The flying spaghetti monster

My sense is that you don't just think religion is dishonest. There's something evil about it as well.

Well, yes. I think there's something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that's dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you're taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die -- anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed -- that clearly is evil. And people don't have to justify it because it's their faith. They don't have to say, "Well, here's a very good reason for this." All they need to say is, "That's what my faith says." And we're all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we're actually faithful ourselves, we've been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it's had historically -- the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York -- all in the name of faith.

But don't you need to distinguish between religious extremists who kill people and moderate, peaceful religious believers?

You certainly need to distinguish them. They are very different. However, the moderate, sensible religious people you've cited make the world safe for the extremists by bringing up children -- sometimes even indoctrinating children -- to believe that faith trumps everything and by influencing society to respect faith. Now, the faith of these moderate people is in itself harmless. But the idea that faith needs to be respected is instilled into children sitting in rows in their madrasahs in the Muslim world. And they are told these things not by extremists but by decent, moderate teachers and mullahs. But when they grow up, a small minority of them remember what they were told. They remember reading their holy book, and they take it literally. They really do believe it. Now, the moderate ones don't really believe it, but they have taught children that faith is a virtue. And it only takes a minority to believe what it says in the holy book -- the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, whatever it is. If you believe it's literally true, then there's scarcely any limit to the evil things you might do.

And yet most moderate religious people are appalled by the apocalyptic thinking of religious extremists.

Of course they're appalled. They're very decent, nice people. But they have no right to be appalled because, in a sense, they brought it on the world by teaching people, especially children, the virtues of unquestioned faith.

Are you saying if parents belong to a particular church, they should not teach their children about that religion?

I would say that parents should teach their children anything that's known to be factually true -- like "that's a bluebird" or "that's a bald eagle." Or they could teach children that there are such things as religious beliefs. But to teach children that it is a fact that there is one god or that God created the world in six days, that is child abuse.

But isn't much of parenting about teaching values to children? Just as a family of vegetarians will teach their children about the evils of killing animals and eating meat, can't parents who believe in God teach their children the values of a religious upbringing?

Children ask questions. And when a child says, "Why is it wrong to do so and so?" you can perfectly well answer that by saying, "Well, how would you like it if somebody else did that to you?" That's a way of imparting to a child the Golden Rule: "Do as you would be done by." The world would fall apart if everybody stole things from everybody else, so it's a bad thing to steal. If a child says, "Why can't I eat meat?" then you can say, "Your mother and I believe that it's wrong to eat meat for this, that and the other reason. We are vegetarians. You can decide when you're older whether you want to be a vegetarian or not. But for the moment, you're living in this house, so the food we give you is not meat." That I could see. I think it's child abuse not to let the child have the free choice of knowing there are other people who believe something quite different and the child could make its own choice.

Now, there are an awful lot of people who call themselves religious -- or some people prefer to use the word "spiritual" -- even though they don't go to church. They aren't part of any organized religion. They don't believe in a personal God. Some don't even like the word "God" because there's so much baggage attached to that word. But they still have some powerful feeling that there is a transcendent reality. And they often engage in some spiritual practice in their own lives. Would you call these people "religious"?

That's a difficult question. I probably would call them religious. It depends on exactly what they do believe. The first chapter of "The God Delusion" talks about Einstein, who often used the word "God." Einstein clearly was an atheist in the sense that he didn't believe in any sort of personal God. He used the word "God" as a metaphoric name for that which we don't yet understand, for the deep mysteries at the foundation of the universe.

But I think most people would call Einstein a deist. He suggested that God may have created the laws of nature, the laws of physics, to get the universe started.

Some people have maintained that position. My judgment, reading what Einstein said, is that he was not a deist. He certainly believed in some sort of deep mystery, as do I. And it is possible to use the word "religious" to describe such a person. On that basis, one could even say that I am a religious person or Carl Sagan was a religious person. But for me, the divide comes with whether you believe there is some kind of a supernatural, personal being. And I think deists, as well as theists, believe that. By that criterion, I don't think Einstein was a deist. He certainly wasn't a theist, although the language he used might lead you to think he was. I think it's misleading to use a word like "God" in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

Your definition of religious belief seems to involve a personal being. I think a lot of people would disagree. They may consider themselves strongly religious, but they would regard the whole idea of a personal God to be an outdated notion of what religion is.

Well, then I would want to know what they did mean by it. I would take my stand on whether the god or the being -- whatever we're talking about -- is complicated and improbable and has those attributes of a person -- intelligence, creativity, something of that sort. If you believe that the universe was created by a designing intelligence, whether you call that personal or not, that seems to me to be a good definition of God. That's what I don't believe in. And that's what Einstein did not believe in.

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