Why are the Religious Entitled to Special Treatment?
It is a longstanding custom of American culture to defer to the religious. We are supposed to respect the fact that they have beliefs (regardless of what they might be) and avoid confronting them with criticism or even sincere questions about their theology. And we are supposed to naively assume that the religious mean well even when they demonstrably do not. It is the belief-in-belief syndrome. And it’s time we recognized it as the pernicious force that it is.
Nonbelievers especially are expected to tiptoe around the fragile feelings of the religious. Meanwhile, while claiming that their beliefs imbue them with feelings of peace, love and tolerance, even the most allegedly well-meaning Christian has no problem making statements such as One cannot be good without God or The Ten Commandments are the basis of all morality, not caring at all that he has just demeaned the billions of non-Judeo-Christians around the world.
Yet these very same people from the consummately self-righteous to the casual churchgoer, not only do not want to suffer direct personal insults themselves (such as How can you believe such nonsense, they don’t want to hear straightforward statements of fact (such as There is no evidence for a god or Evolution made the flowers and trees or Doctors, not God, saved your baby.
As Sam Harris phrased it in Letter to a Christian Nation:
Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Further, fundamental questions that one would think believers would want to be able to answer (such as What will you be doing in Heaven all day ... forever? ...are regarded as insults as well, because people have not taken the time to critically examine the very theology they say they follow.
According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the average believer’s knowledge of his own professed doctrine is perfunctory. Pew researchers asked 32 questions about world religions:
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ... Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education. (My italics)
According to a recent Gallup poll, the number of Americans who think the Bible is the literal word of God has dropped to 24 percent. Before we revel in this finding, we must remember that that leaves one-fourth of Americans who still believe that Noah built an ark and that brides discovered to have had premarital carnal knowledge and homosexuals should be stoned to death. Despite this decrease, belief in the “literal word of God” still has to be considered an intellectual and moral crisis of the highest order.
So, it’s difficult to see why any believer, fundamentalist or “moderate” should receive special treatment ― especially when even the most moderate and “progressive” Christians are nurturing the xenophobic, racist, uncharitable and decidedly “un-Christian” America we are finding ourselves in today.