Against Religion, (2007) by Tamas Pataki Scribe Publications

At least four quite provocative/notorious (notorious for religionists anyway) anti-theist books have been published in the last two years. The best known is The God Delusion, in which Richard Dawkins argues that belief in God is both delusional and pernicious: ‘Any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide.’ Thus, the ‘God’ hypothesis is very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability.

Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great is just as provocative, covering the same ground though with more humour. His focus is less on the innate human need for religion and more on its socio-political uses and dysfunctions.

Judaism and Islam, by Michel Onfray which I have not read.

Tamas Pataki wrote the fourth – Against Religion. Pataki is Honorary Senior Fellow in the philosophy department, University of Melbourne. He has taught in universities in Australia and Hungary and has published articles on the philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis, moral philosophy and aesthetics. He has a long-standing interest in the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry.

Pataki was born in Hungary. His parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors: the family escaped Hungary in 1956, when the revolution erupted. He was educated in Melbourne primary and secondary schools, and pursued doctoral studies in Melbourne, London, and elsewhere.

‘Against Religion’ was published as a essay in the February 2006 Australian Book Review, and provoked heated controversy. [1] His purpose, he wrote later, was ‘polemical, so the reaction was pleasing. Much that we count as religion contains, in its psycho-social expressions, seeds of destruction. Much of it shares the same underlying psychological structures as various forms of racism and other kinds of prejudice. And yet, there is a great difficulty in censuring religion: the acute awareness all people have of the immense consolations provided by it, especially to those whose lives are blighted and without hope.’ [2]

Pataki’s thinking builds on that of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Russell. He agrees with Freud that ‘religious ideas are wishful delusions that satisfy the infantile longing for protection and love by a powerful figure — a Father in Heaven… Religions are mass- delusions…’ ‘We need to consider seriously the possibility that for many people their religion supervenes on something akin to mental illness or infantilism. Shortly before his death Anton Chekov wrote to Diaghilev: “I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.” I share that bewilderment.’ [3]

Pataki underlines the destructive features of the major religions by relating them to a few ‘malign psychological currents’ fed by humans’ narcissistic needs. Religious ideology springs from fear, conceit, and cruelty, and is responsible for a terrible record of human slaughter. It is a delusional way of confronting weakness and helplessness, distorts reality, undermines reason, nourishes hubris/narcissism, and foments ‘us vs them’ persecutions everywhere.

This mayhem is fostered when the ‘religiose’ (read fundamentalist religious elements) discourage doubt, diversity or ambiguity. These religionists have a special ‘chosen’ relationship with God – and their religious ideology is mostly linked with a strong belief that political authority comes from God. But underneath all this are primal, narcissistic needs which seek religious gratification, and are reinforced by anti-rational ‘phantastic’ god-images. So ‘faith is just a refusal to think’.

What are we to make of all that? Certainly the influence of religious ideology on international politics is greater than for several centuries. Religious commitment is growing – numerically and in terms of fundamentalist fanaticism – just about everywhere except among non-Muslims in Europe and the UK. In the USA, 85 per cent claim to believe in God; in Nigeria, 98 per cent; in Indonesia, at least 90 per cent; in Ireland, 87 per cent. My theory about the UK and Europe is that the decline of Christian commitment is related to the role of the church/es in the two world wars… but that’s another story. Professor Gary Bouma says (Australian Soul, 2006) that religion and spirituality among Australians is not declining, though mainline church attendance is.

Thus, if both educated and under-educated peoples around the world are generally (except in Europe) becoming more religious, why is it so? My response, as a Christian, is that of course humans have psychological predispositions (like ‘attachment needs’ which Pataki despises in adults) which their Creator designed to be met in a relationship with God, however ‘God’ is understood. And of course there’s a problem with this-side-of-complexity fundamentalism – in all religions. The human mind doesn’t cope easily with a lack of homeostasis in matters of such ultimate importance. But Pataki seems often to make derogatory statements about the fundamentalist (or, his term, ‘religiose’) mind-set – statements with which I often am in agreement – and generalizes to all religious ideology. What, for example, of someone who ‘finds religion’ – however you want to define that – and becomes a manifestly better-put-together person? I meet these people often (as I do the others), but apparently Pataki doesn’t. I can’t remember any statement in his book to the effect that ‘religion does genuinely help some people’. So there’s a baby/bathwater problem here.

There’s also a problem associated with the size of the book (128 pages, plus 8 pages of notes and reading suggestions). Too often he says something like ‘We can skip over this argument…’ offering no explanation as to why. And some of these matters I thought were significant. Mostly religion is ‘all nonsense’ but sometimes he is moderate: ‘religion causes violence [but] it is not the only cause’. But then he swings back to generalizations which don’t hold water without qualification. Like this one: ‘The idea that people should be killed for holding beliefs which are deemed errant and a threat to the faithful is, I believe, an entirely Judeo-Christian-Islamic conception.’ Hasn’t he heard of the persecution of Christians and Muslims perpetrated by militant Hindus in India, to cite one example?

And there’s a stylistic issue: Pataki loves polysyllabic words. I confess I don’t come across the term ‘religiose’ (‘morbidly or sentimentally religious’) much. And how about ‘imbricated’, ‘contumacious’, and his over-use of the Freudian (?) term ‘phantastic’…

But yes, he’s done his homework. He’s read some Christian theologians like Alister McGrath, Alvin Plantinga and Karl Rahner (though I can’t recall his citing any liberal/progressive Christian scholars). He quotes Luther at least once: ‘Reason is a whore’ (!). And yes, his purpose is polemic, and he is, he says at the outset, selective. Thus he dumps a quote from Nietzsche on us to ‘stir’ us: ‘Never, neither indirectly nor directly, neither as a dogma nor as an allegory, has religion yet held any truth’. (And he accuses the religiose of hubris!).

But he makes you stop and think. For example: ‘The heretic is more feared than the infidel.’ (Who said ‘We are more against the one who denies half our creed than someone who denies the whole of it?’).

The last word here comes from Frank Brennan:

‘Public intellectuals [like Pataki] may relish the public expression of scorn and disdain for all religions. But they do nothing to assist the needed public discernment of the limits on personal opinions and preferences in the public square and in law and public policy.

‘One of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner, in volume 22 of his Theological Investigations (Crossroad, 1989)

asked two questions about dialogue and tolerance as the foundations of a humane society:

* Are you really willing to grant freedom to the other person, insofar as it can be done without harming others, even when you hold a different opinion and have the power to prevent others from doing what they want? * Are you willing and patient enough, as far as possible, to find out and try to feel what others (or another group) want to be and how they want to understand themselves?

Sadly [Pataki] has demonstrated that it is not only Islamic fundamentalists who fail to understand the rules for civil discourse and engagement in the post September 11 public square.’ [4]

[1] http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Feb06/Feb06contents.htm

[2]

http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/critics-blog-tamas-pataki.html

[3] http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Feb06/Pataki%20essay.htm

[4] Fr Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University and professor of human rights and social justice at the University of Notre Dame Australia. His latest book is Acting on Conscience: How can we responsibly mix law, religion and politics? (University of Queensland Press, 2007). He appeared at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this month with Michel Onfray and Tamas Pataki. http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=2955

Rowland Croucher July 2007