MattMaroon.com

Paul Graham’s latest essay, Keep Your Identity Small, says that the reason arguments over religion or politics tend to get so heated (relative to one about baking) is that those particular topics are seen as part of people’s identity. I don’t doubt that that’s part of it, but I’m not convinced it’s the major differentiator. I think the reason those two topics get participants so worked up is that other people’s opinions, unlike most topics, have a material impact on our lives.

If two people disagree over how long to bake a cake, it’s not a big deal because both can simply ignore the other and bake theirs the way they always have. The result of any argument that could possibly arise is relatively insignificant to both parties. Change the argument to whether or not the government should spend $800 billion buying up toxic mortgage-backed instruments from banks, and now we’re talking about something that could have broad ramifications on our lives going forward, and the party whose argument loses has to live with the results, good or bad, just as much as the one that comes out the victor.

As I showed in my popular post Why Anti-God Books Sell Well religion is an even clearer case than politics in this regard, at least in my country where separation of church and state is still largely fiction. Pretend for a moment that you’re an atheist. Here are some ways other people’s religious views have affected you over the last 8 years.

1. George W. Bush got elected twice with the swing vote being cast by the religious right. I’ll leave whether or not this was a good thing up to the reader (though I’ll assure you that you’ll have an easier time finding a unicorn than an atheist Bush supporter) but suffice it to say, the result had a tremendous effect an all Americans, most of whom, according to polling data, consider it largely negative.

2. George W. Bush has stymied stem cell research, by executive order, arguably the most promising avenue of medical progress, for the last 8 years. Remember, for this thought experiment you’re an atheist, so you don’t have any religious problem with using frozen embryos that would otherwise have been destroyed anyway to attempt to cure horrible diseases like cancer and MS. You may be a libertarian or just general free-market capitalist and therefore opposed to any government-sponsored scientific funding, but Bush didn’t cut that off, he just diverted it away from stem cell research to other things by effectively banning it.

This means that if stem cell research delivers on even a fraction of its promise, Bush’s delay, caused by his religious belief that life begins at conception, effectively prevented science from saving potentially millions of lives. If it set research back, say, 4 years total, and that research one day cures breast cancer, then everyone who died in the 4 years before the cure is finalized would not have if not for Bush’s religious beliefs. (I realize I’m greatly oversimplifying the way science in general and stem cell research in particular works here for the sake of expediency, but you get what I mean.)

3. Voters’ religious views have denied gays the right to marry in most of the country. Again, you’re an atheist for this thought experiment, so you don’t have any divine book telling you homosexuality is a sin, so it seems to you like a rather straightforward case of denying people their basic rights. (If atheist Bush supporters are hard to come by, try finding ones opposed to gay marriage.)

Those are just a quick three off the top of my head. The point is that the religious beliefs of the majority of voters have incredibly strong effects on everyone else. The baking practices of everyone else have absolutely no bearing on my corn muffins. (Thank God too, because my corn muffins are amazing.)

This is actually a somewhat testable hypothesis. If I’m correct, what you’d see is that politics lead to heated arguments everywhere (check) and that religion tends to do so at least somewhat less frequently in areas with greater separation of church and state. The former is clearly true, the latter has been as well in my highly unscientific observation. I’ve generally seen Europeans appear to be much less uptight about the topic, except where Islam is concerned in some nations that have experienced significant terrorism, but that’s something entirely different.

It might be interesting to post the same religious threads in forums and social news sites frequented predominantly by Western Europeans, then do the same in American ones, then somehow try to measure the amount of animosity. It’s a tough job (especially since Europeans are often so well-mannered and seemingly calm when arguing relative to us brutish Americans) but I’d love to see the results.

This entry was posted on February 7, 2009 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Are Religious People Stupid? . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.