A friend has promised to send me a copy of Richard Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion”, so I hope to read it soon. I was an atheist long before I’d ever heard of Mr Dawkins, however, and I’ve yet to read anything by him (though I did hear an interview he did on Air America’s late, great Morning Sedition) so I don’t look for the book to buttress my lack of faith. Rather, it seems like a book worth chewing on. I read a provocative review essay in the November issue of Harper’s (by Marilynne Robinson) which I won’t yet go into here (perhaps after reading Dawkins).
Here in Germany, unlike in the US (where I’m from) or Mexico (where I’ve lived), there is relatively little public discussion of religion.* There is talk about Islam, but that’s more of a political issue (and something I’ll come back to), and talk about Benny the Rat (who is famously German, but is also a politician), but not much real religious talk. Politicians don’t say much about religion (their own or anyone else’s), even though one of the largest political parties is expressly Christian. My partner, B, has had issues with her parents about her lack of religiosity, but even in their case it’s not the sort of heat generated by American friends I’ve known.
Of course, Germany is also a country where the state partially and indirectly subsidizes religious schools, has loads of religious holidays (I don’t have to work on All Saints Day, and some Germans don’t have to work on the day of Mary’s alleged ascension) and collects a tax on behalf of religions directly out of your paycheck (if you want it to). I don’t have the figures (I suspect they are readily available) but this is also a country with among the lowest church-attendance rates / professed-religiosity rates in the world. The US, with (and Dubyah aside, let’s be honest) almost no official government action of the sort just mentioned is a nation of bell-tinkling pharisees by comparison.
I find it all very interesting (and in many ways depressing).
I’ll plant my flag in the name of the inverse Pascale’s Wager. If you don’t know already, basically there was a guy named Pascale who bet dome other guy that there was a god. The other guy was all “No there ain’t!” But Pascale figured that, if there IS a god, the other guy is bound to have trouble come the hereafter, whereas he (Pascale) had very little to lose by believing in a god, and perhaps a lot to gain.** Greg’s Wager could be as follows: I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. No, wait. It is: unless you’ve seen some reason to assume that the normal rules don’t apply, you should assume the normal rules apply. In other words, when I look around, I see things that can be explained to me, and this is Good. I stopped accepting “Because I said so” as an explanation quite some time ago, and I ain’t starting back now.
Read Voltaire’s “Candide”. My guess is that M. Arouet said what Mr Dawkins wants to say long before the latter was a gleam in his parents’ eyes, but I’m ready to watch the dead horse get beaten further. I mean, which dead horse is more deserving of a beating, these days?
* A googlenews Germany search for Gott turns up 4,507 hits, a Mexico search for Dios will give you 16,839, and a US search for God yields 69,003. That’s got a lot to do with the number of sources the google machine crawls, but it is an interesting anecdote anyway.
** Somewhere on the Internets I recently read someone making the point that Pascale was thinking of a very particular god, but I’ll leave that aside, as well as a related point about the absurdity of deciding on whether or not to have a genuine religious belief (you either have it or you don’t, agnostics).
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