Clap Your Hands if You Don't Believe
I enjoyed a moment of praise this morning. Just as we were leaving the house, the mailman had reached us on his daily appointed rounds. As we waited for him to separate our mail from the mail headed downstairs, he told us that he had thoroughly enjoyed the rhetorical whipping I’d given to the last evangelists to visit—the same encounter I described in “Praying on Grief” last month. (He just happened to arrive as they did. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because argument takes all my attention, but in hindsight, I dimly remember him slowing to a mosey as he visited the other houses on our little dead-end street.)
We didn’t have time to converse, so I just thanked him without asking why he had enjoyed it. Maybe he’s an atheist too, or practices some religion not broadly accepted in our country. Maybe he’s a Christian who wishes other Christians would shut their pie-hole and stop pushing their particular creed as the One True Way. Maybe he’s just a secularist who resents the awkwardness of missionary visits. He did say he was glad to see me reply, forcefully, to evangelism because he would never have the nerve to do so.
That’s both heartening and disappointing. Heartening because it’s nice to know that I’m not a lone voice shouting into the wilderness, nor even one of a few thousand bloggers angry at how religion embraces and encourages ignorance and intolerance. I can’t say I’ll never create some healthy doubt in a True Believer, because it happened once already, back in high school, but such moments are few and far between—literally once in a lifetime for me. One could get discouraged. Knowing that being outspoken on the value of reason in cosmology, epistemology, ontology, and above all ethics reinforces those virtues in others who may not even be part of the conversation makes the effort more worthwhile.
The fact that the silent majority—secularists who believe that American values includes keeping your religion to yourself—needs such reinforcement, however, is a bit of a downer. So, too, is the reminder that it doesn’t have the nerve to challenge obvious absurdities, whether out of laziness or a misguided sense of politeness, a preference for letting willful ignorance slide over speaking up for the truth, as best we can understand it and as best we can express it.
Letting bad ideas slide does more damage than people may immediately realize. When a community doesn’t stand up and say, “No, don’t teach our children that life appeared on earth by divine magic; teach them evolutionary theory in keeping with scientific understanding,” the vocal crazies win. No politician is going to stand up against a zealous fraction of voters to defend an apathetic majority—or if he does, he won’t be in office long. When a community doesn’t stand up and say, “Constitutional law, and not biblical law, is the foundation of our civilization,” we get judges ruling by God’s law instead of man’s—or rather, because people so seldom agree on divine will, what the judge understands to be God’s law, which mysteriously happens to be just what the judge would prefer to be true. And the principle doesn’t extend just to religion. The mess in Iraq is a direct product of too few people standing up and calling bullshit.
Like it or not, our beliefs are shaped by our community, and tend strongly to move to match the beliefs shared by our community—or, more accurately, what we perceive our community to believe. If sensible people remain silent, then all we see on the news, all we read in the papers, all we hear at the office cooler are the crazies, and we grow to believe that the crazies define the mainstream, that their belief is normal, if incorrect.
They don’t, and it isn’t. You may not agree with my religious beliefs. That’s your right. I may hope to change your belief through the power of persuasion, as evangelists hope to change mine through the power of faith. But I beg you, don’t let foolish ideas slide. If someone is peddling bad ideas, sloppy thinking, dangerous beliefs, call them on it. Bad ideas are like weeds: with diligence, we can control them, leaving room for healthy ideas to grow; left unchecked, they spread out of control. And like weeds, they never…quite…vanish entirely. So don’t stop. Not ever.
You don’t have to aim so high as to convert the fools. Just be heard by the timid, and encourage them to speak.