The Normalcy Bias
The underlying psychology behind sane-washing and down-playing...and religious belief
At the end of this article, I’m going to post a video about normalcy bias. But first some context. (scroll down to the end if you just want to watch the video.)
In 2006, biologist Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, which shot to the top of the best seller lists. Finally, someone was unashamedly challenging the deference paid to religious belief. This book was followed by other authors and podcasters, many of them scientists and scholars. The term “New Atheists” was coined to describe a growing movement of people openly rejecting the validity of religion.
Because many of the most outspoken people were connected to the sciences, the movement tended to be chatacterized as an opposition between religion and science. Science can certainly prove as false fundamentalist claims of biblical literalism, and the assertion that the Bible was authored by an infallible supernatural being. But science can’t prove either the existence or absense of God (however one wants to define that.) But science and religion are very different things. Science is a method of finding what’s true based on evidence and religion is based on faith, another word for belief in something despite the absense of evidence.
Religion and science have coexisted through the strategy of each occupying separate spheres - science in finding truths about the physical world, while religion takes on moral questions.
This is what outrages me the most. That the Bible should be described as “the good book” and forced upon schoolchildren in Oklahoma for their moral uplift is absurd. This is a book containg scenes of sanctioned incest, of a father offering his daughters to be gang raped, or God directing all the inhabitants of a city to be put to death except for virgin girls to be kept as sex slaves, a father commanded to offer his child as a human sacrifice… any one of these things would make a book unsuitable as a moral guide of anything.
I stopped believing in God as a child six decades ago, when I was too young to have a science education. What made me an atheist is what has made many into dis-believers down through the ages: the question of morality, the problem of suffering in a world supposedly ruled by a being who has the power to prevent all of it. There is a question commonly asked about we non-believers: how can we find a meaning to life without God?
I don’t even understand the question. When I finally reached the conclusion that God did not exist, it was like an enormous weight was lifted from me. I had already concluded that God, based on the Bible but more importantly what I knew of the world around me, was evil. What else do you call it when someone has the power to right a wrong or alleviate suffering but refuses to do so? What a terrrible world it would have been in the thrall of a malevolent, capricious, sadistic being so powerful that no mere human could bring an end to its reign of terror.
To me, atheism was hope. It meant that evil arose not from some supernatural force, but as the result of human decisions and actions. That we as humans had everything we needed to defeat it since we as humans were the authors of it. While we could not prevent natural catastrophes, we had the ability through scientific knowledge and public policy to mitigate the suffering caused by hurricanes, plagues and other such misfortune.
Humans have created thousands of religions, all of which seemed aimed at explaing why we are here and to come to terms with mortality. An unfortunate by-product of our intellectual great leap forward relative to other animals is our ability to focus on our eventual death, and to create a story where we somehow live on beyond death. These ideas, meant to provide comfort, have in many cases metamorphosed into obsessions with an afterlife so overriding that it has literally doomed us to greater unhappiness in this one, either by glofying misery as virtue or justifying ignoring the suffering of others as some sort of divine plan.
At this point in my life, I have realized that the real issue is not whether someone believes in some supernatural force present in the universe but what they believe about the force, in other words, religion. Religion is the problem. It is time to stop giving it a pass, treating “faith” in whispered deferential tones.
We must confront the harm religion is doing, because that harm is serious. Among the atrocities that can be laid at its door: the denial of climate change, the abuse and degradation of women, the persecution of LGBTQ people, the view of poverty and homelessness as a personal moral failure as opposed to a political policy failure. Pastors who are no better than con-artists live tax-free in mansions while it is popstars that donate to food banks and disaster relief. People are committing mass murder right now in the name of their religion.
I was seven years old when I realized I didn’t believe in God. I wrote about that in my book Morality Made Me an Atheist. You can dowload a PDF of it for free if you’d like to read it here
At the time I didn’t know there was a word for people like me. I didn’t know there were any people like me. I’d never met anyone who said they didn’t believe in God. The problem was, I couldn’t believe that I had figured out something that all the smart adults hadn’t. Therefore, I had to wonder if they were lying when they said they believed in God. Maybe they were afraid to tell the truth. I already knew religious people had a habit of murdering people who refused their beliefs. It had happened in my own family.
It wasn’t until the internet and the rise of the “New Atheists” that I was finally able to get some insight into why so many believed and what caused them to change. People were speaking out and among those I found most fascinating were the ex-Mormons. They were smart, well-educated and genuinely decent people. By contrast. they had been followers of one of the most preposterous religions. What makes Mormonism so preposterous is, that unlike other religions that are based on supposed miracles happening thousands of years ago - this one was based on the so-called revelations of a 19th Century American conman who wrote a scripture so outlandish that it could easily debunked on just about every level. When I say conman, their “prophet” Joseph Smith was actually prosecuted for fraud, namely swindling farmers into paying him to find buried treasure on their land through use of his magic seeing stones. Never mind his simultaneous “marriages” to about thirty women, some as young as fourteen.
These now ex-Mormons had gone through a good part of their lives ignorant of these facts, in fact they deliberately avoided any of the information that was available because they were told by the Church not to read it. Every week they were required to recite: I know the Church is true.
Why would such intelligent, caring people do this? Why would they choose a lie? After years of listening to a podcast Mormon Stories I finally developed an understanding. One doesn’t need to be stupid or ignorant to follow a preposterous religion. I realized that for many people belonging to a tribe, having social acceptance is a driving force in their lives - something they need. Mormonism is an all encompassing religion that controls every aspect to your life, has elaborate rules that every member must follow. I realized after listening to many of these people tell their stories that having all these rules made them feel safe. To me, that would have been hell on earth, so it is not surprising that I’ve found religious believers so hard to fathom.
So the video I have for you is from the Mormon Stories podcast. It’s long. Take an evening, relax and listen. There’s a lot in it that relates to parts of our society’s grossly inadequate response to the rise of fascism, above and beyond the parts that relate specifically to Mormons. I found it so fascinating. I hope you will too.