Celebrate a God-free holiday season

Tis the season for giving you know - oh and are they ever giving!

Who are these givers you ask? Silly secularist Ann Arborite! While you read the Daily's "biased" editorial page and wait for some liberal academic to impress his or her dirty humanistic theories on you, millions of America's righteous religious folk are thinking about (or doing) the work of a divine entity of their choice.

Nick Woomer Back to the Woom

This holiday season we can all look forward to hearing about the good works of all sorts of religious groups, although the spotlight will focus mostly on Christians. The news media will be rife with feel-good stories and sound bites - testaments to just how much the "power of faith" can accomplish.

This type of seasonal pro-religious rhetoric seems to have gotten even to the many secularly oriented individuals. For these people, religion (or at least spirituality) is a pretty benign institution at best and just sort of goofy at worst. Sure, you have the neo-fascist followers of demagogues like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who would turn the United States into the Christian analogue of Iran if they were ever given the chance, but for the most part faith and spiritual hope are good things. Having a little optimism about what happens after death has to be good. Faith gives purpose to people's lives and makes them feel warm and fuzzy; besides, the worst thing that can happen is that those who consider themselves "heaven bound" all end up disappointed when their time comes.

But attitudes like this are what make even the most non-judgmental types of spirituality so sinister.

Religion is one of the most powerful forces maintaining the social, political and economic status quo. Mass acceptance of any type of spirituality that promises a better existence after death gives people an incentive to be satisfied with the quality of their own lives and the lives of those around them. If you're certain that eternal paradise or a better next life waits, there ceases to be any motivation to risk much here on earth. With poor people - many of whom can expect to die relatively young - the argument to "wait for heaven" might seem especially compelling.

The interesting thing about religion is that almost everyone will implicitly admit that it is an instrument of social control. Many people are terrified by the prospect of mass abandonment of spirituality - without God there can be no morality and without morality there would be chaos, doom and gloom. A cursory examination of this argument is amusing - are people who believe in God so morally fragile that they need the threat of hell to control themselves? I doubt it and I think that, if really pressed, many spiritual people would abandon this strategy.

What makes the "No God = doom and gloom" argument interesting is the level of genuine fear at the possibility of popular atheism it reflects. If the threat of atheism is not that people won't be able to control themselves without a God, what could it be? It seems to me that the hypothetical doom and gloom scenario that so many people appear to think popular atheism would unleash would be nothing more than a radical movement on the part of marginalized classes to demand equality in social, economic and political spheres.

If religion really is just a way to keep people who wouldn't otherwise be content quiet, then there seem to be only two ways to fix it that would not involve gross violations of people's civil and human rights. The first way would be for theologians to revive the few successful religious movements that actually have been catalysts for positive social change like the Latin American liberation theology movement of the '70s and '80s.

The second - and most practical way for students - is to do a little honest reflection on the actual social effects of spirituality and act accordingly. Among other things, the holiday season offers an easy opportunity to act on one's non-faith. Two suggestions: First, give to secular, rather than religious charities. Second, spend some of that quality holiday family time preaching atheism to impressionable young siblings and/or cousins.

Religion can not be redeemed simply by purging it of right wing politics. By offering people visions of a glorious afterlife, spirituality weakens people's desire for a more just society on earth. Conversely, the moral "benefits" of religion appear negligible. One person's "doom and gloom" is another person's "justice."

- Nick Woomer can be reached

via e-mail at nwoomer@umich.edu.