Camaraderie vs. Truth

Throughout my life, the very concept of truth has had a kind of ultimate importance to me. I always want to know what really exists, what really did/does/will happen, the facts of situations, etc. I’ve always figured that truth is the best guide to understanding what is good and how one should act; other paths can lead to contradictions and mistakes. Applying this line of thought to real life, I’ve agreed with statements such as “if a man is really innocent of a crime, he should not be punished for it” and “if a religion is really false, nobody should believe in it.” Further, if I’m the worst player on the court, I deserve to be picked last for basketball; if a politician’s policies will not bring good consequences, they should not be implemented, no matter how appealing they are or how passionately the politician argues for them. The primacy of truth just strikes me as the most obvious and fundamental virtue. However, I’ve recently begun to question what sort of value truth actually has. Consider, for example, how there are many religions in the world and most are incompatible with one another. Therefore, most religions are false. Imagine a community that believes in one of these false religions. Further imagine there is a person in that community that begins to doubt his religion and soon correctly identifies his community’s beliefs as baseless and mythical. Now he possesses the truth, but how is he any better off? What is he going to do? Tell others of his thoughts? Heresy has been punishable by death in some cultures. It is unlikely that he would change anyone else’s mind. At best, the person can expect disapproval from his family and friends. He could also be labeled as immoral or a deviant. I imagine this would make it difficult for him to interact with people. At the same time, his peers are finding friends and spouses at prayer meetings. How sad that finding the truth has left one lonely while those that accepted lies have found camaraderie in those that agree with them. This is not a difficult scenario to imagine. I’m sure it happens all over the world. Of course, the person could just keep his mouth shut, but living a lie, supporting a lie, and going through motions in which he doesn’t believe isn’t very satisfactory either. In this situation, it is hard to see the value of truth. Unless the person is able to make some significant impact to offset these costs, I may be forced to conclude that it is better for him to actually ignore truth and base his life on a falsehood.

Okay, so maybe the idea that knowing truth doesn’t always benefit someone isn’t that groundbreaking, but I find it interesting how the importance of truth can be subverted by the desire to fit in with the community. Case in point, I was recently on a message board and a user posted that atheists should recognize the “cultural value” of religions. Me being me, I responded that culture has no value to me because the goodness of beliefs is not related to how many support them or how long they persist. I claimed that I’ll decide my values. He wrote back with some nonsense that I can’t do that because I “don’t rule the world.” Anyway, I was more interested in what he said in a later post. He said that his “problem with being an agnostic” is that “IT’S NOTHING SPECIAL AT ALL. AND I NEED SOMETHING TO FEEL ALL WARM AND SQUISHY ON THE INSIDE.” He goes on to ask agnostics and atheists if they feel they should have religion because they currently have “no traditions,” “no fun stories to tell,” and “no organization or comradery [sic] among [their] members.” I was shocked that someone would say such things. I mean, I could understand if he was to accept camaraderie without thinking, but he seems to consciously want to believe in a god just to have something in common with other people! I just couldn’t believe that someone would choose a religion this way on purpose.

To try to make him see the absurdity of this, I used an example of the German people living under Hitler. (Although comparing your opponents to Nazis is very cliché on the internet, I felt the example was apt.) Have you ever seen videos of a Nazi rally? Have you seen the thousands of people carrying banners, giving the Hitler salute, and shouting in unison? Are they focused on reality or camaraderie? Camaraderie! Are their focused on their values or cultural values? Cultural values! Do these values turn out to be good to them or bad to them! Bad to them! If you’ve ever seen those videos, you’ll know that culture can’t define real goodness. Yet those people had such a sense of purpose; they had no doubt that what they were supporting was right. But they were wrong, and most religions are wrong. No matter how “warm and squishy” people feel, it doesn’t mean that the values they support will necessarily be good to them.