Kreitsauce's Musings

You may remember last year’s Bill Maher film Religulous, a satire which drew its name from a portmanteau of “religious” and “ridiculous.” The obvious implication being that religion in general is ridiculous, and believers in those religions are essentially fools. It would seem that Bill Maher’s film takes the comedic route to the same destination as Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. In his book, Hitchens says that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” (see pages 56 and 36)

In the thin world of these men, organized religion (whatever that is) is the chief ill of society, which needs to be eradicated or reduced to an impotent form. And, of course, they are more than willing to bring out examples. Hitler, in their view, was religious- maybe even a Christian. David Berkowitz, the infamous serial killer, was also deeply religious, they remind us. After all, he joined a cult that the Son of Sam himself referred to as “the twenty-two disciples of hell.” Or maybe they could even invoke a mystic like Grigori Rasputin.

The reality, though, is that, while there are religious people out there that do terrible things, that doesn’t mean that we can lump all religious people- or all religions- together. What about people who do good things in the name of religion? What about William Carey, David Livingston, Teresa, Damien of Molokai, John Huss, the Venerable Bede, Desiderius Erasmus, Copernicus, William Booth, Harriet Tubman, Brother Lawrence, John Eliot, Amy Carmichael, Oswald Chambers, C. H. Spurgeon, William Gladstone, Sojournor Truth, Hudson Taylor, and Elizabeth Fry? Are we supposed to believe that they count for nothing? Look them up sometime and see what such men and women did for the world because of their faith. In reality, Hitler, Carey, Berkowitz, and Spurgeon had nothing in common except for (perhaps) a belief in the supernatural.

If I were to write a book called The Love Delusion (as opposed to Dawkins’ The God Delusion) because I had examples of how love had led people down a wrong path or ended in a messy divorce, would I be justified in doing so? Just because there are some who use the word “love” to justify something illogical or immoral doesn’t mean that real love in its proper context is a delusion. While some love is a delusion, other love is quite real.