I heard a very fascinating NPR debate tonight on the merits of religion. The topic was simply this: would the world be better off without religion? The two sides both had good points, but the most interesting thing for me was this fascinating duality. The pro-religion side counted, correctly, as one of their main points the fact that religious people are statistically the most charitable and giving people on the planet. That wherever you go, where there are poor and downtrodden folk struggling to make their way you'll find believers helping. And, as Nicholas Kristoff of the NY Times noted: "The difference between the religious believers and everyone else is that the believers stay."
And yet, the opposing side noted, also correctly, that for the most part, wherever you find strife and war and intolerance, you'll also find more often than not that religion is the root of whatever evil is occurring. So where does that leave us?
I had the thought as I was listening to this, that the real answer isn't something intrinsic to religious belief itself, but rather a kind of byproduct of belonging to a religion. You see, there's a growing mass of evidence in fields like sociology, neuroscience, history, etc that humans evolved in small but closely knit kin groupings, tribes if you will, and that we're hard-wired for existence in that kind of society. Namely, we're designed to have a smallish group of people that we trust implicitly and depend on for our existence, and everyone outside of that group is a potential danger. This is a gross simplification of course, but it's roughly the idea.
So what's that got to do with religion? Well my theory is that religion taps into that deep, tribal belonging portion of our brains. Something similar happens with powerful ideologies, like those of various political movements, and also in sports, where people develop incredibly strong feelings for "their" teams and fellow fans who have nothing in common except that they're wearing the same colored shirts.
Religion's power as a force for social good is that it short-circuit's people's usual aversion to growing their sense of tribal self; by seeing others as potential converts and fellow-believers, it brings the others into the tribe, so to speak. Much of morality stems from seeing other people as beings like yourself, and this slow recognition of similarity is what helped the growth of tribes into ethnic groups and thence into nations, and is probably one of the main forces for spreading peace in the world.
Religious groups simply do a *really* good job at bringing people into the tribe (note: a lot of these ideas are lifted almost directly from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the dead). It sets up strongly delineated rules for who belongs and how to recognize belonging, what the perks are, what the punishments are for not belonging, and so on. And that's where all the good comes from: because when you really and truly believe that everyone of your faith are your brothers and sisters, that evolved obligation to help the members of your tribe gets turned on to help poor people in Africa. And this is a great thing! Religions were the first force to transcend race and gender and nationality, bringing people together who evolution would not have.
But the problem happens when this gets twisted, because one of the best ways to strengthen belonging in your own tribe is to direct hatred against those outside of the tribe: making everyone who doesn't belong an enemy. And unfortunately, religions have been very, very good at that, too. So the question I have is this: is there some way we can claim the good parts but not the bad? Build the sense of family and community without the blind faith in a divine being. Create that obligation to help people, without also creating the need to hate other people. I think that may be one of the great challenges for modern atheism.
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