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Feb. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:37
81 Two Examples of Empirical Religiosity
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Time Text
Well, good evening brothers and sisters!
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It's 8 o'clock.
Christina's working late and I have to return a library book.
So, this combination of factors is now causing me to read something to you.
Somebody sent me an email a little while back and they were asking me if there's any proof.
As to, you know, do people just sort of learn religion, or are they taught religion, and so on.
So I want to read to you from just a couple of paragraphs from a book by V.S.
Naipaul, who's an essayist, a traveler, and an essayist.
It's from a book called Among the Believers, An Islamic Journey.
He's actually won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So obviously he doesn't have any philosophical ability, otherwise they'll keep the Nobel Prize far, far away from him.
But he is an acute observer.
And he is also a good writer.
So if you get a chance to read him, it's well worth giving him a shot.
But what I would say is that to the people who think that religion is somehow innate to people or that it is something that we have any sort of direct relationship to, I thought that it would well be worth having a listen to something he has to say here.
So he has in his travels, he comes up with a name, he meets a gentleman named Behzad.
And Behzad is his sort of guide to Tehran.
And I'm going to just read you as he starts to ask Behzad about his questions.
So this is from from the book itself.
This is from page seven.
Behzad had at first seemed neutral in his comments, and I had thought that this was part of his correctness, his wish not to go beyond his function as a translator.
But Behzad was neutral because he was confused.
He was a revolutionary, and he welcomed the overthrow of the Shah, but the religious revolution that had come to Iran was not the revolution that Behzad wanted.
Behzad was without religious faith.
How had that happened?
How in a country like Iran, and growing up in a provincial town, had he learned to do without religion?
It was simple, Bizard said.
He hadn't been instructed in the faith by his parents.
He hadn't been sent to the mosque.
Islam was a complicated religion.
It wasn't philosophical or speculative.
It was a revealed religion with a prophet and a complete set of rules.
To believe, it was necessary to know a lot about the Arabian origins of the religion and to take this knowledge to heart.
Islam in Iran was even more complicated.
It was a divergence from the main belief, and this divergence had its roots in the political-racial dispute about the succession to the prophet who died in 632 AD.
Islam, almost from the start, had been an imperialism as well as a religion, with an early history remarkably like a speeded-up version of the history of Rome, developing from city-state to peninsula-overlord to empire, with corresponding stresses at every stage.
The Iranian divergence had been doctrinal, and there had been divergences within the divergence.
Iranians recognized a special line of succession to the prophet, but a group loyal to the fourth man in this Iranian line, the fourth imam, had hived off.
Another group had their own ideas about the seventh.
Only one imam, the eighth, poisoned like the fourth, was buried in Iran, and his tomb in the city of Mashhad, not far from the Russian border, was an object of pilgrimage.
A lot of those people were killed or poisoned, Behzad said, as though explaining his lack of belief.
Islam in Iran, Shia Islam, was an intricate business.
To keep alive ancient animosities, to hold on to the idea of personal revenge, even after a thousand years, to have a special list of heroes and martyrs and villains, it was necessary to be instructed.
And Behzad hadn't been instructed.
He had simply stayed away.
He had, if anything, been instructed in disbelief by his father, who was a communist.
It was of the poor rather than of the saints that Bizaad's father had spoken.
The memory that Bizaad preserved for special piety was of the first day his father had spoken to him about poverty, his own poverty and the poverty of others.
Now a little later, and this comes from page 121, we come up with another gentleman he's traveling with named Ahmed.
And here is a description of Ahmed's son and his own state of religious faith.
Ahmed's son came in.
He was in his twenties and a doctor.
He worked in a local hospital and didn't intend to go abroad.
He said he wanted to serve the people of Pakistan and I believed him.
He was smaller than his father, paler, more aryan in features, a gentleman, as withdrawn as his father was ebullient.
He was content to let his father speak for him.
Like a man still making a public statement of his faith, and his voice filled the room, Ahmed said, I wanted all my children to serve in hospitals, as doctors, nurses, even as sweepers, because in hospitals you lessen the distress of others.
Ahmed said he hadn't forced religion on his son and had left him free to choose.
And the son, with a kind of 19th century earnestness, was preoccupied with the whole question of belief.
He said, In the beginning men worshipped stones, then fire.
Today we find those practices funny.
Wouldn't men tomorrow find the practices of today funny?
Ahmed let him say that.
Then he spoke for his son again.
When people come around to ask for money for religious causes, you know what he tells them?
He tells them it is better for people to give blood for the sick.
Now, of course, this doesn't represent any kind of proof.
I mean, there is a logical framework that others and myself have set forward, which is to say that religion is not innate to human beings, but rather something which is enforced through parental bullying and social pressure.
And, you know, this would predict, of course, that somebody who was raised even in the midst of a Muslim or Islamic society, if they were raised away from the faith, that they would not end up with that faith.
Which is not a perfect predictor because free will is involved, but we would also expect that somebody who was raised like this second gentleman's son, to actually have the capacity to question and wasn't given any religious or atheistic instruction would end up confused, right?
Because you can't sort of invent epistemology from the ground up and come up with your whole system of philosophy if you're, well, I don't know, not some epoch-spanning genius or, you know, not necessarily busy becoming a doctor.
So I just wanted to do this short scrap.
There's a number of other people within the book.
that are talked about in this manner.
But I wanted to sort of give you those two poles just so you can understand why it is that I say religion is in no way innate to human nature, but it's rather something that is imposed and bullied upon people, which is why you need so many years of instruction and bullying to believe in such nonsense or at least to pretend to believe in such nonsense.
And here are two examples.
This one gentleman who's raised as a communist has as his religion, the poor and the state and all of this sort of craziness of the communist theories
This other gentleman who's raised to be an agnostic has all of the genuine bewilderment and sort of tender confusion that you would expect from somebody who is a humanist who's raised as an agnostic and so it's very hard for me to respond to people who say religion is innate to human nature when I'm just sort of plucking these two examples out of a book that's not about atheism by any stretch of the imagination and you see this constantly both in people that you meet and people that you read about
that the degree of religion that somebody has as an adult is almost always inevitably correlated to the degree of religion or mysticism that they experienced as children.
And it could also be to the degree of abuse that they experience as children as well, which is a little less common.
But I think if you scratch the surface you'll find that just about everybody who has religious faith can have it traced back to a strong amount of parental, social or communal pressure.
When they were very young and therefore it's very hard for me to say And to sort of logically defend any kind of thesis which says that religion is innate to human nature So I'm just gonna do this quick scrap because I've got a bunch of other things to do tonight But before I returned this library book, I did want to read that short passage to you You know in particular in response to this gentleman who wrote in and also just for your own interest.
So pick up the book It's a bit of a slog at times, but it's it's interesting and it's a good view of what life looks like in a very religious Society.
Thanks so much for listening as always
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