| It must be nice to have faith. Having faith – commitment to one of the world’s established religions – provides you with a moral compass, a prescribed set of values that define the line between right and wrong. Having faith also provides a sense of purpose, belief that your daily routine has meaning above and beyond the mundane task of survival.
Finally, having faith helps define who you are and your place in this world. By being a Christian, for example, you know for sure that you’re not a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim, and it’s only natural (or at least well documented) that this sense of difference can easily shade into a sense of superiority, justifying all manner of acts (e.g. crusades, colonization, fatwas and jihads, etc.). Or as Rob Buckman writes in Can We Be Good Without God?, faith is "a very attractive prospect – no more decisions, no more dilemmas, just a pure and simple Code of Behaviour."
Of course, having faith – unquestioning and unconditional belief – also means that you don’t have to worry about facts. And so it was that a recent Angus Reid poll of 1,088 Canadian adults discovered that while 59 per cent believe in the theory of evolution, 22 per cent maintain that God created humans in their present (and unchanging) form some time within the past 10,000 years.
Christian fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and any calculations of chronology based on that text, are free to believe what they wish, of course, as long as they understand that it is just that: only a belief. They cannot – or at least should not – use this belief to challenge what science has firmly established as fact, such as that humans have been around in their modern form for as long as 250,000 years, that our deeper origins as a species go back over two million years, or that the Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old.
However, Christian fundamentalists are not prepared to accept the limits of their faith. In recent years, they have mounted attacks on the teaching of evolution in public schools, tried to elevate so-called "intelligent design" (creationism in sheep’s clothing) to the equal of evolution and established "museums" that promote their beliefs, such as the Big Valley Creation Science Museum that opened in Alberta this month.
Worryingly, all this seems to be having some effect. That same Angus Reid poll reported that 19 per cent of Canadians weren’t sure which story of creation they believed. Also, 42 per cent of those polled – including some who accepted evolution as fact – agreed that humans and dinosaurs had once upon a time co-existed.
In the face of such blind faith, it’s not surprising that various writers have begun to fight back against any form of religious fundamentalism. "Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time," writes Sam Harris in The End of Faith. "It is the denial… of the vastitude of human ignorance." Richard Dawkins goes further in The God Delusion, denouncing faith "as an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument."
Most provocative of all, Christopher Hitchens argues in God is not Great that "Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other." He then adds, "As I write these words… people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction."
This is a little ironic, of course, for Hitchens is one of the few intellectuals who has steadfastly backed U.S. President George Bush in the ongoing "war on terror," notwithstanding Bush’s own fervent faith and denial of evolution.
Still, the point remains that Hitchens accurately catalogues the sum of public fears that has been deliberately cultivated by governments since 9/11 to permit and justify all manner of abuses in the name of faith, from the prison at Abu Ghraib to the military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay to the creation of "no fly" lists in North America and elsewhere.
For the "war on terror" is just that: a matter of faith. It’s a war not against a specific state or nation or even an "axis of evil," but against an idea, a set of alternative values with which there can be no compromise. Accordingly, the argument runs, there can and should be no limits to "our" level of response, nor any questioning of the righteousness of "our" cause.
So it has been for the past six years. Victory in Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan would, traditionally, have signalled success; but in the "war on terror," they have simply tested the faith of either side. The result has been ongoing daily carnage in the streets of Kabul and Baghdad in a conflict that, because no compromise is possible, will last as long as both sides hold to their faith.
Canadian Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor underlined this point back in April, when he confirmed that the occupation of Afghanistan could last 10 or 15 years, as did Prime Minister Stephen Harper last month when he reiterated that Canada would not "set arbitrary deadlines and hope for the best."
There are now signs that faith in the war is wavering. Late last week, Harper declared that unless all parties unite behind the mission, Canadian troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by early 2009. At the same time, in the wake of recent legal setbacks, the U.S. administration is now preparing to close down Guantanamo Bay, although what will happen to the inmates remains unclear.
In both instances, faith in the war on terror has been tested by public opinion (two-thirds of Canadians support an end to the Afghanistan mission) and political expediency (even U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates now opposes Guantanamo Bay).
Having faith might be nice, but it is never enough. |
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