How religion abuses language and analogy to sound reasonable

Life is like a box of chocolates....  full of nuts.

It's often helpful to use a metaphor or an analogy when trying to explain something.

However, it can be easy to slide from using these as tools for understanding and instead commit the logical fallacy of equivocation, using the analogy to prove a point that the idea it was originally meant to describe can't prove.

Religion is famous for using analogy, metaphor, allegory, symbols, and object-lessons.  This lets religion play a shell game of substituting one idea for another to make it more believable.

In a previous article, we explored the "debt parable" and how it fails to explain Christ's atonement.  But we see these attempts to replace one idea with another in many other ways.

"Faith" becomes interchanged with "realistic expectation based on experience and evidence" in this substitution of terms:

Faith is knowing the sun will rise, lighting each new day.  Faith is knowing the Lord will hear my prayers each time I pray.

These are two different levels of "faith."  One is built upon a lifetime of experience and an understanding of the physical sciences of the rotation of the earth, the position of the sun, and so on.  The moment the sun rises can be predicted to the second.  Barring some abrupt change to the planet, we can be reasonably confident that the sun will rise again.  That's not a leap of faith.  Suggesting the sun will NOT rise tomorrow is the unproven and unlikely scenario, something that would require either a leap of faith or an overwhelming body of new evidence.

The existence of an uncreated supreme being who builds universes is, likewise, an unproven and unlikely scenario.  As is the existence of a man-god who walked on water and rose from the dead.  But with a subtle shift of the meaning of words, it is implied that the existence of God is as reasonable as the sun rising.  Faith in a Savior who died for my sins 2,000 years before I committed them so I can go to heaven is the same kind of faith as expecting my car to start in the morning.

"God is love" is another example of this exchange.  Roughly stated:

God is love, so if you have experienced love, then you have experienced God.  You have experienced love, therefore you have experienced God.  God exists.

I once had a Seminary teacher who gave the following lesson:

You want to save yourself until marriage. This keeps you pure, clean, and wholesome. You wouldn't want to marry someone who had slept with someone else. It's like getting a car.  If you could get any car you wanted, you wouldn't choose a used car. You would choose a brand new car.

Because an absolute moral judgment on the idea of "sex before marriage" is abstract and undemonstratable, it must be redefined in objective terms - the value and condition of a car - in order to make sense.  Without the analogy, we only have a base assertion that it is more moral to abstain "because God said so."

Of course it is possible to raise legitimate objections against promiscuity, like STD's, pregnancy, and so on.  But these don't make it universally immoral, only unhealthy or immature without certain precautions and standards.  So to make a case that it is universally immoral, an analogy must be used to try and get us to think of it in other terms.  Terms that don't, in reality, carry over.

The consequence of using this analogy is that sex is now defined as a thing that makes other things dirty or undesirable; sexual partners are those "things" that can be dirtied.  A person's worth and value are diminished through unmarried sex.  If the car analogy is supposed to help us understand the consequences of premarital sex, then the understanding we've gained is that sex and sexual partners are now objectified -- the very opposite of what the lesson was trying to teach, which is that sex and people should NOT be objectified and instead be treated with reverence and respect. 

We can't argue from the analogy because another analogy could always be suggested.  For example, we could just as easily compare sex with having brain surgery. You don't want the fresh grad student, with no experience, working on you. No, you want the doctor with plenty of experience, who has learned a few good tricks, and who can work on you with knowledge, skill, and confidence.

Analogies and metaphors can be good communication tools, but when religion relies so heavily on them, we should consider the possibility that much of what religion is trying to describe just doesn't exist.  These analogies may simply be an attempt to ground fantasy in reality by swapping unsupportable ideas with accepted ones and then pretending they're the same.

The religious claims should be able to stand on their own.  If we can't think of or describe a religious claim without resorting to comparing it to something else, then it's possible all we're doing to talking about the analogy, and not a real thing.

Email Jonathan: slcfreethinking@gmail.com
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