The Case against Theocracy and Faith Based Civil Institutions

        

                      Evaluating the Case against Theocracy

  “No amount of belief makes something a fact.” -James Randi

“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so” - Mark Twain

     A simpler definition: “Pretending to know things you don’t 

know.”

     Faith is not hope. They are not synonymous and can’t really be 

used that way. Most religions do, but it’s a leap of illogic. As an

example: “One can hope for anything or place one’s trust in anyone

or anything. This is not the same as claiming to know something.

To hope for something admits there’s a possibility that what you

want may not be realized. For example, "If you hope your stock will

rise tomorrow, you are not claiming to know your stock will rise;

you want your stock to rise, but you recognize there’s a possibility

it may not. Desire is not certainty but the wish for an outcome.” –

Peter Boghassian

     The pretending-to-know-things-you-don’t-know pandemic hurts

us all as humans in a diverse world.  Believing things on the basis

of something other than evidence and reason causes people to

misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their

communities. Those who believe on the basis of insufficient

evidence create external conditions based upon what they think is

in their best interest, but this is actually counterproductive. In the

United States, for example, public policies driven by people who

pretend to know things they don’t know continue to hurt people:

abstinence-only sex education, prohibitions against gay marriage,

bans on death with dignity, corporal punishment in schools,

failure to fund international family planning organizations, and

promoting the teaching of Creationism and other pseudosciences

are but a few of the many misguided conclusions wrought by

irrationality and inflicted in many cases upon those who don’t s

share the formulator’s  pretense to know things they don’t know.

     The less a society relies on reason and evidence to form

conclusions and policies, the more arbitrary the resultant policy.  In

many instances, conclusions that result from a lack of evidence can

have incredibly dangerous consequences. The Taliban, for

example, have rooted their vision of a good life on the Koran. By

acting on what they perceive to be divine injunctions revealed to

God’s Prophet, they think they’re creating a good life and a good

society. They are not.  Consequently, the conclusions they act

upon— covering women and beating, burning, stoning, or in a

recently noted case, shooting them in the face,  beheading people

who have rival interpretations of the Koran or who act in ways they

deem un-Islamic, perpetrating violence against females who seek

an education, denying citizens basic freedoms, executing people for

blasphemy—take them away from a good life. They’ve

misidentified the process that will allow their community to

flourish because they’ve identified and used faith, not evidence and

reason, as a guide.

       How do we know the society the Taliban created has not

benefitted those who live under their threat?  By examining 

 virtually every modern measure of societal success:  exports versus

imports, literacy, economic aid, public health, life expectancy,

infant mortality, household income, GDP, Happy Planet Index, etc.

Afghanistan under the Taliban was an unmitigated catastrophe. It is

not in anyone’s interest, particularly the people who live under their

tyranny, to have created a dysfunctional, premodern, misogynistic

theocratic atmosphere of fear and repression.

       If you don’t think they created a dystopia, or if you’re a

relativist and think they created a society that’s merely different,

not better or worse from, say for example Finland, then there’s

nothing I can say to you. Nothing written will persuade you

because you are incapable of critical thought. 

        The vast majority of people use faith to understand the world,

to guide their actions, and to define and delimit their institutions.

Nation-states like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia,

Sudan, and Iran adhere to Islamic law (Sharia) as the basis for state

law. There is no civil law independent of religious law.  This is a

problem that would be unimaginable in its scope and severity were

it not for the fact that we’re currently witnesses to this epistemic

horror show, such as the beheading of homosexuals, blasphemers,

adulterers, and apostates and an even more egregiously  radically

disproportionate treatment of individuals based upon their gender.

      So the next time a Billy Graham or Pat Robertson tells anyone

who cares to listen that the United States is a “Christian nation” and

should return to whatever core values that statement implies,

remember, they are basing those statements on faith,( “Pretending

to know things you don’t know.”)  and reflect on how that has

worked elsewhere in the world.  Isn’t it amazing how smart

Jefferson, Adams and Madison still look 200 plus years later?