David Hume Goes to Church: On Hypocrisy, Religious and Otherwise

There is an anecdote about the great Scottish philosopher and atheist David Hume concerning his regular attendance of church services conducted by a very orthodox minister. A friend suggested that perhaps Hume was being a little bit inconsistent in attending these services given his skepticism and atheism. Hume’s reply: “I don’t believe all he says, but he does, and once a week I like to hear a man who believes what he says.” This response contains all the Humean wit and charm that his admirers, such as (need I say?) myself, seek in his writings; but this response also, as his wit often does, cuts two ways and leaves us thinking long after our laughter has subsided.
The statement is funny because is makes light of the people’s general disingenuity: something we can all identify with. But it is also a rather subtle critique–Hume was a master of subtlety–of religion and the religious. It suggests, on the one hand, that the majority of Christians–which, in Hume’s time as still in ours (although this problem is receiving more amelioration every day now) meant almost everyone–were hypocrites, that they could not or would not bear the full weight of their convictions. But, on the other hand, it suggests that those who are the true believers, who actually bear the weight of their convictions, are fanatics. Hume must have attended these sermons to be reminded weekly of the true threat of religious fundamentalism. While the American population is still overwhelmingly Christian (78% according to a Pew Forum poll in 2007), the number of those that live by the book, so to speak, cannot be anywhere close to this number. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, you can go to the grocery store, or a restaurant, or any public place on Sunday morning and recognize immediately that 78% of the population is not at church. It seems to me that, while the majority of Americans seem to be, prima facie, Christians, the majority of this majority do not live that way in their day to day lives. Now, let me qualify this statement and make it very clear how I would define Christian–or a truly religious person.
The source of organized religion, in the case of the three monotheistic religions, is the holy books: the Talmud, the Bible, and the Quran. The majority of people in these religions today, I believe, no longer follow strictly the dictates of these books–and who could? Only a fanatic. Only a fanatic would stone a woman to death on the mere suspicion of premarital sex or infidelity, only a fanatic would seek to kill everyone on the planet that did not have the same belief system, only a fanatic would leave their family and everything they owned to follow a madman who believed the world was coming to an end, only a fanatic would kill his only son because an “angel” commanded him to. Only a fanatic, I say. Insofar as a person does not follow strictly the dictates of these evil books, to that extent are they not religious; to that extent have they become humanized and secularized; to that extent have they moved away from these barbaric Bronze Age religions. The truly religious are the suicide bombers, those killing abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics, those seeking to have pseudoscience taught alongside evolution, those giving a baby syphilis because they insist on following the old circumcision ritual of sucking the cut foreskin off of the bleeding, screaming baby, those cutting off the heads of their own female relatives in the name of “honor,” those who believe that the world is coming to an end soon–and in the depths of their being want it to. Organized religion is evil because the very source of its structure and organization is evil: the “holy” books. In every case they contain evil dictates that are supposedly from the mouth of a benevolent and loving God.
To be sure, it is a good thing that the majority of those who claim to be religious are in fact not that religious at all: indeed, if we are something of Jamesian pragmatists, we must in fact, I think, claim that they are de facto, in light of how they live–which is where people’s beliefs really show (a belief we all express frequently in the maxim “Actions speak louder than words,”)–not religious at all, or only slightly so. Now we need only bring their spoken beliefs into focus with their actions–that is to say, what they really believe. It doesn’t bother me that only 1.6% (again, the Pew Forum poll) claim to be atheists and 2.4% agnostics: people can tell the pollsters that they are religious–as long as they don’t act like they are religious. In a word, while many complain of religious hypocrisy, I encourage it. The bigger a religious hypocrite a person is, the less they are acting out the evils of organized religion, and that is a good thing. And for those of us like Hume that want to keep the threat of religious fanaticism–let us just start calling it “true religiosity” and forego the rhetoric suggesting in the word “fanaticism,” as though they are somehow a small faction that is on the fringe–reminded of the threat, then, of true religiosity, thanks to modern technology, we need not take upon ourselves the inconvenience of getting all dressed up to go out on Sunday morning, having to make mind-numbing small talk with sweet old Mrs. Jones or Robinson or Smith, and drink bad coffee for the sake of “fellowship,” no, we need not inconvenience ourselves: we need only watch international news to see the latest horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan, of Hamas in Gaza, of the Catholic church in the third world fighting contraceptives and abortion; we need only watch for a few moments the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world to renew our anti-religious, anti-theist fervor.

Let's Be Candid: On the Panglossian Response of the Christian Right to Haiti

When news broke of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, I imagine that those with some knowledge of the country's history in the last half of the last century were struck by the terrible and tragic irony of the situation: on the world stage, this is the worst kind of irony. John Lee Anderson, in a recent article for The New Yorker, both concisely and graphically summarized the recent past of Haiti, describing it as "a great human slum, governed by a succession (mostly) of thieves and despots" where "cruel military men…sometimes cut the faces off people they killed and left them in the mud of the streets of the slums to terrorize others." Hence the earthquake was, for me and, I believe, many others, a stunning reminder that there cannot possibly be any overarching and transcendent source of justice guiding our world: in short, there cannot possibly be a beneficent divine intelligence immanent in a world where this could happen to Haiti of all places.
That is why, after hearing of the response (and that is not really the right word, because I do not believe he gave any true human sympathy or attention to the situation—'inhumanity' is perhaps more just) of Pat Robertson, I couldn't help but be reminded of Voltaire's great novella Candide. So I took the opportunity to reread this short classic, which I hadn't read in a couple of years, and also to escape from the overwhelming pictures and video footage of the earthquake for a while.
A devastating earthquake figures in Voltaire's masterpiece, and it is not mere fiction. There was a massive earthquake in Lisbon on November 1, 1755 in which thirty to forty thousand people died. Voltaire's description could be used to describe the current disaster I'm sure: "Whirlwinds of fire and ash swirled through the streets and public squares; houses crumbled, roofs came crashing down on foundations, foundations split; thirty thousand inhabitants of every age and either sex were crushed in the ruins." Now, Pangloss, the Leibnizian philosopher of Voltaire's novella, responds thus to the carnage: "all this is for the best, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it cannot be somewhere else, since it is unthinkable that things should not be where they are, since everything is well." Candide is in fact a humorous and, at times, vitriolic satire aimed at the German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz, who formed a totalizing philosophical system in which the world operates under a pre-established harmony because God created "the best of all possible worlds." Pangloss, therefore, sees everything—even the terrible earthquake at Lisbon, even the ravishes of war, even his own hanging and partial dissection—as contributing in some way to God's plan for this, the best of all possible worlds.
I don't think that Pat Robertson has heard of Leibniz or has probably even thought much about theological or philosophical questions, but he—and other mouthpieces of the Christian Right (recall Jerry Falwell's response to 9-11)—nonetheless reacts in a Panglossian way to current events. Everything is reduced to a totalizing worldview in which God is immanent. The good is God's mercy and kindness, the bad—or even catastrophic, as in the case of Haiti—is divine retribution for human transgression. I believe that it is time that we rejected this "metaphysico-theologico-

cosmoloonigology," as Voltaire labeled it, as the pernicious and otiose doctrine that it is.
For centuries humans have been giving their ignorance a name: God. Or Horus, or Mithra, or Zeus, or Jove, or Yahweh, or Krishna, or Allah, etc.,—the list could go on ad infinitum. When humanity didn't understand natural phenomena such as the nature, composition, and behavior of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies, the weather (and we haven't advanced too far on this front), the failure or success of their crops, and natural disasters, they explained them through the use of anthropomorphic gods: gods that were fickle and emotional like human beings, gods that had human jealousies and concerns, and hence had to be propitiated through sacrifice and rigid adherence to rules of conduct. This is convenient for the parties of god, for human beings will almost certainly lack an explanation for certain things. On the other hand, when science or philosophy makes advances in knowledge, such as Galileo's discovery that our solar system is heliocentric, Darwin's discovery of natural selection, and the discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson, the theists say, "Ah, look how ingenious our God is!" Or, "Look how incredibly complex the composition of life is! There must be an intelligent designer!"
Now, apropos the first ruse of the theists—that of deifying ignorance: I wouldn't mind if some people wanted to call our ignorance God, or Allah, or whatever, as long as they were content to admit that doing so gives us absolutely no new knowledge. But they are not: they first give our ignorance the name God and then presume that they have proven the existence of some sort of beneficent bearded man in the stars who is immanent in our everyday concerns. A God, for example, that will suspend the natural order to help Billy Bob recover from heart surgery because he has indulged in far too many dollar burgers from cows raised on what was once the South American rainforest, but then turns around and kills 50,000 people in Haiti because of a pact they made with the devil; or a God that rewards suicide bombers with 72 virgins in heaven; or a God that demands genital mutilation.
As to the second ruse,—that of giving God the credit in absentia, for our advances in knowledge,—all we need is Ockham's razor: where we already have an explanation, we don't need another entity in the equation, much less a supernatural one. That would only complicate things and add more questions to be answered (how many a good scholastic mind was wasted on the myriad questions of Christian theology?).
Philosophy has, since Leibniz's time, deconstructed its own extensive—labyrinthine at times—systems and has had the humility not to attempt to rebuild over the ruins, but merely to admire them; and, while a unified theory serves as the ideal end for many scientists, it certainly isn't necessary as a means to the functioning of our everyday scientific practice; but most importantly, both philosophy and science have discarded the hubris that keeps the Panglosses of our world from calling our ignorance what it is. After all, naming a marmosyte "Tullia's ape" or a swan "Leda's goose" is a gratuity: they are after the naming no less a marmosyte and a swan.
So, I say, let's be candid, and let's remember Cadide's response to the dogmatic Pangloss: "we must cultivate our garden." There is no divine intelligence that is going to right the world's wrongs and protect us from the immense challenges that face us, now a decade into the twenty-first century. If there is going to be any justice in the world, if anyone is to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and clothe the poor; if there is ever to be anything like paradise, it must come from us: to paraphrase the great American poet Wallace Stevens, divinity must live within ourselves and our being in the world—and being sensitively attuned to the world. It is, it would seem,—with us and all the other myriad and beautiful variations of life,—a singularity in a largely empty and dying universe.
As for the present, there remains—and likely will remain for many years to come—much cultivation required in Haiti. I don't think God will lift a finger, so let us take the responsibility upon ourselves.