Cutting through the tentacles of superstition

“The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit.”

These words by Christopher Hitchens in the Introduction to his book The Portable Atheist – Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (De Capo Press, 2007) summarises the problem religion still causes in society.

Hitchens’s book is absolute essential reading for anyone who claims to have a critical mind and who wants to counter the preposterous arguments so often used by believers who see no conflict between the findings of science and the tenets of religious beliefs. He introduces the development and growth of the island of nonbelievership and science amidst a sea of ignorance and religious beliefs through the words of atheists: essays and questions on religion and rational thinking by Lucretius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, David Hume, James Boswell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Leslie Stephen, Anatole France, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Emma Goldman, H.L. Mencken, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, John Updike, Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Elizabeth Anderson, Steven Weinberg, Salman Rushdie, Sam Harris, A.C. Grayling, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others.

Hitchens quotes from Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) when Dr. Rieux thinks about the reaction of the town of Oran, “celebrating its recovery from – its survival of – a terrible visitation of disease.” The analogy is clear, that a biological pestilence mowing down vulnerable people is very similar to the way religion casts it spell over the minds of a “plague-stricken people”, destroying their ability to think rationally and to deal with the challenges the real world puts in their daily lives.

Hitchens writes human “sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus ‘miracles’ attested to, and scapegoats – such as Jews or heretics or witches – hunted down or burned. The few men of science and reason and medicine had all they could to keep their libraries and laboratories intact, or their very lives from harm. Of course, when the evil had ‘passed over,’ there were equally idiotic ceremonies of hysterical thanksgiving, propitiating whatever local deities there may be…”

The severe criticism I have experienced as an atheist journalist writing about science for newspapers in the Media24 group and as former science editor of Die Burger – and now again because I cast a sceptic blanket over the hysteria of the Angus Buchan phenomenon – reminds me of the excellent novel by the Oxford author Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio.

In it the stern religious dogmatist Caius Valerius complains when his friend Lucontius jests about the way the discoveries of science were making inroads into the beliefs of Christians in 5th century Roman Gaul near Avignon. “Surely I speak only the truth? Surely we see the Revelations of our Lord solely through Greek eyes? Even Saint Paul was a Platonist,” Lucontius jokes.

“I do not know what you mean,” Caius replies. “The truth is told to me in the Bible. I need no Greek words to tell me what I see there.”

Pears describes Caius Valerius as a coarse man “who wrapped himself in piety like a suffocating blanket.” And: “Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed. Once, and not so long ago, he would have fallen silent in embarrassment at his lack of knowledge; now it was the knowledgeable who had to mind their tongues” (my italics).

Angus Buchan, pastor Fred May of Shofar, the religious fundamentalists running (and ruining) the minds of the United States of America, these are all modern day Caius Valeriuses.  When one reads the letters of support for Buchan in the Afrikaans media, criticising poor Lina Spies for daring to point out the superficiality of his message in an excellent column in the weekly supplement By, the need for science to make its voice heard loudly and clearly becomes so much more urgent.

As Pears points out through the character of Julien Barneuve, “saintliness was hysteria, miracles naturally occurring phenomena misunderstood by the simple, belief mere self-delusion. A rigorous education in science was the antidote to all such afflictions” (my italics).

The “tentacles of superstition” ensnaring the minds of believers through the preachings of Angus Buchan, Fred May, Benny Hinn, TD Jakes, Pope Benedictus XVI, and thousands other misleaders of vulnerable, gullible minds can only be decimated by taking up the sharp scissors of science.

Hitchens’s analogy between the plague bacillus in Camus’s novel and the religious virus is very apt. He writes, quoting Camus’s character Dr. Rieux:

“No the fact is that the bacilli are always lurking in the old texts and are latent in the theory and practice of religion. This anthology (The Portable Atheist) hopes to identify and isolate the bacilli more precisely, and also to vindicate Dr. Rieux by giving prominence to those who, then and now, have always counterposed enlightenment to the bane:

The record of what had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

May the healing of ensnared religious minds begin with this excellent anthology compiled by Hitchens.