Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

by Daniel C. Dennett

would find a much larger chasm separating us. I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation. It

agree: a doctrine that trades in a person’s good intentions for the prudent desires of a rational maximizer shopping around for eternal bliss may win a few cheap victories, luring a few selfish and unimaginative souls into behaving themselves for a while, but at the cost of debasing their larger campaign for goodness.

“Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness”

can a secular armed force, motivated in the main by a love of liberty or democracy, not of God (or Allah), maintain its credibility, and hence its effectiveness, with a minimum of bloodshed, against an army of fanatics?

the Hollywood-inspired desire to lead an adventurous and hence “meaningful” life may play a larger role in multiplying the number of young people who decide to frame their lives in such terms.

Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence, either because they secretly believe that most of the world’s population is wasting their lives in delusion (but they are too tenderhearted—or devious—to say so), or because they secretly believe that their own tradition is just such a delusion (but they fear for their own safety if they admit it)?

That’s why those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.

And most shameful are the priests, rabbis, imams, and other experts whose response to the sincere requests from their flock for moral guidance is to conceal their own inability to give reasons for their views about the tough issues by hiding behind some “inerrant” (read “above criticism”) interpretation of the sacred texts.

Property owners are held responsible for harms that result when they maintain something that can lure innocent people into harm. Those who maintain religions, and take steps to make them more attractive, must be held similarly responsible for the harms produced by some of those whom they attract and provide with a cloak of respectability.

It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of “moderate” Muslims.

we prefer to channel our charity and good deeds through secular organizations, precisely because we don’t want to be complicit in giving a good name to religion!

Only those within the religious community can effectively start to dismantle this deeply immoral attitude, and multiculturalists who urge us to go easy on them are exacerbating the problem.

Now let me try to put better words in their mouths. What these people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go.

We materialists are the bad guys, and those who believe in anything supernatural, however goofy and gullible the particular belief, have at least this much going for them: they’re “on the side of the angels.”

A good scientific materialist can be just as concerned about whether there is plenty of justice, love, joy, beauty, political freedom, and, yes, even religious freedom as about whether there is plenty of food and clothing, for instance, since all of these are material benefits, and some are more important than others.

Consider, for instance, those contemplative monks, primarily in Christian and Buddhist traditions, who, unlike hardworking nuns in schools and hospitals, devote most of their waking hours to the purification of their souls, and the rest to the maintenance of the contemplative lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. In what way, exactly, are they morally superior to people who devote their lives to improving their stamp collections or their golf swing? It seems to me that the best that can be said of them is that they manage to stay out of trouble, which is not nothing.

It is not surprising that religion survives. It has been pruned and revised and edited for thousands of years, with millions of variants extinguished in the process, so it has plenty of features that appeal to people, and plenty of features that preserve the identity of its recipes for these very features, features that ward off or confound enemies and competitors, and secure allegiance.

Anybody hoping to make sense of any highly sophisticated and difficult field of human effort needs to become a near-expert in that field in addition to having the training of his or her home field. Applied to the study of religion, the prescription is clear: scientists intent on explaining religious phenomena are going to have to delve deeply and conscientiously into the lore and practices, the texts and contexts, the daily lives and problems of the people they are studying.

When do the authorities have not just the right but the obligation to step in and prevent abuse? Tough questions, and they don’t get easier when the topic is religion, not alcohol. In the case of alcohol, our political wisdom is importantly informed by what we have learned about the short-term and long-term effects of imbibing it, but in the case of religion we’re still flying blind.

Richard Dawkins goes further. He has proposed that no child should ever be identified as a Catholic child or a Muslim child (or an atheist child), since this identification in itself prejudges decisions that have yet to be properly considered. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant? [2003b] Or imagine if we identified children from birth as young smokers or drinking children because their parents smoked or drank.

Who are they to “protect” these human beings? The anthropologists do not own them as if they were laboratory specimens carefully gathered and shielded from contamination, and the idea that these islands should be treated as a human zoo or preserve is offensive—even when we contemplate the even more offensive alternative of opening the doors to missionaries of all faiths, who would no doubt eagerly rush in to save their souls.

the idea of insisting that the devout of all faiths should face the challenge of making sure their creed is worthy enough, attractive and plausible and meaningful enough, to withstand the temptations of its competitors. If you have to hoodwink—or blindfold—your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.