Last Thursday, I attended the debate, “Away With All Gods! Possibility or Fantasy?” which was put on by UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion. The guest speaker, Sunsara Taylor, is a writer for the Revolution Newspaper, and sits on the advisory board of The World Can’t Wait (yes, that means she is a Communist, not to poison any wells). She is on a speaking tour for Away With All Gods!, a book by Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. You can watch a sample of her talk, or watch her appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. The respondent, Scott Bartchy, is the director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion. I’ve previously had Bartchy as professor of History of Religion, and I can vouch that he’s a great speaker and intellectual.
Sunsara wished to convey three central points: that all religion is harmful, that religion wrongly takes human nature to be flawed, and that there is a much deeper basis for morality than religion. To argue that religion was harmful, she had a variety of examples of modern violence that has been approved by religion. She also argues that the Bible is not simply factually wrong, but morally wrong, even in the New Testament. She is very eloquent, however, I thought she overused examples to the detriment of her point. Bringing up lots of extreme examples does little to show that all religion is as bad as that. I felt this played directly into Bartchy’s stance, which was that there is good religion, and bad religion.
Bartchy agreed that there is plenty of bad religion out there, but said that many of Sunsara’s and Avakian’s scriptural interpretations had factual errors. He argued, in fact, that Jesus’ message had many socialist aspects. Marx himself was inspired by some passages in the Bible. Bartchy said that religions are founded on the power of myth. Just as the Abrahamic religions use the myth of history, with a god that closely follows his people, Marxism is uses the myth of the class struggle and revolution. He also drew parallels between Christians’ picking and choosing from the Bible with Sunsara’s picking and choosing from the history of Communism. When Sunsara said that some things in Communist societies were good, some bad, Bartchy immediately compared it to his own point about good and bad religion.
These were some other intriguing moments from the debate.
- Bartchy played the “Stalin” card. Normally, I would groan at this cliche, but I think it is a fair point against Communism. Sunsara’s response? She played the apologist for Stalin, saying many historical facts have been wrong or exaggerated. As I tried to tell one of the Communists afterwards, I think it would have been more effective to simply admit that of course Stalin didn’t get everything right.
- An audience member asked Sunsara where morals come from. One of Sunsara’s main points was that there is a more profound basis for morality than religion, but I don’t think she ever effectively supported that point. She said that only through examining reality, can we know what steps to take to reach our goals. But instead of explaining where those goals come from, she went off on long tangents as if she had misunderstood, or was avoiding the question.
- Another audience member asked how Bartchy could pick and choose from something that is divine. Bartchy responded that everyone picks and chooses; it is neither unusual or bad.
- After the debate, we were going to ask Bartchy a question, but a woman cut in front of us. I didn’t catch the whole thing, but I heard her say, “So you don’t really believe in God”. Bartchy insisted that she didn’t know that. But she kept on saying “He doesn’t really believe in God”, walking away satisfied. Talk about presumptious. Asking someone their personal views and then disbelieving their answer is not a move I would recommend.
Last 5 posts by Tristan Miller
- Presentation: Separation of Church and State - March 6th, 2010
- BASS protests the Westboro Baptist Church - January 17th, 2010
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[...] Scott Bartchy, my doctoral advisor. I was not able to make it to the debate, but was happy to find this tidbit giving what appears to be a fair report of the debate. The report is done by the Bruin Alliance of [...]
Of interest: Larry Hamelin’s response to “picking and choosing“
I attended the debate Away with All Gods curious to hear the seemingly radical and (what I initially believed to be) unwarranted stance–that all religion and subsequent contingencies are harmful, morally unjustified, and should thus be abolished.
After getting over the long bash of religion that did insult my personal beliefs to the fullest, I was curious to know what then the alleged basis for morality that Sunsara Taylor had mentioned numerous times was if not some divinity.
So I asked her (actually I was the second person t ask her) where then does morality come from immediately after the discussion, to which she gave a long and mostly side-stepping answer that addressed more the nature of morality than its basis.
After repeatedly trying to get the true nature of my question across (a question about the basis for morality) all I understood from Sunsara’s longwinded, eloquently worded, and somewhat contradictory reply was that Science could not answer the question of what ought to be, yet morality was grounded in the very reality that science was best in providing answers for.
After having completely denied in unequivocal terms the existence of any realm, be it metaphysical or spiritual, beyond the physical world observable by science, Sunsara’s lack of a satisfactory answer to the puzzle that is the nature, ontological status, and overall objective basis for morality seems to me to reveal the likelihood that Sunsara’s radical stance against religion (and the divine basis of morality religion encompasses) is a bit exaggerated.
Simply put doing “Away with All Gods” and by extension their conceptual equivalents seems a bit extreme when it is in fact reasonable from a philosophical perspective (and one incorporating a method much like that of the scientific method, the Socratic method) to explain ubiquitous and obscure aspects of reality such as morality or consciousness that science is ill-apt to explain with metaphysics (or something beyond the natural realm).
Thus to me it seems the militant denial of Gods and all things beyond the natural realm within the observable domain of science is a bit hasty and contradictory to the burden of proof the scientific method itself warrants for the acceptation and affirmation of such positions–and how can science prove the inexistence or existence of something beyond the domain of empirical observation when doing so would require that the supernatural be empirically observable? By definition the supernatural is not observable in the way that the natural world is empirically observable.
Therefore claiming Gods do not exist is mere conjecture and not even an impractical or irrational claim. But to spread this belief, ironically in a form strikingly similar to Christian evangelist spreading the gospel, seems to me to make the same error of presumption that religions such as Christianity make in affirming the unproven without evidence. Sunsara and the like who affirm certain things are wrong or harmful are appealing to an absolute conception of morality whether they admit it or not. And to do so there must be some objective basis (it need not be a Living being or God with a will) for this morality, and it must exist beyond the limited domain of science in some sense or it would be empirically verifiable.
These are my thoughts on Sunsara Taylor’s views but I do concede in the same manner that Scott Bartchy did in stating that there is good and bad religion. There are some very horrible and atrocious acts that have been condoned and supported by religious doctrine of all sorts. Ignoring that would be to continue to compound the egregious errors of religious practice that feed the atheism, agnosticism, and secularism on the rise in this country. They all share a valid point which ultimately is rooted in the fallibility, dogmatism, ignorance, and naivety of common religious practice and teachings.
There is indeed bad religion, but to overlook the good aspects of religion—the things that religions do such as promoting piety, virtue, and moral rightness within society—is to render one guilty of the same form of ad hoc ignorance characteristic of those who dogmatically and blindly seek to defend their doctrines as absolute and infallible by overlooking the flaws inherent in them and emphasizing the good in them. Sunsara denied any and all good that comes of religion and cited the passages most conducive to this aim out of the Christian Bible far more than any other religious texts (though she did cite others texts as well).
Sunsara cited the practices of religious fundamentalism and extremism as well as religious doctrine that condemns contraception, abortion, and homosexuality and paints then as inhumane, harmful, and ridiculous; yet no passages about unconditional love, altruism, or devotion to righteousness are mentioned. Sunsara briefly noted them in passing by conceding their existence yet moving on to make the point that “you can’t pick and choose.” This struck me as valid prima facie, but upon a deeper look, I feel picking and choosing in some sense is warranted. Simply put reformulation of the principles of morality and spirituality (even drastic reform) is the strongest critique that can be made rather than a complete and total abolishment of religion. This is true simply because the unrealistic abolition of all religion will just create a void that will need to be replaced by something equivalent. If not a God or Gods, then something just as absolute is necessary such as nature or “science,” the latter of which seems to be Sunsara’s replacement for Gods.
All and all my inquiry about the basis and by extension the source of morality was aimed at articulating indirectly the point I’ve been trying to expound this entire comment, that “God” in concept represents far more than the trivial anthropomorphisms commonly ascribed to the concept; furthermore what should be heeded is the danger of the ironic threat that in dogmatically opposing all religions as well as waging war against the oppressive and idiotic idiosyncrasies of bad religion and the political regimes that exploit them for their proposes, there effort may in fact be rendered futile by recreating the very thing they are aimed at defeating—Yet another bad religion, Atheism!