STRANGERCROMBIE WINNER! This article was bought-and-paid-for in The Stranger’s annual charity auction—which this year raised more than $50,000 for the Seattle nonprofit Treehouse, helping foster kids since 1988. Thank you, everybody!
The biggest problem with atheists and agnostics is that we don’t
know how to speak without sounding like ass-holes. True, books like
The God Delusion and God Is Not Great became best sellers
last year, and in many ways, atheism is more accepted than ever before.
But atheists—myself included—need to stop being so
goddamned smug about their atheism all the time. Watch any of
the dozens of clips of Christopher Hitchens denouncing God on YouTube:
He’s so insufferable—even more insufferable than Hitchens usually
is—that even the most devout unbeliever has to restrain the urge
to punch the screen. And Richard Dawkins, with his inane suggestion
that atheists refer to themselves as “brights,” is no better.
Douchebags.
Valerie Tarico’s antievangelical book The Dark Side is a
refreshing alternative. Perhaps part of the reason Tarico doesn’t come
across as a snide intellectual is that she is from an evangelical
background: “My faith had been the center of my life since I was
small,” she writes. “Evangelical Christianity was what
I fell back
on when I felt lost. It was my home.” By her own choice, Tarico went to
the evangelical Wheaton College, “a bulwark of conservative Christian
education” whose graduate school is named the Billy Graham Center.
But that’s not to say that faith came easy to her. “I remember
kneeling one night on the floor of my bedroom, crying, pleading for God
to take [my doubts] away, and then crawling into bed with some sense of
relief.” Finally, the life of faith became too much for Tarico to bear:
“Alone, one wretched evening, I swallowed a bottle of pills.” This is
not an atypical experience, of course. You can find any number of
stories like this on exchristian
.net, and it’s important to note
that Tarico’s biographical information only takes up the first few
pages of The Dark Side, to contextualize her quest.
The rest of the book is a humble and sincere exploration of the
Christian faith. Tarico is a psychologist, and she has a good
psychologist’s curiosity for symbols and untruths and true meaning. Her
quest takes her through hundreds of sources—books and websites on
both sides of the religious debate—and she determines that “the
Bible is laden with contradictions” that can be “reconciled only by
contorted logic, improbable conjecture, and leaps of faith.”
For many of these contradictions, Tarico simply had to do a close
reading of the Bible. If, as evangelicals believe, the Bible is God’s
literal word, why does it offer dueling opinions on incest,
circumcision, alcohol, graven images, and infanticide? (Not all of
these failures of internal logic happen by flipping between the New and
Old Testaments. Jesus proclaims in Matthew 5:22, “Anyone who calls
someone else a fool deserves hell,” and then, in Matthew 7:26 and
23:17, he calls people fools.)
Christianity is also inspected within its historical contexts. I
didn’t know, for example, that “for much of Christianity’s first
fourteen hundred years, homosexual behavior was seen as a minor sin
like gluttony or greed.” Others may not realize that in 1616 the
Catholic Church issued a statement that the earth revolving around the
sun was “philosophically (i.e., scientifically) foolish and absurd, and
is considered official heresy because it explicitly contradicts the
meaning of Scripture in many places.”
The book mirrors Tarico’s quest for meaning, and she proves to be a
skilled teacher—in one passage, she equates God blaming humans
for original sin with an adult blaming a child for being molested,
which is an eerily apt metaphor that sets up this beauty of a passage:
“God is an aggrieved party. His goodness has been offended by human
sin, and he is owed something, namely the death and eternal damnation
of all humans. This is the only thing that can appease him.”
But Tarico is, most importantly, never shrill. Like all worthwhile
humans, she is simply in love with the quest for knowledge. She
reaffirms that “Christianity is, to borrow a phrase, one of the world’s
great wisdom traditions.” “What if ideas are like plants?” she asks as
she explores Christianity as a self-propagating idea: “feeding us,
tempting us with practicality or beauty, but sometimes taking hold and
crowding out other ideas that might also feed, serve, and delight us?”
Tarico teaches with grace and humility, she explores the facts
responsibly and with an eager curiosity, and she mercifully applies the
Golden Rule by not belittling the people—evangelicals—for
whom this book is intended. For that reason above all, this is the
finest anti-Christian book I have ever read. 
Is comparing religious beliefs to mythical uniforms that shit rainbows doing too much?
Is comparing religious beliefs to mythical unicorns that shit rainbows doing too much?
Have you seen Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God”?
You should.
I get a little cranky when people tell me that I have to accept their messiah and myth-based belief system or I will burn in hell. And it happens all the time in person, on billboards, TV, etc.
I also feel a deep frustration when our elected officials say that “God” has told them to take our country to war, or that building a pipeline is god’s will.
I think it sucks that people of blind faith feel the need to fight each other, and hurt everybody else in the process.
The fact is that people who don’t buy into to the sectarian dogma get bombarded with it as the status quo in our society. That fact alone gives them every right to respond with smug irreverence. It may turn lots of people off, but it is a human and fair response.
Thanks for this review. Check-book journalism at it’s finest!
Seriously, organized religions have caused such damage for such a long time, it’s good to see another angle opened against the unearned respect given to them. Think of this book as the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of Dawkins.
Atheists who insist that Christians are idiots because the bible contradicts itself are just as bad as the smug nasty-minded Christians who proudly tell the aforementioned Atheists that they are damned.
The symmetry breaks when we understand how the only basis for the claim of damnation comes from the same book(s) full of contradictions! Anyone who believes self-contradictory nonsense — to the point of not only spending one’s life trying to obey it, but actually staking his immortal soul on it! — has committed mental folly of the highest order. The person who rejects such teachings in toto (and who takes appropriate insult at the extortionate threat of damnation) is clearly the sane one of this pair.
Karl, I think the reason most American atheists don’t rail against Islam is that Islam has very little real effect, currently, on their daily lives. Even as a pantheistic Buddhist, I feel the pressure from the Christian majority to adopt a normative system of behavior that springs from an ostensibly “revealed” text in which I don’t believe, built on metaphysical assertions which I find counterintuitive.
Philosophically, yes, I find Islam at least as problematic as Christianity. To the degree that I find it more so, I simply submit that given its relative age, Islam is about where Christianity was immediately after the slaughter of the Cathars in France.
At the root of both religions, however, lies the real problem (to my mind): the counterintuitive assertion that a being–and not simply a phenomenon of being–precedes the physical universe, and the anthropocentric insistence that this being is, in essence, anthropomorphic, possessed of primarily human (so far as we can tell) traits as moral preoccupation, jealousy (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”), immutable form.
Now, if we want to debate these matters, I’m happy to take the time (and you’ll find that many atheists would subject me to as much ridicule as they do you . . . and to any degree that they don’t, I’d suggest that it’s the association of Christianity with, say, sodomy laws, opposition to gay marriage, and anti-abortion legislation that drives such ideologues, and they can easily recognize that the average pantheist isn’t much concerned with such things). Hell, maybe we could play around with the relative veracity of the various “revealed” texts, to see if there’s any concrete reason that the Bible ought be considered a greater historical testament than the Lotus Sutra or the Bhadhavad Gita. But it seems that you’re concerned more with the character of atheists, more than the veracity of atheism (or pantheism, or anything other than anthropomorphic monotheism), that is of concern to you.
And speaking of broad brushes, didn’t you defend, a number of posts below, your reference to Pol Pot and Stalin when discussing the moral bankruptcy of atheism? Isn’t that a bit of a broad brush with which to paint? I actually countered that by separating the debate between atheism and theism from the debate between atheocracy and theocracy, but you never addressed such. Avoiding an argument simply because you don’t understand the terms, or because you do understand them and thus realize you’ve essentially lost already, does little for your credibility if you’re going to continue to be up in arms about the failure of anyone to address you in civil terms.
That said, I honor and applaud your service. I’ve always been against our involvement in Iraq, but that sentiment has never extended to our soldiers; and if I wouldn’t have had us fight, I would certainly have us win so long as we were/are fighting.
–took Paul’s atheist arrogance theme to the Daily Kos, where there’s now a discussion thread including 299 comments. Some are just ornery, but some are pretty thoughtful. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/29/…
Valerie Tarico
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.–Jacob Bronowski
http://www.WisdomCommons.org
“But to assume we are just a product of Darwinian evolution alone; otherwise why do humans have the ability to disregard their survival for the survival of a complete stranger? Why is it humans have that “voice” that tells them to for a moment not be selfish and help someone who does not share their genes or hope for survival?”
Hey Karl,
You raise a good question — it bothered me for a while as well. However, once I started some research into neurobiology and social systems, I came across research that cemented my disagreement with the anthropocentric worldview typical of most evangelists. In evolutionary biology, the concept of “altruism” — that is, sacrificing one’s own fitness to benefit another individual — can be explained by the following:
1. Kin selection and inclusive fitness. By assisting a relative with child-rearing or resource attrition, a particular individual will still be promoting its own genes — since they are shared, to a certain extent, by a relative. Look up eusociality and haplodiploidy for more info.
2. Altruism/reciprocity as a behavioral paradigm. In game theory, you create a matrix of payoffs to an individual based on interactions with others. (It’s a statistical paradigm used in economics as well.) The strategy of reciprocity — that is, tit-for-tat conditional altruism – is one of the most successful strategies because it promotes the well-being of the commons. File-sharing on p2p networks, for instance.
If you are interested in learning more, Dawkins wrote an acclaimed book called “The Selfish Gene.” There are still arguments you can make against this theory, but the fields of social psychology and evolutionary biology have progressed pretty far in the last century or so — I would recommend you look into a college course or two, just to become more familiar with the information.
I admire Mr. Constant (an avowed atheist) acknowledging that many atheists and agnostics (more atheists, actually) sound increbibly smug when asserting their views. He’s right–many atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Bill Maher) come off as insufferable jerks who are just as intolerant and disdainful of others’ beliefs and opinions as the religious believers they criticize.
The problem with the review (or the original book, not sure) is one of nomenclature. Mr. Constant calls the book on a couple of occasions “anti-Christian” but in reading the review the book appears to be more about the author’s experience with evangelical Christianity. Fair enough, but the problem is that many (arguably most) Christians in the world aren’t evangelicals. Half of the world’s 2 billion Christians are Catholics, for example, and few would describe Catholics as evangelicals. He also points out the contradictions in the Bible (true), but again, this is only a problem for fundamentalist Christians (again, a minority of Christians worldwide) who view the Bible as inerrant. Fundamentalist Christianity seems to be a particularly American phenomenon, but again, most Christians in the world are not American. Critics of religion (and Christianity) often use these terms inter-changibly, which is inaccurate.
None of this is to say that Christianity, religion, etc. is above criticism–it isn’t. The problem is that many of its critics have no sense of nuance, broader perspective, or real undertanding of what they’re criticizing.
KO: “The problem is that many of [religion’s] critics have no sense of nuance, broader perspective, or real undertanding [sic] of what they’re criticizing.”
Nor do many of the critics of its critics. I’m looking at you, KO.
KO: “The problem is that many of [religion’s] critics have no sense of nuance, broader perspective, or real undertanding [sic] of what they’re criticizing.”
Nor do many of the critics of its critics. I’m looking at you, KO.
For another sensitive and informative (if also slightly unnerving) take on fundamentalist Christianity, check out The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, by Susan Harding. It is a serious piece of scholarly analysis by a professor of cultural anthropology, but the writing is clear, beautiful, and gripping. Her insights in this book have become foundational in the anthropologies of Christianity and secularism.
Oh, and there is a ton out there on the expansion of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity globally (definitely NOT just an American phenomenon). Simon Coleman’s The Globalization of Christianity is a good start if anyone is interested in the cultural dimensions and transformations associated with the spread of fundamentalist approaches to Christian belief.
Being an author makes one a relentless self promoter. In that light, I can’t resist posting the following comment. It was made by an evangelical philosophy professor who read Paul’s review and then purchased The Dark Side. He is writing to the NYT:
I am writing to suggest that you review the following book: Valerie Tarico, The Dark Side: How Evangelical Christianity Corrupts Love and Truth. . . . I can say, as someone who does academic philosophy of religion, she has seen more of the relevant issues and contributed more of novelty to the debate than some of the better known critics, including Christopher Hitchens, who quite frankly is more heat than light and has little new to say. Tarico does have much new to say, and her book, on my view, is the best of the genre — although it specifically targets evangelicalism. While I do not find all of the criticisms persuasive, it is on the whole a devastatingly good indictment of many core evangelical doctrines — and this is coming from a very committed Christian who teaches at an evangelical university.
I sent this book review to a Christian friend in Arizona and this is her reaction:
I probably would like the book, but I don’t like this review because it ignores progressive or non-evangelical Christianity’s support for what information he could be supporting. This type of publicity appeals to many who are just anti-government, anti-religion or church and anti-change and reinforces their ignorant views. It shows the reviewers ignorance of a powerful force – the growing progressive church movement – working toward his inclusive goals and educating evangelical believers about those subjects as the book apparently does. Those that remain ignorant of the changes in Christianity and attack that change are as detrimental to progress as some of the anti-gay activists are in opposing support for diversity and acceptance of all. The term “anti-Christianity” I believe will limit the value and readership of what sounds like an excellent book. I spent my weekend in a church gathering where I met people who have positions to make positive political change rather than putting others down. What’s the difference between those who are actively anti-gay and those who are actively anti-Christian as the reviewer appears to be? I see great similarity–both are inadequately informed and/or ignorant.
Tucson Progressive Christian