Freethinking for Dummies

The God’s Will Fallacy

…during (Timothy) Dwight’s tenure, since he personally delivered more than two hundred sermons to undergraduates on the dangers of religious infidelity. One of his most memorable perorations proclaimed the immorality of smallpox vaccination, introduced by Dr. William Jenner in 1796. An earlier form of inoculation against smallpox had been employed by progressive, educated New Englanders like the Adams family since the 1760s. In a departure from the general eighteenth-century approval of scientific advances—a predilection of many orthodox believers as well as freethinkers—Dwight argued that if God had decided from all eternity that an individual’s fate was to die of smallpox, it was a sin to interfere with the divine plan through a man-made trick like vaccination.”

The above quote is from Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby.  It is an excellent example of the inhumanness of a conservative religious mindset.  It is the supernatural version of the Naturalism Fallacy.

The Naturalism Fallacy basically assumes that anything that is natural is good and by extension, anything that isn’t natural is bad.  Here we have the supernatural version of that which I shall call the God’s Will Fallacy.  This fallacy assumes that anything that mankind does to change or enhance the human condition is wrong because god made things the way they are and we are flouting the will of god if we try to influence things.

This ties back into the Calvinistic principles of Unconditional election and Limited atonement upon which modern conservative Christianity is based.  In a nutshell, Unconditional elections states that those who shall be saved were destined by god from the begging of time to be saved and everyone else was destine to spend eternity in hell.  Limited atonement says that Jesus died only for the sins of the elect.

I find these concepts to be grossly arrogant and selfish.  The ideas they promulgate are no different than any other ideology that promotes a select group of people gaining and holding power over everyone else.  We see this in almost every religion.  Christians have their pope, bishops, priests, ministers and pastors. Islam has it’s imams, Hinduism has it’s caste system.  We also see this in secular, mainly political, movements such as kingdoms, dictatorships, oligarchies, and even to a lesser extent, republics.

All of these ideologies are about power of the few over the many.  As Baron Acton said, ”Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”  His observation, while somewhat pedantic and extreme, has real relevancy.  The quote above illustrates this nicely.  Mr. Dwight’s lack of empathy for the suffering of his fellow human beings is corrupted by the fallacy of “God’s Will”.  When put into practice, millions of lives are adversely affected.

This is just one example of the corrupting influence that religion can have on society.  This is why we need a popular movement based on the values of humanism.  Values that put the welfare of all human beings first and foremost.

March 6, 2011 Posted by James Walker | Religion | christianity, humanism, humanist, Islam, religion | 8 Comments