The complexity defence for religion

One of the issues that comes up a lot within atheism is the argument around whether religion is a net good or net bad for humanity.

Today is International Blasphemy Day - so I figured I would go after one of the holy cows of this sort of thinking: the complexity defence.

This argument tends to come with anti-theists, such as myself, saying that religion is wrong and therefore inherently harmful, and pro-theists arguing that religion is far more complex than that.

They will talk about things like how religion intersects with culture, how it can have positive effects, how it is never-quite-that-simple^tm

Here is the thing about complexity – racism is complex, patriarchy is complex, homophobia is complex, in fact every form of bigotry I can think of is complex, often for pretty much the same reasons.

Along with most of the bad things we've done.

Recently the New York Times ran a story about the US military ignoring child rape - using the excuse of culture and the complexities of local authorities versus being an occupying army.

Those children and their parents, probably don't consider child rape a treasured element of their culture. The US military wanted to present the issue as far more complex than it really was - because they knew looking the other way while their allies raped children was never going to be a good thing.

A person who saves another person's life isn't generally going to go to jail for it, a person who kills another person had better have a very good explanation.

Hence bad things trend towards being much more complex than good things – because you spend more time thinking of ways to defend your bad actions than you do your good ones.

So when I hear religion is "more complicated than that", what I think is that religion has excuses – and excuses tend to need closer examinations.

One of the most often raised excuses from religion is that okay – there is a lot of bad stuff that comes from religion, but there is also all of that charity work.

Except the Yakuza have a solid history of charitable works, the Mafia operated soup kitchens during the Great Depression, that doesn't make organised crime a good thing.

I also have a problem with the big charity numbers religions proclaim - in that how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Would you count ministering to the sick as a good work? Most people would.

In South Africa we had churches preaching that they could cure AIDS with prayer. I do not think that was an isolated case - I think there are a lot of small fundamentalist churches doing similar things all across Africa and the results aren't good.

A Zambian study found that in Zambia the leading group of new HIV infections was not prostitutes, it was not men who had been unfaithful to their wives, it was the spouses of HIV sufferers.

You see ARVs work by killing the HIV virons, kill enough of them and the disease has a very hard time spreading. Do away with the ARVs, convince the sufferers that they're cured, and HIV has a much easier time spreading to their faithful spouses.

When we talk about charitable donations – that number is inflated by televangelists proclaiming that you must plant a seed in their bank accounts in order to solve your problems.

They prey on the vulnerable, promising them everything from cures for their deadly diseases to financial security in much the same way as most con-artists do, except what they're doing isn't crime, it is charity.

Every cent Creflo Dollar received towards his new jet – still counts as charity. And this problem goes back all the way to the source material.

When Jesus was praising the widow for giving him her last two copper coins – he praised her mightily, blessed her, acknowledged that she had given more than she could afford and he took the two copper coins.

Judas was a very hard man, a tax collector which I suppose means Christians can say even Jesus had trouble with the taxman, who confronted Jesus at a point about selling some of the stuff that people donated and giving it to the poor, as Jesus preached the rich should give away all of their worldly goods.

Jesus responded with what must be the coldest line in fiction.

“You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me."

And those two copper coins counted as charity.

When I hear someone say something is more complex than that – I hear an acknowledgement that what I am saying is basically correct but there are nuances.

The thing about nuance is that it doesn't tend to really leave you on the side in favour of the issue you're being nuanced about.

You can take a nuanced view of history - but you're still going to say that colonialism was basically a bad thing. You can say there were some good things that came out of colonialism - but you still have to deal with all that slavery and genocide.

You can make it as complex as you like, but it being complicated doesn't really make it good, or even really any better than it was at the start of the discussion.

We can say that there are some good things that have come of religion - but those good things are subject to examination themselves, and they don't really wipe out the bad.