I just read Bertrand Russell's Essays in Skepticism, a short 1962 collection of philosophical pieces. I hadn't read much by him in quite a few years, and was pleasantly surprised by some I things I found here. In particular this, on the first page of the first essay, "Man's Record of Beliefs":
I think that the evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions. In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burnt, it sometimes happened that one of them, by a particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled before being put into the flames. This would make the spectators so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act.
I think this is exactly right. The atheist discussions I've been reading lately assume that religious beliefs cause people to be intolerant and cruel. I keep pointing out that atheists presumably believe that religious beliefs were invented by human beings to justify doing what they wanted to do for more primal reasons. If Leviticus says that men who lie with each other must be executed, that tells me that some people were offended by men who lie with each other and put their offense into their god's mouth. My fellow atheists think the reverse, that Leviticus somehow made people object to male-on-male copulation.
I can't prove it, of course, but neither can my opponents prove their case, which I think obviously goes against their own belief. Many of them talk as if they really believe that buttsex offends the god they supposedly don't believe exists. Since extreme cruelty is a feature of most if not all human societies, it seems to me that it can't be blamed on religion in general or on any religion in particular. Listening to some atheist commentators, you'd think that Christianity invented crucifixion, though it was a Roman punishment that the Romans apparently got from Persia, and who knows where the Persians got it? The high civilizations of Eastern Asia also invented baroque punishments, with no help from the Abrahamic religions; and so on. Why people have this fondness for hurting each other, I don't know; there have been many attempts to explain it, none convincing.
Russell would have done better, though, to put this observation at the end of his essay. Instead he pivoted, saying that
although passions have had more to do than beliefs with what is amiss in human life, yet beliefs, especially where they are ancient and systematic, and embodied in organizations, have a great power of delaying desirable changes of opinion and of influencing in the wrong direction people who otherwise would have no strong feelings either way. Since my subject is “Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind,” it is especially harmful systems of beliefs that I shall consider.
He then discussed well-known systems of harmful beliefs for fifty pages or so, the bulk of the book. Atheists and other skeptics have been doing that for centuries now, and it's become a rote exercise. His real insight, I think, was the primacy of cruelty. If people were merely brainwashed sheep, as we like to say, they would have accepted letting a heretic get off with a quick death when their masters decreed it. Instead, as Russell says, they demanded the advertised spectacle of a human being burned alive. I'd go a step further and say that bad beliefs would be less harmful if not for the passion of cruelty that they justify. Otherwise we might sneer at the foolishness of others but leave them alone without feeling a need to torture or kill them.
I've quoted before the political philosopher Michael Neumann, who wrote twenty years ago:
Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt.
But where's the fun in that? About a year ago I quoted an atheist writer who lamented that "I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell." Oh, sure you can, if it would give you comfort. It's in your genes, evolution wants you to comfort yourself with that belief, and you cannot go against the word of evolution. Some of the early Christians even said that the blessed would get to witness the torment of the damned as part of their heavenly reward!
I'm not pretending that I don't harbor similar vengeful thoughts myself, but I know they're fantasies and I don't indulge them (much). Other atheists indulge them even less self-consciously, while supposing that they're morally superior to the dumb-damentalist Bible thumpers. The harm comes from acting on the fantasies, and atheists too are prone to look for reasons to do that. I've seen numerous fans of the late Christopher Hitchens posting clips of his anti-religious tirades on Facebook. When I ask them how an enthusiastic supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a moral exemplar, I haven't gotten any replies. But that's the question, isn't it?
