By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
Faith and religion—are they actually good for people, or are they an ancient, stubborn habit that leaves humanity morally stunted? What, if anything, is the real value of faith?
Jonathan Swift answered with razor-sharp irony: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Charles Caleb Colton put an even finer point on it: “Men will wrangle for religion; write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live by it.”
When I was 15, I spent hours devouring philosophy, and few books left a more indelible mark than Bertrand Russell’s unapologetic classic, Why I Am Not a Christian. Russell did not mince words. To him, religion was fundamentally “a disease born of fear and a source of untold human misery.” He saw it as a historical engine of terror: fueling wars of extermination, suppressing scientific curiosity to keep civilization tethered to the Dark Ages, and treating femininity as an intrinsic source of temptation and sin.
Decades later, Christopher Hitchens took that baton and sprinted gleefully with it, declaring with his characteristic smirk that religion was essentially our “first and worst attempt to make sense of the world,” an authoritarian celestial dictatorship where human beings are convicted of thought-crime before they are even born. And anyone tempted to dismiss Russell or Hitchens as cynical cranks should take a brisk stroll through Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Read five pages of the sadistic horrors pious men cheerfully inflicted on one another in the name of the Almighty, and Freddy Krueger begins to look like a resident host on Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
The critics are not inventing their evidence out of whole cloth; they are looking at the historical record. The pathology they diagnose is real: toxic faith. Toxic faith feeds on certainty, alienates the seeker, and destroys personal conscience. It builds walls of “Us versus Them,” viewing anyone on the other side not as a fellow bearer of the divine image, but as a blasphemer to be corrected, conquered, or erased. It is an insecure, dictatorial posture—ironically godless in its complete absence of mercy.
Yet here lies the paradox: the opening lines of Parsha Ha’azinu warn us against that very same distortion:
“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; and let the earth hear the words of my mouth. May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distil as the dew, as the gentle rain upon the tender grass, and as the showers upon the herb.” (Deut. 32:1–2)
Notice the deliberate meteorology of Moses’ metaphor. Moses does not compare truth to a flash flood, a thunderous hurricane, or a tidal wave designed to flatten everything in its path. He compares it to a gentle shower and the quiet morning dew. Water is life itself, but a torrential downpour erodes the soil, uproots the saplings, and drowns the landscape. The very element that sustains life can easily become an instrument of wreckage when it arrives with brute force.
The same holds true of faith. When a religious idea is imposed like a deluge—shouted through bullhorns, codified into tyranny, or wielded as an ideological club—the human soul instinctively rejects it, rebeling against the drowning force. But when it falls gently, with quiet integrity, it sinks into the roots and lets character grow organically.
An old tale tells of a cynical soap merchant strolling beside a rabbi. Looking around at the squalor and vice of the city, the merchant scoffed: “Frankly, Rabbi, I don’t see the point of religion. Look at all the misery, corruption, and cruelty in the world after thousands of years of preaching! What good has your faith actually done?”
The rabbi walked along in silence until they happened upon a small child sitting happily in a deep puddle, caked in muck from head to toe.
“Look at that child,” the rabbi said, shaking his head. “I really don’t see the value of soap. With so much soap in the world, how can that boy be so filthy? Soap has clearly failed.”
“Don’t be absurd, Rabbi,” the merchant protested. “Soap does nothing just sitting on a shelf! You actually have to rub it in with water for it to work!”
“Precisely,” replied the rabbi. “Religion sitting on a bookshelf or worn as a tribal badge doesn’t clean a single soul. You actually have to apply it daily to wash away the mud.”
Moses’ metaphor of rain contains a second quiet insight: rain does not produce fruit overnight. You do not pour water on a seed at breakfast and harvest an orchard by lunch. It requires patience, quiet soaking, and internal change. King Solomon captured the identical standard in Proverbs:
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy.” (Prov. 3:17–18)
Torah is not an ideological battering ram to conquer our neighbors; it is a discipline meant to civilize our animal instincts. If our beliefs make us petty, arrogant, or eager to condemn, we are not practicing religion; we are merely disguising our own neuroses in theological vocabulary.
Russell and Hitchens were entirely right to despise a faith that brutalizes and diminishes humanity. The ultimate test of genuine faith is remarkably simple: is it making us kinder, more patient, and more decent human beings? If it isn’t, then no matter how loud our prayers or how orthodox our dogmas, we haven’t found the dew of heaven—we’re just splashing around in the mud.