by the phrase "question authority". I was personally aware of this at the time. If we look at what this country says it stands for, things like the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Declaration of Independence), "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and out Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution) , and "all men are created equal" (Declaration of Independence) and then we look at what this country actually does there is often a contradiction. Segregation and unequal treatment of black people is not consistent with "all men are created equal". A literal reading of the words is consistent with a "separate but equal" approach to women. But cultures evolve. And it is reasonable to evolve "all men are created equal" to "all men and women are created equal". So our professed beliefs are incompatible with an unequal treatment of women.
The Vietnam war is a more complicated situation. The Constitution specifically states that Congress, not the President, is the only body that can "declare war". The work around for this is the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Congress passed it. The executive took it as sufficient authority to prosecute the war. Legalistic arguments can be made on both sides but that is not the principal bone of contention. At its deepest foundation the basic argument was not the fact of the war but how it was prosecuted. The U.S. had a much larger industrial base. It had a much larger population. It had much better technology. But we lost anyhow.
Imagine we had gone into Vietnam and won. Imagine further that the whole thing had taken six months, only cost a billion dollars, and only have cost a few dozen U.S. lives. Under those circumstances people would have decided it was not worth arguing over. But none of those "imagine"s were true. So people carefully examined why we got involved in the first place and found the whole process wanting. And hanging over it all was the fact that our government did not play straight with us. If you want more on the subject then check out my "Vietnam" blog post at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html. But all this called into question the basic "we're the good guys" assumption we have about ourselves. We meddled in the affairs of a foreign country. We spent a lot of money. We got a lot of people killed. And specifically at My Lie (and probably at a bunch of other times and places) we killed a bunch of women and children. We lost. None of that is consistent with the behavior of good guys.
More generally the first couple of decades after World War II were good times. The economy was growing. Life was getting better for everyone. It was getting better faster for some but it seemed to be getting at least a little better for everyone. And we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We had just won the war. We were having the "baby boom" and as a result investing a lot of money in education. And we were teaching ourselves about "American" values. And then there was the cold war. The commies were the bad guys. How do we know? 'Cause we do good stuff and they do bad stuff. And, since it looked like the cold war would be a long and difficult struggle, all this good stuff/bad stuff was taught in our schools.
We were the "all men are created equal" people. Of course, the commies said they were too but they were lying. And one way you could tell they were lying is because they built the Iron Curtain and put down uprisings (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, others) and suppressed free speech. We, on the other hand, had the two longest open borders in the world (U.S. - Canada and U.S. - Mexico). We stand for freedom and, if you stand for freedom, you don't need no stinking fences. (I will pass up the opportunity to discuss the current "build the dang fence" on the U.S. - Mexico border debate here.) That's what we were taught in school. And, by the way the communist economic model sucks. The democratic (never call it "capitalist") economic model is much better. Just look at all the cars and refrigerators and such. (In 1959 Richard Nixon, then vice president, literally had a debate on economic systems with Nikita Khrushchev, then "Chairman" of the USSR, at an exhibit in Moscow that featured, among other things, kitchen appliances).
The apparent contradiction between words and actions was very troubling. But maybe there was a good explanation. What's the harm in asking? After all, our core values included free speech and representative government. And it's a given that we are not oppressed like those people who live under the control of those bad old communists. So people asked. And the response in way too many cases was "shut up and sit down, you're bothering me". Now it might be that it was not the right time or not the right place. But there was also no good response to "what is the right time?" or "what is the right place?" either. Certainly some people were willing to discuss these matters. But for the most part they were the pro-civil rights, anti-war, and pro-women's rights people. And they were not the people who held the reigns of power.
So, if the good guys were trying to change the system in good ways, how did it all go wrong? Kurlansky brings a lot to the discussion on this subject. His basic conclusion is that there was a lot of confusion, incoherence, and a disdain for anything practical. This was something I did not take much notice of at the time.
As but one of many examples, he talks about the poet Allen Ginsberg. The 1968 Democratic convention was held in Chicago. What was later described as a "police riot" broke out and was captured on TV. Hundreds were beaten or arrested. Ginsberg was a peaceful soul. His solution to all the chaos: have everyone chant "Om". Needless to say his "solution" was completely ineffective and sounded idiotic to normal people. And there were innumerable interminable debates, hundreds of marches, hundreds of sit ins. But in a lot of cases it was hard to figure out exactly what would fix the problem that the debate, march, or sit in was about. Kurlansky quotes numerous key players as saying "we were making it up as we went along" and "we never did end up deciding what we wanted". During this period there was a very popular newspaper comic strip called "Li'l Abner". It was drawn by Al Capp. Capp coined the acronym SWINE - Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything. Capp was good at getting at deep truths in what was ostensibly a light hearted comic strip.
So there was a core of goodness and truth involved in the chaos that characterized 1968. But there was a whole lot of anarchy, irresponsible behavior, and general chaos involved too. The intensity of it all put a lot of people off. A lot of people were asking very loudly for a lot of change. Many people felt simply overwhelmed. And then there were the people of good will who asked the agents of change "what do you want?" Too often they got "Om" level impracticality: "all you need is love". What were these people to conclude except that "the demonstrators have no clue". For good reasons and bad this generated a backlash and delegitimized liberals. Nixon ran on a "law and order" platform in 1968 and won. He then cracked down on anyone he didn't like, dragged the Vietnam War out until 1975, and delivered underwhelming economic results. He was, however, successfully able to derail the women's movement and put civil rights on the back burner. He was eventually impeached for Watergate.
The country reacted by then electing the liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter. But his presidency is generally rated a failure (bad economy, embarrassment in Iran). Carter was followed after one term by Reagan. Nixon was more of an opportunist than a doctrinaire conservative. But Regan was conservative to his bones. Liberalism has yet to recover from the excesses of the '60s. But the rate of change has accelerated. We now get a new iPhone a year. Gay rights has gone from a "third rail" issue (don't touch it - you'll get electrocuted) to a good "vote getter" issue that politicians are happy to embrace. Both the first iPhone and the old view of gay rights are only a decade old. The ability for individuals to access the Internet is now about 2 decades old. I have an old school car that you start by turning the key in the ignition, just the way you did in 1968 (and before). Many new cars sense the presence of your key while it is in your pocket. You literally push a button and go.
What has changed is people's ability to cope with a rapid rate of change. We now have a lot of experience with everything around us changing all the time. And it's not just new things like iPhones. It's old things like cars. It's gotten so that we now take as a given that news about an event taking place ten thousand miles away is available within seconds on our mobile phone. In 1968 the ability to talk to a friend who lived in another state without having to involve an operator was relatively new. And the ability to directly connect to a phone located on another continent was only to be found in science fiction movies. In fact, a movie that was released in 1968, "2001, a Space Odyssey", contained a scene involving what was then called a Picture Phone. Today we know it as Skype. And today a Skype call to someone in another country or a "long distance" call to a good chunk of the world does not cost extra. In 1968 a "long distance" call was quite expensive, running perhaps a dollar a minute or more.
So would people be as put out by the doings of 1968 now? I think they would. What we have become used to is technological change. We take it as a given that bigger, better, faster, gadgets are just around the corner. And sure, the first time you sit down in a "push button" car, as I did about a year ago, it's disconcerting. But it takes only a few minutes to learn enough to figure out how to operate it well enough to get where you want to go. But the changes that gave people the most trouble in 1968 were social changes. And, although society's opinion of gay rights, a social change if there ever was one, has "come a long way, baby" for most people, there are a lot of people who are extremely put out and want to go back to "the good old days". And we are still battling over civil rights and women's rights. And to this day there is a large group of people who are just as strongly of the opinion that "the old ways are the best ways" on both of these subjects now as they ever were.
There aren't as many active agents of chaos as there were in 1968 and that's a good thing. But I think we have also gotten better at fooling ourselves. We now are much better at keeping our darker impulses hidden. And that actually makes those darker impulses harder to deal with. Rednecks setting police dogs on well behaved black people is pretty out in the open. It's a bad thing and it's pretty obvious it's a bad thing. Less obvious methods of discrimination can be just as effective in the long run as the more obvious methods of yesteryear. But they are much harder to deal with because there is no "bang bang" video to shock everybody into action with.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Dealing with Religious Pests
I just had a pleasant experience dealing with a couple of Mormon "missionaries" who knocked on my door this evening. It was the second instance within the last few days of someone knocking on my door with a religious message. The first one was not persistent. He was willing to take a quick "no" for an answer. But a feature of modern society is the all too common situation where someone wants to convert you. And like the Mormons and unlike the other guy it is often hard to get rid of them. I have been musing for some time on the general subject of religion. I think I have come up with some original thinking on the subject. I used my thoughts on the Mormons. Judging by my success I recommend them to others. I think they are a useful contribution to the discussion of religion in general. So I thank the Mormon visitation for giving me an excuse to lay them out. Even if you don't want to accept them as your own personal belief feel free to trot them out as an aid in dealing with Mormons or other religious types that are bothering you.
What I have come up with is a general argument against most religions. The beauty of it is that many parts of it do not depend on the specific beliefs of any specific religion. There is a part that has to be customized to fit a specific religion. But even that part does not require you to know a lot about whichever specific religion you are dealing with at the moment. Most people would think that a general argument is a weak argument that can be dodged using something like "my religion does not have that problem". But, as I will demonstrate, the argument depends on an almost universal attribute of religions. And any religion that doesn't have that attribute is also the kind of religion that doesn't send people out to pester you. To see what I am talking about let me sketch out the bare bones of the argument.
Another objection is that there are some religions that are not behavior modification oriented. Good for them. But none of the adherents of these religions accost you as you are going about your daily life. So I am going to ignore these religions. All of the popular western religions and many eastern ones definitely fall into the "behavior modification" category. They all have rules for "right behavior" and "wrong behavior". The details change as to what behaviors fall into the "right", "wrong", and "theologically unimportant" categories. But these are details we can ignore for the moment. Each religion gets to do its own categorization. With these two general observations out of the way let me proceed to the specifics.
I think most religious people would find it reasonable to say that their religion originates with God. It may be that a religion was created by an inspired individual. But this is more about the details of how the religion God has created are transmitted to us mortals than it is about where the tenets of the religion originate. Surely God is competent enough to make sure that the inspired individual does a good job. So we can again ignore the details. It doesn't matter how the religion got created or how it got transmitted., The key is that it is God's creation.
And if a specific religion is not God's creation why are we supposed to buy into it? If religion A is God's creation and religion B is not why do we want to have anything to do with religion B? Religions inevitably contradict each other. If they didn't they would be the same religion. In the areas where the two religions agree there is no advantage to paying attention to the "B" position. And in the areas where they disagree we are risking engaging in bad behavior by going with B. And, by the way, most religions agree that God only created one religion so all the other religions are wrong to a greater or lesser extent.
So we have a specific religion namely the religion of the person in front of us. Adherents are usually uncomfortable characterizing the objective of their religion as behavior modification. But assume for a moment that the overriding objective of their religion was not behavior modification. Then what's the point of all the rules? You are supposed to believe certain things. You are supposed to act in a certain way. Why? If it is entirely ok to reject the beliefs and it is ok to act inappropriately then the belief system and the rules are unimportant. If this is so then adhering to the tenets of that religion is unimportant. If this is so then shouldn't we go looking for an important religion?
Now the religion gets to set the level of importance associated with any specific belief or action. It can say that this belief is of major importance and that that act is of minor importance. Again, they get to set the rules. But it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to some beliefs. And it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to members increasing the amount of "good" actions that its members take and/or decreasing the amount of "bad" actions that its members take. And we can ignore beliefs and actions where the behavior is the same in the absence of the religion and focus on the cases where the religion changes behavior. Religions are supposed to be important. If the point is to make minor and trivial modifications to people's behavior then the benefit is not in line with the effort. The religion is fatally flawed.
Most religions characterize their God as "all powerful" or "all knowing" or at least more powerful and/or important than other Gods. That's the "religion" perspective. Most religions also believe that their God created the world around us, For contrast let us adopt the "science" perspective for a moment so we can do a thought experiment. Imagine asking a scientist, any scientist, the following:
The final point is where the disagreement should set in. Proponents of most religions believe their particular religion is pretty wonderful. But now you have changed the source of the disagreement away from its usual ground. I have found that the people that want to talk religion with me are pretty dogmatic. They have a script and they want to stay on script. There are a number of objections that they are prepared to deal with but they are pretty much at sea when confronted with anything else. In these situations where they have not prepared they tend to go to one of a small number of rote generic responses that usually don't address the objective you have raised.
But in response you just bring them back to the basics. "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that God created your religion?" "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion has a purpose?" "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion is about behavior modification?" "Are you disagreeing with the fact that your God is all knowing or at least very smart?" They will try to fight you on the "behavior modification" part. But it is pretty much impossible for them to have any problems with the others. And, assuming you deal successfully with the "behavior modification" push back they are pretty much stuck. So let me spend a moment on the behavior modification issue.
They don't like to admit it but it is easy to box them in. Religions have beliefs their members are expected to subscribe to. "Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God?" "Do you believe Jesus died on the cross to wash away original sin?" "Do you believe that the angel Maroni visited Joseph Smith?" Religions have actions their members are expected to take and actions their members are expected to avoid. "Do you believe you are supposed to be baptized?" "Do you believe you are supposed to go to church once a week?" "Do you believe you are supposed to tithe?"
The beliefs and actions are specific to the specific religion. And you have to have at least a modest knowledge of the specific religion to come up with appropriate examples. But in all fairness believers really can't get away from the behavior modification aspect of their religion. So what they usually do is change the subject. But just circle back. Repeat the belief or action and invite them to deny the truth of your contention. They really can't get away from it. Now they may challenge some specific contention. And they may be right. If so then admit you got that specific contention wrong and move on to another. But only do this if they make a credible objection.
Once the "behavior modification" issue is disposed of we are on the "how effective is your religion" issue. This is not an issue any of them is prepared for. And theoretically they have a response along the lines of "very effective". But it is usually easy to find a way to counter this. No religion has secured a majority of the world's population as adherents. In fact, if we drill down to the various major and especially minor branches of any specific religion less than one percent of the world population are followers. Many religions (Southern Baptists, Mormons, modern mega-churches) are very modern. They date back less than 200 years. Christianity dates back only two thousand years and Judaism perhaps 3,000. That means that most of the people who live or have lived on this earth missed the boat. That sounds like pretty inferior work.
Now we can dive into the specific tenants of the specific religion. Where is the evidence that adherents actually believe what they are supposed to believe or do what they are supposed to do? A classic example of this is Catholics and birth control. The official position of the Catholic Church is that birth control as a no-no. But something like 90% of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. My point is NOT that Catholics are hypocrites. It is that the Catholic Church is poor at getting their own believers to adhere to their own teachings. The general argument is "the church is inefficient". You have to tailor the specifics of the inefficiency to the specifics of the church you are dealing with. Once you have come up with reasons why a specific church is inefficient your can return to the general argument. Is inefficiency a mark of smart designer? A third rate engineer would toss a design this obviously defective into the trash and go back to the drawing board. So your church is fatally deficient.
Religious types will try to distract you at this point. My Mormon guys started talking about "perfection". My response was that your church gets to decide how important or achievable perfection is. The point is not whether this or that is or could be perfect. The important point is how effective is the Mormon church in modifying behavior appropriately in response to their belief on perfection, whatever that belief is.
The question shifts from "what should the goal be" to "how good at achieving the goal is a particular religion". The religion is free to set whatever goal they want except that the goal must be one that people would not move toward in the absence of the religion in question. (If the goal is to "get people to do what they would otherwise do" then the goal has no value.) But once the goal is set the important question becomes how effective the religion is at modifying behavior in the appropriate directions. If they are bad at it then their religion is not legitimate. God would have done a better job.
Most of what these people want to talk about is "what should the goal be". Your answer is "the goal should be whatever your religion says it should be". In other words, whatever they want to talk about is not in contention. You concede it immediately. Then you pivot to the question of "how effective is your religion at achieving the goal your religion has set". The answer is usually that they are not very effective. And, by the way, you immediately concede the usual "good versus evil" questions. Whatever their particular religion decides is ok. But you pivot to the question of how effective is their religion at increasing the good stuff and decreasing the evil stuff.
One of the standard arguments my Mormons trotted out on me was "how can you question our religion if you don't know all the details of our religious beliefs". At this point you are supposed to accept a copy of "The Book of Mormon" from them and study it carefully. I was initially unsuccessful in dealing with this argument. I pointed out that there were many thousands of religions and asked if I was supposed to be familiar with all of them. They dodged this question and went back to repeating their original argument. But they could see that they weren't getting anywhere so they left. But that conceded the argument to me. "How can you argue that I should be familiar with your religious beliefs if you are unwilling to become familiar with mine?" They are hypocrites. I did give them points for neatness as they crossed the street in search of an easier mark.
I do actually believe my own argument. I believe believers believe that their religious beliefs are "the word of God". And I agree with them that if some entity created the world around us (they believe the entity is their God, I don't) then that entity was really smart. But all the religions I know anything about seem dumb to me. And I see no indication that leads me to believe that there is some religion out there I don't know about that is not dumb. So I have a hard time believing that an entity that was as smart as the hypothetical "creator" would create or even support any of the "religions" I am familiar with.
I go even farther than that. I don't know why such a hypothetical "creator" would actually care about what religions say it cares about. Why would it care whether or not we congregate in a building of a specific shape once every seven days? Why would it care whether or not we utter certain incantations? Why would it care whether we treat each other badly? And what would its definition of "badly" be? Why would it confer a favor on one person in one situation and not another? And why would it have an interest in assisting one specific group in slaughtering another specific group?
But some religions at some times have said we should congregate in cruciform churches every Sunday. And religions say we should pray (and some religions at some times even tell us what language we should pray in as if God is incapable of translating). And religions promise that prayers will be answered sometimes but they can't tell us which prayers will be answered and why or why not. And most religions say "thou shall not kill" but then give us a long list of exceptions for when we are encouraged to kill (or let people the religion disapproves of die). And as long as we have had written history we have had documented instances of army after army marching out on the field of battle each accompanied by its own set of religious figures who swear that "God is on our side". This might make a small amount of sense if on a particular battlefield the various religious figures represented different religions. Then you could argue that it was "God against God and may the best God win". But in all too many cases we don't even have that fig leaf. All the various religious representatives represent the same religion and, to hear them tell it, each can simultaneously authoritatively deliver the undivided affections of the same God but each to a different army.
What I have come up with is a general argument against most religions. The beauty of it is that many parts of it do not depend on the specific beliefs of any specific religion. There is a part that has to be customized to fit a specific religion. But even that part does not require you to know a lot about whichever specific religion you are dealing with at the moment. Most people would think that a general argument is a weak argument that can be dodged using something like "my religion does not have that problem". But, as I will demonstrate, the argument depends on an almost universal attribute of religions. And any religion that doesn't have that attribute is also the kind of religion that doesn't send people out to pester you. To see what I am talking about let me sketch out the bare bones of the argument.
- A religion is created by God to achieve a purpose.
- That purpose is behavior modification. The objective of the religion is to increase the amount of "good" behavior and/or decrease the amount of "bad" behavior relative to the amount that would occur in the absence of the existence of God's religion.
- God is "all knowing" or, at least, very smart.
- Your religion (here's where we get specific) does a poor job of achieving its objective and is therefore false. It is not the true religion.
Another objection is that there are some religions that are not behavior modification oriented. Good for them. But none of the adherents of these religions accost you as you are going about your daily life. So I am going to ignore these religions. All of the popular western religions and many eastern ones definitely fall into the "behavior modification" category. They all have rules for "right behavior" and "wrong behavior". The details change as to what behaviors fall into the "right", "wrong", and "theologically unimportant" categories. But these are details we can ignore for the moment. Each religion gets to do its own categorization. With these two general observations out of the way let me proceed to the specifics.
I think most religious people would find it reasonable to say that their religion originates with God. It may be that a religion was created by an inspired individual. But this is more about the details of how the religion God has created are transmitted to us mortals than it is about where the tenets of the religion originate. Surely God is competent enough to make sure that the inspired individual does a good job. So we can again ignore the details. It doesn't matter how the religion got created or how it got transmitted., The key is that it is God's creation.
And if a specific religion is not God's creation why are we supposed to buy into it? If religion A is God's creation and religion B is not why do we want to have anything to do with religion B? Religions inevitably contradict each other. If they didn't they would be the same religion. In the areas where the two religions agree there is no advantage to paying attention to the "B" position. And in the areas where they disagree we are risking engaging in bad behavior by going with B. And, by the way, most religions agree that God only created one religion so all the other religions are wrong to a greater or lesser extent.
So we have a specific religion namely the religion of the person in front of us. Adherents are usually uncomfortable characterizing the objective of their religion as behavior modification. But assume for a moment that the overriding objective of their religion was not behavior modification. Then what's the point of all the rules? You are supposed to believe certain things. You are supposed to act in a certain way. Why? If it is entirely ok to reject the beliefs and it is ok to act inappropriately then the belief system and the rules are unimportant. If this is so then adhering to the tenets of that religion is unimportant. If this is so then shouldn't we go looking for an important religion?
Now the religion gets to set the level of importance associated with any specific belief or action. It can say that this belief is of major importance and that that act is of minor importance. Again, they get to set the rules. But it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to some beliefs. And it is important that the religion ascribe some importance to members increasing the amount of "good" actions that its members take and/or decreasing the amount of "bad" actions that its members take. And we can ignore beliefs and actions where the behavior is the same in the absence of the religion and focus on the cases where the religion changes behavior. Religions are supposed to be important. If the point is to make minor and trivial modifications to people's behavior then the benefit is not in line with the effort. The religion is fatally flawed.
Most religions characterize their God as "all powerful" or "all knowing" or at least more powerful and/or important than other Gods. That's the "religion" perspective. Most religions also believe that their God created the world around us, For contrast let us adopt the "science" perspective for a moment so we can do a thought experiment. Imagine asking a scientist, any scientist, the following:
Assume for a moment that the parts of the world that you study were created by some outside entity. Now, given what you know about how the parts of the world that you study, how smart do you think that outside entity is?I think all or nearly all scientists would answer "extremely smart". So religious people and scientific people would agree that what religious people call God is extremely smart. So again our premises seems pretty much self evident.
The final point is where the disagreement should set in. Proponents of most religions believe their particular religion is pretty wonderful. But now you have changed the source of the disagreement away from its usual ground. I have found that the people that want to talk religion with me are pretty dogmatic. They have a script and they want to stay on script. There are a number of objections that they are prepared to deal with but they are pretty much at sea when confronted with anything else. In these situations where they have not prepared they tend to go to one of a small number of rote generic responses that usually don't address the objective you have raised.
But in response you just bring them back to the basics. "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that God created your religion?" "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion has a purpose?" "Are you saying you disagree with the fact that your religion is about behavior modification?" "Are you disagreeing with the fact that your God is all knowing or at least very smart?" They will try to fight you on the "behavior modification" part. But it is pretty much impossible for them to have any problems with the others. And, assuming you deal successfully with the "behavior modification" push back they are pretty much stuck. So let me spend a moment on the behavior modification issue.
They don't like to admit it but it is easy to box them in. Religions have beliefs their members are expected to subscribe to. "Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God?" "Do you believe Jesus died on the cross to wash away original sin?" "Do you believe that the angel Maroni visited Joseph Smith?" Religions have actions their members are expected to take and actions their members are expected to avoid. "Do you believe you are supposed to be baptized?" "Do you believe you are supposed to go to church once a week?" "Do you believe you are supposed to tithe?"
The beliefs and actions are specific to the specific religion. And you have to have at least a modest knowledge of the specific religion to come up with appropriate examples. But in all fairness believers really can't get away from the behavior modification aspect of their religion. So what they usually do is change the subject. But just circle back. Repeat the belief or action and invite them to deny the truth of your contention. They really can't get away from it. Now they may challenge some specific contention. And they may be right. If so then admit you got that specific contention wrong and move on to another. But only do this if they make a credible objection.
Once the "behavior modification" issue is disposed of we are on the "how effective is your religion" issue. This is not an issue any of them is prepared for. And theoretically they have a response along the lines of "very effective". But it is usually easy to find a way to counter this. No religion has secured a majority of the world's population as adherents. In fact, if we drill down to the various major and especially minor branches of any specific religion less than one percent of the world population are followers. Many religions (Southern Baptists, Mormons, modern mega-churches) are very modern. They date back less than 200 years. Christianity dates back only two thousand years and Judaism perhaps 3,000. That means that most of the people who live or have lived on this earth missed the boat. That sounds like pretty inferior work.
Now we can dive into the specific tenants of the specific religion. Where is the evidence that adherents actually believe what they are supposed to believe or do what they are supposed to do? A classic example of this is Catholics and birth control. The official position of the Catholic Church is that birth control as a no-no. But something like 90% of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. My point is NOT that Catholics are hypocrites. It is that the Catholic Church is poor at getting their own believers to adhere to their own teachings. The general argument is "the church is inefficient". You have to tailor the specifics of the inefficiency to the specifics of the church you are dealing with. Once you have come up with reasons why a specific church is inefficient your can return to the general argument. Is inefficiency a mark of smart designer? A third rate engineer would toss a design this obviously defective into the trash and go back to the drawing board. So your church is fatally deficient.
Religious types will try to distract you at this point. My Mormon guys started talking about "perfection". My response was that your church gets to decide how important or achievable perfection is. The point is not whether this or that is or could be perfect. The important point is how effective is the Mormon church in modifying behavior appropriately in response to their belief on perfection, whatever that belief is.
The question shifts from "what should the goal be" to "how good at achieving the goal is a particular religion". The religion is free to set whatever goal they want except that the goal must be one that people would not move toward in the absence of the religion in question. (If the goal is to "get people to do what they would otherwise do" then the goal has no value.) But once the goal is set the important question becomes how effective the religion is at modifying behavior in the appropriate directions. If they are bad at it then their religion is not legitimate. God would have done a better job.
Most of what these people want to talk about is "what should the goal be". Your answer is "the goal should be whatever your religion says it should be". In other words, whatever they want to talk about is not in contention. You concede it immediately. Then you pivot to the question of "how effective is your religion at achieving the goal your religion has set". The answer is usually that they are not very effective. And, by the way, you immediately concede the usual "good versus evil" questions. Whatever their particular religion decides is ok. But you pivot to the question of how effective is their religion at increasing the good stuff and decreasing the evil stuff.
One of the standard arguments my Mormons trotted out on me was "how can you question our religion if you don't know all the details of our religious beliefs". At this point you are supposed to accept a copy of "The Book of Mormon" from them and study it carefully. I was initially unsuccessful in dealing with this argument. I pointed out that there were many thousands of religions and asked if I was supposed to be familiar with all of them. They dodged this question and went back to repeating their original argument. But they could see that they weren't getting anywhere so they left. But that conceded the argument to me. "How can you argue that I should be familiar with your religious beliefs if you are unwilling to become familiar with mine?" They are hypocrites. I did give them points for neatness as they crossed the street in search of an easier mark.
I do actually believe my own argument. I believe believers believe that their religious beliefs are "the word of God". And I agree with them that if some entity created the world around us (they believe the entity is their God, I don't) then that entity was really smart. But all the religions I know anything about seem dumb to me. And I see no indication that leads me to believe that there is some religion out there I don't know about that is not dumb. So I have a hard time believing that an entity that was as smart as the hypothetical "creator" would create or even support any of the "religions" I am familiar with.
I go even farther than that. I don't know why such a hypothetical "creator" would actually care about what religions say it cares about. Why would it care whether or not we congregate in a building of a specific shape once every seven days? Why would it care whether or not we utter certain incantations? Why would it care whether we treat each other badly? And what would its definition of "badly" be? Why would it confer a favor on one person in one situation and not another? And why would it have an interest in assisting one specific group in slaughtering another specific group?
But some religions at some times have said we should congregate in cruciform churches every Sunday. And religions say we should pray (and some religions at some times even tell us what language we should pray in as if God is incapable of translating). And religions promise that prayers will be answered sometimes but they can't tell us which prayers will be answered and why or why not. And most religions say "thou shall not kill" but then give us a long list of exceptions for when we are encouraged to kill (or let people the religion disapproves of die). And as long as we have had written history we have had documented instances of army after army marching out on the field of battle each accompanied by its own set of religious figures who swear that "God is on our side". This might make a small amount of sense if on a particular battlefield the various religious figures represented different religions. Then you could argue that it was "God against God and may the best God win". But in all too many cases we don't even have that fig leaf. All the various religious representatives represent the same religion and, to hear them tell it, each can simultaneously authoritatively deliver the undivided affections of the same God but each to a different army.
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