I read a couple of news items recently that got me thinking about the often harmful intellectual and emotional effects of religion as well as the general inability of religious people to perceive these deleterious effects so I thought I might say a few words about that this week. I suspect this post may be a bit challenging or dare I say annoying for some of my more spiritually minded readers and I do have some concerns about that. Not concerned enough to shut the hell up of course. Let’s not go crazy. I’ve hardly ever been that concerned about anything. But concerned enough to suggest that if you’re of a particularly otherworldly temperament and you’re a sensitive soul and especially if you tend to perceive critical discussions of your cherished beliefs as personal insults and even more so if you tend to react to perceived insults of that sort by running after random people in the street waving meat cleavers or what have you may I invite you to stop reading right now? I don’t intend at all to challenge the ideas of anyone who is in no fit mental or emotional state to entertain any such challenge. Come back next time and maybe I’ll be discussing something you can digest a bit more easily. Or then again probably not, but you can always give it a try. Are we good? For everyone else; let’s talk.
The story that got me thinking about this issue involved a young homegrown American Muslim terrorist who appears to have been a normal kid until his father, who had emigrated from the Middle East many years before, decided it would be a good idea to get the kid in touch with his heritage and in particular his religious heritage. He packed the kid off to some sort of religious school out in the Syrian desert somewhere and the kid came back unhappy, unfriendly, and kind of weird. The police eventually arrested him for plotting to kill random people in a terrorist attack. The father was duly shocked and couldn’t fathom how such a thing could have happened. I didn’t save the reference although it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Sorry about that. Anyway, doesn’t really matter because as luck would have it we promptly had a similar story about a different young homegrown American Muslim terrorist, this one named Mohammed Abdulazeez, who managed to actually murder a few random people. I think the final body count was five in that case including a young twenty-one year old fellow by the way, which is the kind of thing I find particularly irksome now I’ve gotten a bit up there in years and everyone else has gotten correspondingly younger. All unarmed people of course just going about their everyday work although in this case I think their everyday work was at least related to national defense in some way. Similar situation to the first story although I think I read Mr. Abdulazeez was also a drug addict and had mental problems and so on so maybe the cases are not exactly the same because of these sorts of complicating factors. Anyway, he was apparently able to hold it all more or less together until, like the young fellow in the other story, he took a little holiday to Syria only to return a bloody minded murderer. Shock, amazement, and surprise all around.
How could such things happen? Well, you know I love a good mystery so of course I immediately started thinking about potential mechanisms by which trips to Syria might transform previously unobjectionable if somewhat troubled young people into murderous terrorists. I hate to bring up an awkward point but I suspect it may have something to do with religion. Not necessarily Islam per se. I don’t know enough about Islam to make that sort of argument and I most likely never will. No, I mean religion in general. The entire religious thought process.
I hope I’m not going out on too much of a limb when I suggest many young people are prone to experiencing a certain amount of difficulty transitioning to adult life. (I know I had a hell of a time myself.) I suppose this has probably always been the case quite possibly due to biological phenomena (I think I read somewhere one’s brain is undergoing major development and reorganization a good deal later than one might have expected) but it is probably more than ever now at least in the US due to the toxic influence of economic conservatism and the ensuing lack of sympathy and concern for other people and hence absence of any meaningful connection to other people or to society in general. Of course, money, maturity, and experience all tend to act as buffers to the ignorance, cruelty, and greed that are some of the most salient features of the little world we’ve made ourselves, so if one manages to live long enough and be moderately successful in the world of work and finances one may hope to one day become totally insensate to the ugliness of our world, at least until the world hits one on the head with a rock some fine evening when one is out walking the dog. Now young people typically live in a rather different world, which is to say, the real world. They’re not often floating about in a state of benumbed smugness in an insulated cocoon of gated privilege. No, they’re more often out there rubbing shoulders with the unfortunate bits of our system every day. It’s stressful. As one might expect they can develop all manner of unfortunate mental and emotional problems. In these cases it’s probably natural for religious folk to think they’ll help the kids out by offering them a hit of religion. In my opinion that’s probably just about the worst thing one can do in this situation. Pushing religion to an already stressed young person in a misguided attempt to make him or her feel better is like trying to make a homeless person more comfortable by giving him or her a hit of crack cocaine. It may be well intentioned but one shouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t end well.
The problem with foisting religion on mixed-up young people is that religious thought is basically an archaic pre-scientific not entirely rational emotion-based belief system that is totally foreign to anyone who has gone through a modern educational system. When the modern and pre-modern worlds collide inside a troubled young person’s head strange things can happen. Like what? Well, I suspect they can very easily lose their already tenuous ability to evaluate arguments in the cool light of human reason because the principles of secular epistemology, logic, and science don’t necessarily line up very well with whatever mental or intellectual procedures, if any, are associated with various brands of religions thought. A kid with no exposure to religious thought and hence no intellectual defense against the various strains of brain rot they represent is a sitting duck for any wily evildoer with a flair for eloquence. Indeed, you may have noticed many of the most virulent religious extremists, I mean the ones who blow up little kids, run people over with cars, murder passers by with meat cleavers and so on, tend to be people who formerly had no religion at all. Quite often they’re gang members or drug addicts or petty criminals and so on. My understanding is that many or perhaps even most of the really psychotic killers in the Middle East have emigrated from the slums of Europe.
The sad thing to me is there’s really no reason for this to be the case. Education and knowledge are surely the only reliable cures for religious fanaticism and violent extremism and here in the US at least we have a quite respectable educational system. We might not always get the top scores but then again unlike some other countries we tend to not want to give up on anyone. Our kids should have plenty of intellectual ammunition in the form of a commitment to rationality, critical thinking, logic, secular philosophy, and the scientific method to deal with the far fetched rantings of any foreign cleric with aplomb. Unfortunately that’s apparently not always the case. Even though the fundamental bases of our education system are indeed reason and science we seem to have made a rather unfortunate pact with conservative forces to not enter into any sort of discussion that might reflect poorly on religion. We have all manner of other educational requirements: language, mathematics, writing, economics, history, art, physical education. But when it comes to the really big issues like epistemology and ethics and so on we’re just afraid to go there. Why? Well, let me explain. It’s because we try give religion a big old pass. We don’t want to offend anyone. The implicit message for young people is that normal intellectual principles are fine and dandy for some things but just don’t really apply in a religious context. When it comes to religion we basically have this notion that one should believe whatever ones feels one ought to believe or feels disposed to believe. This normally works out fine because most of the religions we’ve traditionally dealt with on a regular basis have been rather benign at least in recent memory, although that certainly wasn’t always the case. And most people can eventually figure it out on their own, which is why religion in general is gradually losing its icy grip on the back of the neck of modern culture. But it doesn’t always work out that way. If a kid is not particularly quick on the uptake or if someone gets to them before they can figure it all out then the stage is set for something rather unfortunate to occur.
Of course, if a kid already has some exposure to religious thought then he or she has an advantage in the sense that relatively innocuous religion can crowd out more unfortunate permutations in the same way beneficial bacteria in the human gut can crowd out harmful bacteria. This raises an interesting question. Well, I think it’s interesting anyway. The question is whether one is doing a kid a service or disservice by proactively introducing what one hopes is a relatively benign form of religion. I feel it’s an interesting question because I can see two sides to the argument. I just gave the pro side. Against that we have the potential issue that once one gets a kid to accept these archaic forms of thinking as just as legitimate in their own way as more modern forms one may very well have facilitated unsavory people waltzing in later and convincing the kid to do literally anything. It’s a high risk strategy. “Yes, my son or daughter, you should believe in utter nonsense that has no basis whatsoever in human reason or science but just remember to always be careful which brand of utter nonsense you believe in.” And then we have the psychological issues that go with having the kid’s parents involved. Some kids crave their parents’ approval and if that means throwing reason and science out the window that’s what they’ll do. Other kids want to separate from their parents and if their parents promote one brand of religious claptrap they will inevitably look for another most likely contrasting brand.
Well, I don’t really know the answer to this question of course. Maybe religious inoculation sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But I suppose you can probably guess what I think about the issue. In my opinion parents are playing with fire when they subject their kids to religion. We should be responsible adults and teach our kids philosophy, logic, science, critical thinking, and secular ethics. They can take up and decide about religion later when they have the intellectual and emotional tools to evaluate those sorts of arguments. We should give them room and time to grow not jump in there and brainwash them and hope for the best. Try not to become like the bewildered dad in the story I was discussing earlier and end up wondering how your little darling could have become a crazed murderer despite all your crazed religious exhortations to the contrary. Let’s just give the kids a break for once.
References
Chattanooga shooting: New details emerge about the gunman. Scott Zamost, Yasmin Khorram, Shimon Prokupecz, and Evan Perez. July 20, 2015. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/us/tennessee-naval-reserve-shooting/index.html.
