Is It Wrong To Be Almost Perfect?

Earlier this week, PZ Myers took on a different sort of criticism of the New Atheists from what they normally receive. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephen Asma complained that the usual suspects' critique of religion fails because it focuses so much on the big three monotheisms, and ignores other religions, like Buddhism and animism.

That critique isn't as interesting to me as part of Myers' response, in which he essentially says he would reject a world that was perfect in (almost) every way if that perfection was brought about by acceptance of religious faith:

He really doesn't get it. He could show me a religion that is nothing but sweetness and light, happiness and good thoughts and equality for all, and it wouldn't matter: the one question I would ask is, "Is it true?" It wouldn't matter if he could show empirically that adopting this hypothetical faith leads to world peace, the voluntary abolishment of crime, the disappearance of dental caries, and that every child on the planet would get their very own pony — I'd still battle it with every fierce and angry word I could speak and type if it wasn't also shown to be a true and accurate description of the world. Some of us, at least, will refuse to drink the Kool-Aid, no matter how much sugar they put in it.

This reminds me of a question I used to pose to my intro to philosophy students when we were discussing free will. If someone told them that they could go to live in a perfect world (however they defined 'perfect'), but the condition of doing so was that they had to give up their free will, would they accept the offer? In the whole time I taught, only about three students ever said they would. Those who refused it almost uniformly said that they would rather live in a world full of pain and hatred than exist in one that was perfect, but in which they could never choose to do anything that would ruin that perfection.

For my part, I think I would accept the offer with very little further deliberation. I think that, in a perfect world (as I envision it), I would be too busy being wildly happy to worry that I couldn't wake up one morning and choose to rape or murder my neighbor. I wondered if my students meant what they said, or if most of them were just failing to really imagine what a perfect world would be like.

I don't wonder that about PZ--he's incredibly intelligent, and unlike my undergraduate students, has more than enough life experience to understand what he's rejecting. The fact that he says he would reject an offer very similar to the one I was proposing to my students makes me wonder about the morality of my willingness to accept the perfect world.

Just as I would probably sacrifice my free will to have my ideal world, I'm pretty sure I'd be willing to support a religion I knew was bogus so long as it was otherwise entirely benign. That would mean that it made minimal false claims. It wouldn't prohibit the teaching of scientific truths like evolution and the big bang; discriminate against anyone because of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.; or censor its critics. It would probably, like animism or panentheism, make minimal claims about the nature of divinity. But I'm pretty sure my skepticism about its metaphysical ideas wouldn't trouble me much if it meant that I, and the people I love, would live happy, healthy lives with no worries about money, inequality, or nuclear annihilation.

I might not drink the Kool-Aid, but I also wouldn't run around knocking the cups out of other people's hands.

So does this make me cowardly or immoral? Is there a difference between those and pragmatism? Or is there anything I've missed that should change my mind? Feel free to enlighten me.