Irregular Books

In January of 2009, religious author Clemens Sedmak will have a new book released for sale. It’s called “Religious Intelligence: Developing Religious Literacy in a Secular World”. Introducing the concept of the book, publicity materials state,

“This book offers an exploration of religious intelligence in an era where public and personal belief has become inseparable. Since the events of 9/11 it has become increasingly evident that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone and ban it from the public sphere. Current debates about veils and headscarfs in Germany, France and England, caricatures of the prophet Mohamed in Denmark, and the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture on 9/12/2006 clearly show the need for better concepts of dealing with religiously sensitive issues, and people.”

This paragraph in itself reveals a slippery grasp on the concept of intelligence.

How have public and personal belief become inseparable? Huge numbers of people separate them quite effectively, and many more people choose not to engage in religious belief at all, without any harm to themselves.

What evidence is there that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone? Plenty of people regard religion as a merely personal matter. Does the author suggest that government mandates on religious practice are inevitable?

How do the religious controversies cited indicate that there is a need for improvement in dealing with “sensitive” religious issues? Couldn’t it be that the problem is the sensitivity itself, and not the lack of coddling for it? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were religiously inspired, as were the other controversies cited. The common crisis in these controversies comes from individuals trying to impose their personal beliefs in the public sphere. So, Sedmak’s solution seems to be part of the genesis of the problem.

Sedmak seeks to convince people that there is an innate “religious intelligence” in the human brain that needs to be understood. In making this argument, however, Sedmak fails to understand the concept of intelligence itself, by mixing it up in belief. It’s ironic that Sedmak should choose to cite the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict, given that a significant purpose of that lecture was to blast the separation of church and state in secular societies, and attack academics for attempting to preserve the separation of intellectual thought from religious faith. Benedict announced that the Catholic Church seeks to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”.

To mix reason with the empirically unverifiable is to make it unreasonable. Likewise, to propose that faith is a form of intelligence is to suggest that authority and tradition are comparable to skeptical inquiry. We might as well talk about scientific religion as to discuss religious intelligence.

Religious authorities have tried for generations now to co-opt the power of secular society for their own uses, inventing unintelligent chimaeras such as Creationism, Intelligent Design, and faith-based initiatives in an attempt to grab once more the worldly power that they lost long ago due to their incompetence and barbarity. The intelligent choice is to leave religious concepts in the realm of private, personal belief, and preserve the public square as a place where reasoned, truly intelligent arguments based on empirically verifiable reality are required to set common policies for the government of the whole.