Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Praise Allah for the Internet. With the Web making self-censorship irrelevant—someone else is bound to say what you won’t—it became a place where intellectual risk-takers finally exhaled.

—Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam¹⁴

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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

—Either Thomas Jefferson (date unknown) or Wendell Phillips (1852)

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There’s such a thing as growing up too fast. We all have to make the awkward transition from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, and sometimes the major changes come way too early, with lamentable results. But we cannot maintain our childhood innocence forever. It is time for us all to grow up. We must help one another, and be patient. It is overreaction that again and again has lost us ground. Give growing up some time, encourage it, and it will come about. We must have faith in our open society, in knowledge, in continuing pressure to make the world a better place for people to live, and we must recognize that people need to see their lives as having meaning. The thirst for a quest, a goal, a meaning, is unquenchable, and if we don’t provide benign or at least nonmalignant avenues, we will always face toxic religions.

Instead of trying to destroy the madrassahs that close the minds of thousands of young Muslim boys, we should create alternative schools—for Muslim boys and girls¹⁵—that will better serve their real and pressing needs, and let these schools compete openly with the madrassahs for clientele. And how can we hope to compete with the promise of salvation and the glories of martyrdom? We could lie, and make promises of our own that could never be fulfilled in this life or anywhere else, or we could try something more honest: we could suggest to them that the claims of any religion should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. We could start to change the climate of opinion that holds religion to be above discussion, above criticism, above challenge. False advertising is false advertising, and if we start holding religious organizations accountable for their claims—not by taking them to court but just by pointing out, often and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that of course these claims are ludicrous—perhaps we can slowly get the culture of credulity to evaporate. We have mastered the technology for creating doubt through the mass media (“Are you sure your breath is sweet?” “Are you getting enough iron?” “What has your insurance company done for you lately?”), and now we can think about applying it, gently but firmly, to topics that have heretofore been off limits. Let the honest religions thrive because their members are getting what they want, as informed choosers.

But we can also start campaigns to adjust specific aspects of the landscape in which this competition takes place. A bottomless pit in that landscape that strikes me as particularly deserving of paving over is the tradition of “holy soil.” Here is Yoel Lerner, an Israeli and a former terrorist, quoted by Stern:

“There are six hundred thirteen commandments in the Torah. The temple service accounts for about two hundred and forty of these. For nearly two millennia, since the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people, contrary to their wishes, have been unable to maintain the temple service. They’ve been unable to comply with those commandments. The Temple constituted a kind of telephone line to God,” Lerner summarizes. “That link has been destroyed. We want to rebuild it.” [2003, p. 88]

Nonsense, say I. Here is an imaginary case: Suppose it turned out that Liberty Island (formerly Bedloe’s Island, on which the Statue of Liberty stands) was once a burial ground of the Mohawks—say the Matinecock Tribe of nearby Long Island. And suppose the Mohawks came forward with the claim that it should be restored to pristine purity (no gambling casinos, but also no Statue of Liberty, just one big holy cemetery). Nonsense. And shame on any Mohawks who had the chutzpah(!) to rile up their fellow braves on the issue. This would be ancient history—a lot less ancient than the history of the Temple—and it should be allowed to recede gracefully into the past.