With a panel that is “a veritable smorgasbord of cleverness that the world is rightly too respectful to eat,” the talk show “Big Talk” tries to resolve the big question “Does God Exist?” (from the BBC’s That Mitchell and Webb Look).
Religion is a hugely costly machine, but what does it produce? Let’s compare religion to a big corporation since we know how those work.
Take General Motors (on the left of the red revenue scale in the figure above). In 2010, U.S. sales were $73 billion, and that bought three million vehicles. Pretty simple—$73 billion goes in and three million vehicles comes out.
We can peek inside to see where the money goes. Of the incoming revenue, 87% went to automotive cost of sales—manufacturing and materials purchasing. Next, 8% to sales/marketing and G&A (General and Administrative)—the cost to sell the vehicles plus overhead. The final 5% was profit.
Compare this to religion (on the right side of the revenue scale above). In the U.S. for the same year, donations to religion were $101 billion. But that isn’t the only input. Few GM employees spend their free time selling or manufacturing cars, no matter how much they love the company, but religious believers do the equivalent all the time. They volunteer in all sorts of ways for the benefit of religion: evangelizing, serving as deacon or pianist, doing repairs on the church structure, making food for potlucks and bake sales, and so on. How much is this worth? Multiply by a couple hundred million American Christians and we get an extra 50% of income (a very rough guess).
Where does the church’s income go? We don’t know for sure. The IRS grants tax-exempt status to qualified organizations in return for those organizations opening their books to show the public how they spent their money … except for churches and ministries. All we know is that every year about $100 billion (plus a lot of volunteer effort) goes into a black box.
Obviously, personnel must be a huge cost—there are roughly 600,000 paid clergy in the U.S. Buildings, land, and other capital outlays are another biggie—megachurches don’t just build themselves.
So, what’s the output? This black box gets twice the input of GM; what’s religion’s equivalent of six million vehicles?
Nothing goes back to society through taxes. Maybe 10% passes through to good works outside the church. (Again, this is just a guess since churches’ books are closed.) Maintenance of the congregation is another expense, and to some extent this is worthwhile—helping those in need and providing a community for the members.
The rest is the church’s equivalent of marketing—recruiting new members and keeping current members within the fold. General Motors knows that customers of Buick and GMC vehicles won’t remain customers without ongoing marketing, and churches know the same.
And maybe that’s the best way to see religion. Religion is a very inefficient route to charitable giving (imagine a charity with 90% overhead), and religion isn’t necessary to get the social benefit of community. Those benefits could be provided without the inefficient machinery of the church. Religion must be propped up with marketing as is done with Chevy and Cadillac (with an imaginative dose of fire and brimstone thrown in) to remind customers that they’ve backed the right horse.
GM doesn’t need faith to stay in business, but it’s the only thing keeping religion going.
Inspiration credit: Richard Russell suggested this comparison.
Related posts:
Christian apologists often bring up unresolved scientific questions and usually conclude with, “Well, if you can’t answer that question, Christianity can! God did it.” For example:
Admittedly, there is no scientific consensus on these questions. But a century ago, Christian apologists pointed to different questions if they wanted to put science in the hot seat: Okay, Science, if you’re so smart, how is heredity transmitted? What causes cancer? What caused the universe?
And centuries before that, Christianity asked, What causes lightning? Disease? Drought? Earthquakes? It used these questions to argue that Christianity had answers that science didn’t.
Not only is science the sole disciple that could provide answers, increasingly only science can uncover the questions. That is, the apologist pretends to inform science of questions that science discovered itself.
If in hindsight “God did it” was a foolish resolution for the questions of previous centuries—the cause of lightning and disease, for example—why offer it now? Why expect the results to be any different? Wouldn’t it be wise to learn from the past and be a little hesitant to stake God’s existence on the gamble that Science will finally come up short?
What’s especially maddening is apologists like William Lane Craig putting on an imaginary lab coat and ineptly fiddling with beakers and turning dials, playing scientist like a child playing house. He imagines himself strutting into a community of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, Christianity can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has finally come to bail them out of their intellectual predicament. He imagines that he can better answer questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.
This reminds me of the fable about Science scaling the highest peak of knowledge. After much difficulty, Science finally summits and is about to plant his flag when he looks over and sees Theology and Philosophy sitting there, looking at him. “What took you so long?” one of them says. “We’ve been here for centuries.”
Uh, yeah, Theology and Philosophy can invent claims, but Science does it the hard way—it actually uncovers the facts and makes the testable hypotheses. It gets to the summit step by step along the route of Evidence rather than floating there on a lavender cloud of imagination and wishful thinking. Religion is like the dog that walks under the ox and thinks that he is pulling the cart.
To the Christian who thinks that science’s unanswered questions make his point, I say: make a commitment. Publicly state that this issue (pick something—abiogenesis or the cause of the Big Bang or fine tuning or whatever) is the hill that you will fight to the death on. Man up, commit to it, and impose consequences. Say, “I publicly declare that God must be the resolution to this question. A scientific consensus will never find me wrong or else I will drop my faith.”
If the Christian fails to do this (or rather, when he fails to do this), he then admits that when his cherished question du jour is resolved, he’ll discard it like a used tissue and find another in science’s long list of unanswered questions. That is, he admits that this is just a rhetorical device, stated only for show, rather than being a serious argument.
He’ll just move the goalposts. Again.
Photo credit: Graham Ballantyne
Related links:
In a 2010 book, New Testament scholar Michael Licona said that the zombie apocalypse of Matthew 27:52, where many of the dead came back to life after Jesus died, didn’t literally happen. To many of us that’s an unsurprising observation, but this caused quite a controversy within the scholarly evangelical community.
According to Christianity Today:
[Norman] Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it “unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism.”
“Recant”? Is this the Inquisition? Was Licona, like Galileo, shown the instruments of torture and encouraged to choose the correct path?
To be clear, the only objectionable item in Licona’s entire 700-page book was the reinterpretation of this one incident in Matthew, and yet he was pressured out of his job last month as professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES), and his position as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board was eliminated. A single question about biblical inerrancy was, for some, intolerable.
We can try to see this from the standpoint of SES. They have a purpose statement, which says in part that the institution assumes “the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Licona was likely asked to commit to this statement, and his book could be seen as a breach of this commitment.
These kinds of statements of faith are common, and I found them for Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and others. I attended the International Academy of Apologetics this summer (admittedly an odd place for an atheist to be for two weeks, but that’s another story), and their statement of faith, binding on the faculty, said that the Academy “accepts the Holy Scriptures as the revealed and inerrant word of God.”
Let’s grant that a university can dismiss a professor for breaching a contract, even one so odd as this. What’s rarely discussed is the consequence of these mandatory statements: they mean that Christian scholars at evangelical institutions are unable to be objective. With their job on the line, their hands are tied. They can’t always follow the facts where they lead. The public pillorying of Licona shows the consequences of intellectual honesty.
This incident has opened my eyes. Whenever I see or hear claims by Christian scholars, I will now wonder if a statement of faith applies. The next time I read an article by William Lane Craig, for example, I will read it with the caveat that he’s bound by Biola University’s doctrinal statement that says, in part, “The Scriptures … are without error or defect of any kind.” When he argues that the Bible is accurate, I won’t know if that’s really his honest conclusion or if that’s just his institution talking.
This even affects Norm Geisler, Licona’s chief accuser. Geisler is a professor at Veritas Evangelical Seminary, whose statement of faith says, “We believe the Bible … is verbally inerrant in the original text.”
How can we take seriously anything said about Christianity by Craig, Geisler, or indeed any scholar who is intellectually constrained in this way?
Photo credit: Vectorportal
Related posts:
Related links:
Karl Marx said, “[Religion] is the opium of the people” in 1843. This is often assumed to mean that religion is like a drug, dulling the intellect of those under its influence.
But this isn’t correct. Here is the quote in context:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Marx is saying that religion is a coping mechanism, like a security blanket or a crutch. It’s a symptom of a broken society. In the same way that opium is valuable medicine for someone who is hurting, religion provides valuable relief to those hurting within society.
His larger point is that treating the symptom isn’t a bad start, but it’s only a start, and we must address society’s root problems. Opium reduces the pain of cancer, but don’t fool yourself that it’s treating the cancer. Similarly, religion reduces the pain caused by a dysfunctional society, but don’t fool yourself that you’re treating the underlying problem.
If someone needs crutches, don’t kick them away. Acknowledge that they serve a purpose. But don’t think that that person is whole! Find the problem and solve it. You don’t take away someone’s crutch; you let that person discard it himself when it is no longer needed.
Christianity has faded in Europe, but that’s not because it was outlawed; people have discarded that crutch by themselves. What mechanisms have they adopted to reduce society’s problems so that Christianity’s pain-soothing properties aren’t necessary? Adopt those, and religion withers away by itself as unnecessary.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
Related posts:
You only get one 11/11/11 each century, and today is it. And if today is all about 11, it must be Spin̈al Tap Day!
The 1984 film This is Spinal Tap, a mocumentary of Britain’s loudest heavy metal band, has a scene where the lead guitarist explains why they’re so loud—the dials on their amplifiers don’t stop at 10 but go up to 11. When the interviewer asks why they don’t just recalibrate the numbers so that 10 is the loudest, there’s a confused pause, after which Nigel repeats, “These go to 11.”
And isn’t every day Spin̈al Tap Day within Christianity? Let’s look at a few areas where Christianity stares blankly into space and then repeats, “These go to 11.”
The Catholic Church is a great source of 11-isms. To see immutable religion changing, look at the position of Jesus’s mother Mary within the Catholic Church. By 1854 it concluded, without scriptural evidence, that she must have been born of a virgin herself and in 1950 that she couldn’t have died but must have risen to heaven.
Or consider Limbo, the place that’s neither heaven nor hell, where unbaptized babies go when they die. The idea was discarded by the church in 2007.
The Trinity is always a fun topic. The Jews in the Old Testament saw the move from polytheism to monotheism as foundational, but then Christianity (Judaism 2.0) invented the Trinity. They had a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too problem in that they wanted to keep monotheism except that their “single” deity would be formed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. First off, we have a problem with language—can’t Christianity think of a better name for its god than “God”?
And if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the persons, what do you call the union of these into one god? That is, Father + Son + Holy Spirit = who? You need a fourth name. Do you call it “God”? But “God” is the one who created everything, and that’s supposed to be the Father. The Father can’t both be the first person of the Trinity and the overall god at the same time. You can use “the Trinity” as the umbrella name, but that’s an odd name for a monotheistic god.
There’s another way to see the problem. Consider this passage:
I will gird you, though you have not known Me; that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me. I am the LORD [that is, Jehovah], and there is no other. (Isaiah 45:5-6)
There’s nothing confusing here from a Jewish viewpoint, which was the intended audience. Let’s ignore for now that the Old Testament uses several names, possibly for different gods (Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim), that are conflated when convenient.
The verse says that there is no other besides Jehovah. If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Father,” this means that he reigns alone and the Trinity is no more. But if Jehovah is a synonym for the Trinity, then it makes nonsense of the singular pronouns (Me and I) in these verses and confuses passages such as “Then [Jehovah] spoke to Moses” (Ex. 40:1) or “After [Jehovah] had spoken these things to Job” (Job 42:7). The problem, of course, is demanding a Christian interpretation of a Jewish text.
Here are a few more 11-isms.
I’ve read more sensible things in Alice in Wonderland. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Sweep away [the priests’] gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies.”
Let’s end with an 11-ism video. This one weighs the profound love Jesus has for us against that whole hell thing.
Related posts:
Galileo Unchained 