Is it a sin to doubt?

Robert Tracinski writes:

As a young atheist observing my friends, I realized that those who had the most difficulty dealing with a religious upbringing - regardless of whether or not they remained religious — were those who had been taught that it is a sin to doubt. They were constantly being shoved up against lines of thought that they couldn’t let themselves pursue, issues where it was a basic betrayal of their values to follow the evidence wherever it might lead.

For all its supposed secularism, the contemporary left has plenty of it own areas where it is a sin to doubt. In fact, they have turned the word “denier”—in this context, a synonym for “doubter”—into their favorite epithet. Is the burning of fossil fuels really causing a disastrous change in the weather? It is a sin to doubt. Is there really a campus rape “epidemic” supported by a “rape culture”? It is a sin to doubt. Is America—50 years after the dismantling of segregation and with a black man in the Oval Office—really a country so mired in racism that it deliberately and systematically murders young black men? It is a sin to doubt.

So in the past few weeks, if you are on the left, you have been urged to regard the facts of two sensational, high profile cases—a police shooting in Missouri and an alleged rape at the University of Virginia—as unimportant. It doesn’t matter if Michael Brown really had his hands up and was trying to surrender when he was shot, what matters is maintaining the “metaphor.” It doesn’t matter if a young woman was really gang-raped at a fraternity, what matters is the “wider truth” about “rape culture.” “To let fact checking define the narrative,” an earnest young editor at UVA’s Cavalier Daily insists, “would be a huge mistake.” In effect, you are being told that the facts should never be allowed to get in the way of the correct political narrative. But from another perspective, what you are being told is that the facts should never be allowed to tempt you into the sin of doubting.

Consider how this applies to the case for capitalism. If there were ever a system that proved its value for improving human life, it is the free market. Industrial capitalism is, in fact, the only thing that has ever made it possible for large numbers of people to lift themselves out of poverty. Whereas socialism has repeatedly failed, in every form and variation and on every continent. Not only did it fail, but it was responsible for vast, inconceivable crimes. (Google “Holodomor” sometime. Just don’t do an image search if you want to sleep for the next few nights.)

Yet it is usually considered self-evident that socialists are idealists who are concerned about the little guy, while advocates of capitalism want to push the masses down into poverty.

The same thing goes for the welfare state. The War on Poverty has spent trillions of dollars over 50 years and has merely fixed poverty into place. Yet if you advocate the expansion of the welfare state, you are regarded as proving how deeply you care about the plight of the poor. Criticize the welfare state, and you are regarded as callous and indifferent to all human suffering.

The gap between the left’s laudatory self-image and the less-than-spectacular results of its programs is widely interpreted on the right as evidence that smug self-congratulation is the real purpose. It doesn’t matter whether a government program actually works, so long as you can pat yourself on the back for being progressive enough to vote for it. But I’m beginning to wonder whether the actual goal is the avoidance of evil thoughts. Ask yourself: how much of your political self-image is tied up in regarding yourself as better and purer than those wicked “deniers” on the right?