Parasitic Religion

I see a good deal of truth in the argument (per Dawkins) that religion is a kind of parasite, a set of memes that replicate themselves from generation to generation by cleverly commandeering certain critical mental faculties to ensure their reproduction. (And even recognizing this, I find myself unable to take any kind of measured stand to prevent my own exploitation as a receptive host.) As hard as it is to internally revise or reject religious beliefs learned in childhood, it is much harder yet to resist conveying these beliefs to one's children. Religious beliefs do seem to force one inexorably to communicate them to the next generation. They hijack one's rationality by playing to emotions of guilt and fear. Religious people who don't really believe any of the religious fairytales will still transmit religion to their children, either directly or through the schools in which they enroll them. This process is rarely ever disrupted by a host declaring "I will not transmit!" Rather, disruption occurs when a host transmits ineffectively, for example, when a parent sends their child to an after-school religious program. While such a measure may satisfy the parent's compulsion to transmit religion, it is not adequate to implant the religious memes into the new host. Thus we find that completely secular people are generally not raised on secularism, but are more often raised on "religion-lite". For these individuals, someone indeed did attempt to infect them with the relevant memes, but the effort was not adequate for the memes to take root and the religious parasite was extinguished. Am I being too negative?

Learning Religion

I am unimpressed with the manner in which religion and theology are taught, or rather to who they are taught. In particular, I am unimpressed with the traditional practice of teaching theology to children. Oughtn't educated people, religious and irreligious alike, find this practice to be very suspect?

Imagine that you are the parent of an 7-year old child. You are divorced, and share custody of the child with your former spouse. Unfortunately, your former spouse has become a member of an obscure cult that preaches a variety of apocalyptic beliefs, very different than your own mainstream religious beliefs. One day, a friend informs you that your child has been inducted into the cult and has begun attending daily classes with the cult leader, all with the enthusiastic encouragement of your former spouse. Does this bother you?

I think that you would be VERY bothered by this news. Why? Because such a young child can't possibly have the wherewithal to objectively assess the claims that they are likely to hear? Because such a young child can't possibly have the experience to know how such claims are regarded by others, or to have had exposure to competing claims? Because such a young child is predisposed to give maximal credence to the claims that are made by authority figures in their lives? Because such a young child is predisposed to give maximal credence to the claims made by a parent? Because such a young child is predisposed to think or do whatever will be rewarded by social acceptance among peers and the affection and respect of authority figures and parents? Because strong beliefs adopted during childhood may be difficult and painful to dispel or revise at a later time? Because indoctrinating such a young child is tantamount to coercion?

I think all of the above arguments have some degree of validity. Indoctrinating a young child is indeed a coercive process. A young child has no choice but to believe what they are told, especially when everything of importance to them is made to be contingent on this belief. But such utter contingency is always the case in a very religious environment. Should thinking people be upset with this state of affairs only when the indoctrination is carried out by an esoteric cult leader, but not when it is carried out within their own mainstream Jewish or Christian home? What is the essential difference? Let me offer a couple more quotes from the Joshi reader:

To my mind, the inculcation of religious belief into the young — a process that can scarcely be termed anything but brainwashing — is religion's great crime against humanity. Billions have been prejudiced in favor of one religion or another by this kind of indoctrination, and it requires a tremendous strength of mind and will to overcome it in later years. [...] One would suppose that religionists would wish their adherents to have come by their beliefs freely and of their own accord; so why do they insist that religious training begin at an age when the child is not able to think for itself and is incapable of questioning the authority of its parents or other adult figures (Joshi 2000).

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honorable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction. (Lovecraft, in Joshi 2000).

Well, taking a few steps back, I'm not sure that outrage is necessarily in order. Parents have always indoctrinated their children with their own beliefs, and they will continue to do so regardless of Joshi's indictments or my own half-hearted objections. And such indoctrination will always play on a child's immature fears and desires, because that is all the child has at its disposal.

But I think there needs to be some acknowledgment of the following truth: There is a certain educational dynamic created when Professor Smith lectures to a class of 22-year-olds about the life of Jesus, and there is another, very different, educational dynamic created when Mommy cuddles her 8-year old child and lovingly reassures him that everything will be OK as long as he always loves Jesus. These are not equivalent forms of education, nor are they even in the same category.

Obvious? Perhaps. But I don't think that this gross inequivalence is registered by most religious people. One argument that I often hear in friendly discussions on religion is that if so many millions of people believe in God, then surely there must be a good deal of truth to the notion. Well, of course this is wrong in so many ways. But for just one, it implicitly compares belief in God with other beliefs that have never had the kind of reinforcement that has been lavished upon the former. Consider, for example, that there is probably a small group of people who believe that Immanuel Kant was the greatest Western philosopher of all time. And every year there are probably a few additional students who will make such an assessment after encountering Kant in a philosophy course. Should we conclude because of the huge disparity in the number of God-believers and Kant-believers that God's existence is therefore so much more self-evident than Kant's philosophical greatness?

I think before we can honestly do that, we ought to strive to level the playing field. One way to attempt this would be to instruct children about Kant at the earliest ages, telling fascinating stories about him that might excite the childish imagination, and stressing ad nauseam how he was the greatest philosopher of all time, how no one before or since could hold a candle to his wisdom, how he loved all people, how he freed our minds, etc. (And of course we should not neglect to seriously instruct the child about the unimaginably horrible fate that awaits them should they choose to believe otherwise.)

But this project is probably hopeless if we wish to retain any trace of truth in our tale. Rather, we should level the playing field by deferring any instruction about God until about the same time and place where we begin instruction about Kant. Let a 22-year old university student who has not been previously indoctrinated take one class on Western religion and another on Western philosophy, and let us then see which he or she finds more compelling, the self-evidence of God's existence or the self-evidence of Kant's greatness. If we repeated this experiment several times, I think we would see the great disparity evaporate. As Robertson writes in regard to Christianity (see Joshi 2000),

Clergy and flock alike act in the spirit of self-interested corporations. They feel that if children are not trained to accept Christian doctrines before they can reason for themselves, the chances are ten to one that they will not join any church in later life. [...] None of them dares to trust to the process of persuading grown men and women.

My point is not that Kant is greater than God. I couldn't even finish Kant's book. My point is that religious thinkers somehow always manage to overlook the many (unearned) competitive advantages that accrue to their beliefs sheerly in virtue of the way that those beliefs permeate every aspect of the child's developmental environment. Oddly, many religious thinkers seem to have convinced themselves that most people who hold religious beliefs have indeed arrived at them against all odds, through Herculean effort and heroic sacrifice. Please. In most cases, religious beliefs are first delivered with the mother's milk, and continue to be delivered without cessation throughout all of childhood and adolescence. Few other beliefs get such privileged treatment. What is finally required to produce a religious adult from a religious child is not Herculean effort, but common intellectual inertia.

In conclusion, I think that the theologians — the people who actually think about religion rather than just performing the motions — really have something to ask themselves. They tell us that one can arrive at religious truths through rational deduction, or through study of nature, or through study of self. All these endeavors require certain capacities that are characteristically present in adults and not in children. Why then not defer instruction on theological matters until adulthood, when the capabilities will be present for the successful completion of the task? Shouldn't religious thinkers indeed be embarrassed that rather than instructing and educating the most mature and most critical minds, they have chosen to coax and cajole the least competent and least critical minds?

Persuasion and Coercion

I think one must be deeply skeptical about any set of beliefs that incorporates among it a meta-belief regarding the consequences of nonbelief in the set. Besides the obvious logical problems (i.e., the belief regarding the consequence of nonbelief will only be relevant to those who already accept the belief set), it seems to me that the threats of unpleasant consequences for the nonbeliever and of rapturous consequences for the true-believer just erodes the credibility of the belief set itself. It leads one to think that any argument in favor of the belief set is more one of "bullying" than "convincing". If people must be threatened with unimaginably horrible mental and physical afflictions for themselves and their loved ones in order to be persuaded to subscribe to a given belief set, it can only be concluded that the beliefs themselves must be extraordinarily unpersuasive. This is very much what we see in religion since the Biblical era. Time and time again the flock strays from the path of belief, and time and time again must be terrorized by the prophets with threats of awful punishments and calamities.

Welcome to the Dark Side

Did you ever notice that while some people thrive in the religious social environment, others seem never to find a sense of comfort and belonging?

Here's a metaphor of my own: I think that religion can be likened to a river that runs through a rocky terrain. The water at some distance from the banks and the bottom runs smoothly and easily, making gentle curves, perhaps occasionally hitting a dip or making a rapid adjustment around an obstacle. Most of the water in the river has a genuinely serene property. Drop a leaf into this part of the river, and you would watch it move effortlessly downstream and be gone from sight.

On the other hand, the water that has the misfortune to run along the rocky bank has a turbulent and unpleasant existence, constantly colliding with massive, immovable objects, being turned back on itself, sprayed up into the air, sucked into vortices, churned in chaotic eddies. A leaf dropped into these waters has an uncertain future. Perhaps it will be sucked into a crevice, flattened against the side of a rock, or just ripped fiber from fiber under massive and uncomprehending forces.

I think that people raised within a strong religious tradition can be thought of as a million leaves scattered randomly on such a river. By good fortune, a majority will find themselves some distance from the banks, moving placidly downstream amongst the thousands of similarly situated leaves. Indeed, if any one such leaf could "see" only what lay in its immediate vicinity, it would scarcely recognize any motion at all — just the small dipping and bobbing of the other leaves relative to itself.

But there will be a small fraction of people that find themselves near the rocky banks of this river, or that through misfortune will drift closer and closer to those shores over time. And those leaves will inevitably be ripped and battered mercilessly until their very shape and structure is obliterated, their torn remnants eventually left to decay forgotten under a rock.

Picture the leaf that has come to be pinned against some undistinguished rotted tree stump. The other leaves amongst which it began its journey have long ago disappeared from sight, transported by the river's mighty flow to distant places. Yet if this trapped leaf could escape the confines of its watery prison for just a moment — to majestically leap from the water onto the dry river bank, to safety... but that moment can never come. Wet and soggy and decaying, the leaf's fate is sealed. "Stay with me!" the water cries irresistibly, as the leaf slides into the muck.

I think that this frightening boundary region, this rocky bank, is an intrinsic feature of every socio-religious system. The most obvious victims are those whose mental or sexual predispositions are certified by the pious masses to be "an affront to God". They will certainly be the first into the grinder. But they won't be the last, because their sacrifice cannot diffuse or erase the boundary region. The boundary is created along with the belief system; it is created by the belief system. In order for the water in the center of the river to flow smoothly, there must exist a region of water at the edges that is continuously punished, harassed, confounded, destroyed.

The grinder never stops grinding, and the grinder is never empty.

Review of "Off The Derech" by Faranak Margolese

I just finished reading Off The Derech by Faranak Margolese, and I thought it was very interesting. She discusses a lot of the causes that drive people off the derech, and does so in a fairly perceptive and truthful manner. She herself appears to be quite religious, and therefore invokes God about as often and as naively as other religious authors do, frequently sounding as though she just recently chatted with Him about his views on chinuch and whatnot.

God created Adam and immediately gave him free choice, knowing full well that not one page later Adam would stumble and choose sin. But God determined that it was better to allow Adam to fall, better to have him betray His will with free choice, than not have that choice at all.

God wants us to walk in his ways, but he doesn't force us to. He leads but does not push. He gives us free will and then does what He can to preserve it by delaying punishment.

This sounds like the climax of a really bad d'var Torah, but if you can read past the midrashic drivel (which, ironically, is what probably drove me off the derech as much as anything else), you will find that most of Ms. Margolese's analyses are pretty sound. I will now discuss some of the issues she raises.

One of the author's recurring points is that Judaism must be able to compete in the free marketplace of ideas on its own merits. That is, it is no longer enough to "scare" people into remaining frum with visions of Gehinom or God's wrath, or to coerce observance through emotional manipulation (e.g., fear of losing the respect or love of one's parents). In the modern world, these classic techniques are ineffective or counterproductive, and often produce nominally Orthodox Jews whose Judaism is extremely shallow or cynical. Instead, Orthodox Judaism must prove itself to be more emotionally and intellectually rewarding than any other available option, or it will continue to lose adherents. This is especially true in the modern era, when one really doesn't have to believe anything. In earlier times, the alternatives to Judaism were largely limited to Christianity and Islam, and for a wide variety of reasons these options were never very appealing to Jews. Today, one can live a completely normal and fulfilled life without subscribing to any religious system at all. Orthodox Judaism must therefor prove that it can provide its members a better option than all the other options available:

The outside world is no longer painful or perceived as evil, but rather enjoyable, attractive and welcoming. So today, in order for observant Judaism to be chosen, it cannot merely be neutral. It must be better than the alternative.

Ms. Margolese focuses heavily in the beginning of the book on "rejection" as a cause of people leaving Yiddishkeit, and I think there's a lot of truth in that. She discusses a number of kinds of rejection, all valid, but I think she underplays the rejection felt by individuals who can't buy into the hashkafa of Orthodox Judaism. Certainly, there is more than a single legitimate Orthodox hashkafa, but it is nevertheless the case that most Orthodox Jews believe that God (literally) gave the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai about 3300 years ago, and that this exact same Torah is the one we read today every Shabbos. Most Orthodox Jews believe that God created the universe less than 6000 years ago in pretty much the same state as we see it today, and many or most believe that this creation occurred over a literal 6-day period. These are basic aspects of Orthodox Judaism today.

Orthodox Jews (me included) who at some point discover they can no longer suspend their disbelief in such stories will undoubtedly feel rejected, regardless of whether or not they actually give voice to their discontentment. Moreover, for the most part, these discontented Jews will not give voice to their concerns, because they realize the incredible emotional and psychological pain that doing so would bring to their friends and family, and to any other true believers. (They realize this because they themselves almost certainly experienced this very same emotional anguish in the course of revising their own deepest-held beliefs about the world.)

So what recourse exists for Orthodox Jews in this situation? What they see all around them in the Orthodox world is rank intellectual dishonesty; that is, the coddling of religious beliefs, and the unwillingness to examine cherished ideas with the dispassionate scrutiny that is the hallmark of all critical reasoning and empirical investigation. How can Jewish people who also value rationality and empiricism find a place in such a culture? I don't know.

On a related note, Ms. Margolese has a chapter on Truth, and how issues related to the search for truth drive people away from Orthodoxy. Again, I agree with most of her points, but find that she underestimates the role of theology and hashkafa. For example, she writes,

So how can we strengthen belief in God? By discussing with students and children, on a level they can understand, the reasons for believing in God: why it makes sense, if it makes sense, what the alternatives are, what some of the arguments are for God's existence and against it.

This is not easy to do. In fact, it can be quite tricky for, while we can make good arguments for the rationality of God's existence, we cannot prove it.

Yes, it is tricky, isn't it? That's the problem that a lot of us have with Orthodox theology and hashkafa. We've been told from the earliest ages how obvious is the existence of God, and how foolish and ignorant are all those agnostics and atheists. (Indeed, they are considered far worse than Christians and even Reform Jews, probably because their arguments are so much harder to refute.) At some point, however, when we are able to think and read for ourselves, we come to realize that the very best arguments for the existence of God were already discredited by the 17th century. The author's position that "there are good arguments for the rationality of God's existence" is really quite weak, and it is the historical failure to honestly recognize this that bothers many of us so much. The "good arguments" that the author refers to are really just post-hoc justifications, and have only rarely convinced anyone who wasn't already a believer.

Moreover, the author's suggestion for discussing with students "what some of the arguments are for God's existence and against it" is disturbingly wishful thinking. Does she really think that a yeshiva rabbi discussing God's existence with his students would paint a fair picture of "the alternatives." Or will the yeshivas invite atheists and agnostics to present the evidence in favor of their positions? I think not. No, the "discussion" envisioned by Ms. Margolese will ultimately be nothing other than the same hashkafic brainwashing that has defined Jewish education ever since the Middle Ages. I think the following opinion from a contemporary book on off-the-derech Hasidim comes much closer to the truth of the matter:

Among people who believe that there is only one truth — and that they are in possession of it — tolerating other points of view is, by definition, impossible. (Winston, 2005)

Also, although I realize that Off The Derech is not a theological treatise, one too-often hears this "we can make good arguments" line without ever actually hearing one of these good arguments. So what's the good argument? The Argument to Design? The Ontological Argument? These arguments do not convince anyone except those who already believe. That is not what I consider a "good argument." I think it will be when Orthodoxy comes to grip with the tentativeness of the God-hypothesis — with the idea that God's existence and involvement is something we wish to be true rather than know to be true — that genuine religious inclusiveness will be possible. In the meantime, the zealous and absolute adherence to metaphysical beliefs which have zero empirical support will continue to make a mockery of the notion of religious rationality or rational religiosity.

Ms. Margolese goes on to propose that

If we succeed in intellectually establishing that there is a God, that He gave the Torah, and that rabbinic leaders have the authority to make halachah, we will have succeeded in establishing an important foundation for observance.

Well, yes, sure, but it's crucial to note that the Orthodox educational process does not actually work by establishing any of these things intellectually. If we wanted to establish these beliefs intellectually, we should wait until a person is 20 years old and has experience with the ways of world and some capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, and then we should make our best intellectual arguments about the existence of God, the authenticity of the Torah, and rabbinic authority. What we actually do is brainwash children with religious fairytales from the time they are 2 years old until the time they are 22 in the hope that it will become impossible or irrelevant for them to ever seriously entertain real hashkafic questions, either because we have made them completely ignorant of anything other than Talmud, or because we have constructed their belief systems in such a way that raising such issues would simply be too cognitively or emotionally painful. As Ms. Margolese writes,

Our parents believed, they told us we should believe, and therefore we do, without giving it the kind of thought and exploration that makes it our own. Thus belief in God begins in childhood and pervades the lives of observant people.

As an example of the Orthodox educational approach, consider this charming advice from Wagschal's Successful Chinuch:

[we] need to show children the beauty of Torah and emptiness of the secular way... [we] need to answer questions before children can ask them for themselves... [the] child must be warned not to be taken in by what he may see, read or hear and, above all, to avoid temptations.

This certainly does not sound like a recipe for an open and honest evaluation of "alternatives," and I think it unfortunately represents the typical approach to chinuch in the Orthodox community. All the talk about intellectual honesty and openness and alternative beliefs is really just hogwash, I'm sorry to say. Strictly religious parents and teachers want their children and students to believe the same things they themselves believe, and a long-term process of brainwashing is without any doubt the most reliable way to accomplish this. Individuals who ultimately reject this brainwashing may leave religion entirely, or remain within the religious world as cynics, hypocrites, and antonymous bloggers.

A couple more things I'd like to quote from the book:

Michael, who went off the derech as an adult, experienced intellectual dishonesty when observant people would engage in what he called "selective reporting" as they tried to prove that Judaism was true. He says they would "sometimes look for various scientific discoveries to prove certain age-old truisms in the Talmudic system and, at the same time, disregard scientific studies that disprove them... They don't even necessarily believe in the tools they are using to prove the Torah. They just figure, 'Hey. It's useful. Let's use it.' And when someone discovers that it's not useful, they dump it... It is not the evidence that drives the system; the system drives the evidence."

I could not have said it better myself, but there are still a couple of points to make. The first is that Ms. Margolese treats Michael's story as a "for instance," when actually the intellectual dishonesty Michael describes is completely rampant in the yeshiva world, and widely embraced by kiruv organizations. (Note the liberal use of "Torah Codes" nonsense in certain kiruv programs.) Michael's story is far from an isolated incident. But the essential problem is that it's almost inevitable. When people have a certain unassailable belief — a view of the world that cannot possibly be wrong, then all valid evidence must inevitably point to that particular conclusion, and all contrary evidence must be in error. What we therefore see in the yeshiva world is that when empirical evidence cannot be suitably twisted to fit the Jewish mythology, this evidence is then recast as the deceptive production of evil, amoral, atheistic scientists, who are worse than Nazis and would dissect their own mothers given half a chance. (If you think I am overstating things, please read Avigdor Miller.) Thus, any evidence scientists produce which does not happen to support prevailing Jewish fairytales is immediately attributed to Satan.

So the essential problem of Truth is that Judaism, like all other religions, is not about Truth at all. It's about a particular set of beliefs and traditions which come from an age of mystery and magic, long before the introduction of critical reasoning, empirical methods, and natural laws. Those who try to sell Judaism as a "quest for truth" are selling a bill of goods. The closest thing any of us have to a real "quest for truth" is the scientific method. Even with all its imperfections, the achievements of science in illuminating the workings of the natural world long ago surpassed the sum total of everything religion had ever accomplished in this capacity.

The author goes on:

So truth must be acquired truthfully. If we want to argue effectively for the truth of Torah, we must not only speak of truth, we must speak with it in the classroom, in our actions, and all our pursuits. We must be honest about ourselves and honest about Judaism. Hiding the truth undermines truth, which is one of the strongest arguments for Torah observance...

The basic problem is that true intellectual honesty would require that we modulate our belief in God and Torah in correspondence with the evidence presented in the favor of these propositions. In science and critical reasoning, hypotheses are "believed" with a strength that is largely proportional to their evidential support. For example, the causal role of smoking in cancer is strongly believed because of vast empirical findings that support this hypothesis. On the other hand, the existence of life beyond our solar system engenders more tenuous belief, because although we suspect that other habitable planets may exist and may produce life by the same mechanisms that produced life here, we thus far have no actual evidence of life outside of Earth. We also have available rational and quantitative methods for belief evaluation (Bayesian probability, for example) that are frequently used in artificial intelligence. In any case, the main point is that intellectual honesty (i.e., rational cognition) requires that the strength of beliefs be contingent on the strength of evidence. Unfortunately, the fact is that Orthodox Jews are not prepared to appropriately modulate their beliefs in God or Torah. Instead, they put God and Torah beyond the reach of evidence or argument, thereby ensuring that Orthodox Judaism cannot achieve true intellectual honesty. I think it's really that simple.

The author claims that "After all is said and done, we must take a leap if we are to believe in God." I simply ask "Why must we?" The intellectually honest approach is to attach a degree of belief to the God-hypothesis and Torah-hypothesis that reflect their evidential support. Why can't we just do the honest thing?

Omissions and Commissions

Let me now mention something that "Off The Derech" leaves out entirely, as does almost every other "frum" book on child-rearing, such as Successful Chinuch, Love is Not Enough, Timeless Parenting, Being and Becoming, More Effective Jewish Parenting, Chinuch in Turbulent Times, and so on, and so on.

That is sexuality.

From reading almost any "frum" book on child and adolescent development, you would think that nothing of any significance happens to boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 15. They just get bigger and possibly become "moody." The wholesale omission of any discussion of the sexual aspects of puberty reflects the monstrous fear of sexuality in the Orthodox world. The approach to sexuality adopted by frum authors, educators, and parents alike has been to ignore as thoroughly as possible any discussion of sexual development, and to rely on the hope that God will make it all just go away.

We can conclude, therefore, that as long as a child is sheltered, his heart will remain pure and he will be protected from sin. (Wagschal 1999)

In other words, sexuality is a kind of alien virus that is beamed in from the "outside world," a contagion that can be prevented by carefully surrounding a child with fedoras, shaitles, and rabbinical fairytales. This hear-no-evil, see-no-evil attitude toward sexuality (along with the inevitable cover-up of sexual abuse and sexual maladjustment) is one more factor that gives the lie to the notion of intellectual honesty in Orthodox Judaism. The Orthodox approach to sexuality is not honest; it is cowardly.