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• Wednesday, October 1, 2008 11:49 PM

  Really?

  Let me begin by saying that I am not a Christian or a member of any religion at all.

  Yet I find it sort of silly that Bill Maher and most of the commenters seem to blame religion for wars and for general stupidity and evil in the world. I'm not a historian or an anthropologist, I guess, but I'm reasonably sure from what I do know about history that war happens with or without religious justifications, and that many times the religious rhetoric is actually just a coverup for a war that is actually (usually) about division of resources--land, water, minerals, and so forth. Certainly, much of the European colonization of the world had overtones of religiosity, but I think it's fairly clear that it was really about business. About spices and tea and trade routes and control, and very little of it had anything more than a superficial coating of religion on it. Even a lot of the missionaries spent more of their time doing linguistics and helping people plant crops than converting them.

  And people are ignorant and selfish and prone to doing evil in roughly the same proportions all the world 'round, no matter how religious or unreligious they are. The Japanese, for example, are nowadays a very nonreligious people (there are still remnants, and of course there are still devout believers, but it is not especially common), and are we suppose, therefore, that they are smarter and less prone to doing evil than Americans? I suppose Bill Maher probably thinks so, but I've lived in Japan, and I beg to differ (yes, there is less crime overall, but this has to do with other issues; evil in Japan takes somewhat different forms than it does here).

  Jefferson and some of our other founding fathers were not Christians per se, but they did mostly believe in a god and in Jesus, so were they stupid? Was St. Augustine stupid? Is Charles Taylor or Albert Borgmann or Martin Buber or Kierkegaard or Kant--really, were all these people stupid? I tend to think that despite the fact that I do not believe in the religions they believe(d) in, they are smarter than Bill Maher. It's facile and juvenile to accuse everyone you disagree with of being stupid; it is precisely that kind of nondialogue that has our country in the mess it is in right now. Maher was on The Daily Show the other night and stated outright that anyone who doesn't agree with him politically is a stupid redneck. It's such a progressive, intellectual sort of thing to say, isn't it? I don't know how anyone could take that kind of thing seriously, except that it just reinforces their own biases.

  Meh, I'd rather read Charles Taylor on the "malaise of modernity" because he has a thoughtful and profound interpretation of it, one that does not rely heavily on 6th-grade insults of the people who disagree with him. Yes, he's Catholic. So what?

  —TygerTyger Read TygerTyger's other letters
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