How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [89]
I had always heard (but never witnessed first-hand) that the black religious experience is qualitatively different from that of the white. I cannot speak for all white churches, of course, but having attended a wide variety of services throughout my life, I have seen nothing quite like the elan expressed in these houses of worship. These services go far beyond mere Hosannas and Amens, with the fellowship’s vocal repartee to the songs, hymns, prayers, and sermons every bit as much a part of the service as anything planned for the day. “Say it preacher” … “Oh yeah brother” … “That’s right sister” … and hundreds of other rejoinders came bursting forth from around a room filled with energy and anima. You would have to be made of wood not to feel a spiritual presence there; thus only the tiniest amount of faith, and only a modicum of the willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to “get into the spirit” of the experience. The specific content of the services was not necessary to understand the power of religion on this most foundational level—the human experience of moral courage and nobility of spirit.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and the monument to his moral courage and nobility of spirit.
At one of the churches that morning, during a rare quiet moment between modes of spiritual expression, Michael leaned over and whispered to me: “You know, the church is the only social institution in the last four centuries that has not let these people down.” Although religion has played its own ugly role in the ghastly history of slavery, and anything can and has been justified in the name of God and religion, including murder, war, rape, and slavery, Coles is right. Through centuries of slavery, decades of corrupt reconstruction, years of Jim Crow American apartheid, and overt and covert racism at all levels of our society, religion has remained steadfast by the side of African Americans, providing a safe haven where they might enjoy (however fleeting) a sense of freedom from the physical or psychological chains that bound (and, in many ways, still bind) them.
The anthropologist Anthony Wallace estimates that over the course of the past 10,000 years humans have constructed no less than 100,000 religions. God is alive and well, not only in the past, but in the present. Most people believe in a god of some kind, and if the historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists are right, almost everyone who ever lived believed in one god or another. Religion evolved for the two modes of myth making and social bonding. To those scientists, skeptics, and humanists who believe that science and humanism will one day replace these two functions of religion, E. O. Wilson wrote the following reality check in his Pulitzer prize-winning book, On Human Nature:
Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions … . Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.
Skeptic magazine, with its circulation of 40,000, would probably fit into this category when compared to various religious publications whose circulation numbers run well into the hundreds of thousands or even millions. We might answer Wilson by explaining that we only take on Christian fundamentalists and their related brethren when they cross over into our turf by trying to use science to prove articles of faith which, by definition, cannot be proved. Indeed, some of this book is aimed at just this sort of invasion. But sometimes we go beyond what