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The Evidence Never Lies 23
    The task of weaning people from dogma is challenging in all times and contexts, but Bruce Lee had an advantage in his antiauthoritarian quest. Because of the very physical nature of martial arts, one can go on talking for only so long before he or she is invited to step up and put their theories on the line. Martial arts theory is testednot through flowery debates but combat. At the end of the match, you are either the one left standing or the one on the floor. No arguments there. Fighters can spout the best speeches in the world about the superiority of their art and training methods, but if they keep getting knocked out, they will be forced by reality to revise their ideas.
    Because of this wonderfully concrete aspect of martial arts, Lee's inflammatory ideas were eventually tested and vindicated in the early 1990s through the development of the new sport of mixed martial arts. Competitions such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, in fact, invited fighters to test their skills in contests with as few rules as possible. Traditional martial artists from every corner of the globe stepped up to defend the honor of their systems. This, after all, was their chance to prove in a public forum the superiority of their style. Much buzz was in the air: maybe the debates among martial artists about which art was the best would be finally settled. What resulted shocked everybody. No single art turned out to be “the best.” Just as Bruce Lee had predicted, traditional martial artists became easy prey for those fighters who followed Lee's insight by picking the best techniques from several different sources and mixing them together. This was the most indubitable proof that, in the right hands, an eclectic syncretism is far superior to rigidly following a single path.
    In case you are wondering, I am not proposing an Ultimate Fighting competition for religions. While I have to admit that the prospect of having a beer in front of pay-per-view matches between Shinto and Judaism, or Islam and Buddhism, seems like lots of fun, I am afraid it wouldn't work. The effectiveness of a religion cannot be measured through objective, physical standards. No concrete testing ground exists to prove beyond a shadow of doubt the superiority of one religion over another.
    We can't test objectively the existence of God, or of heaven and hell, but this doesn't mean that we can't test religious theories at all. What we can do is look at the effects that certain religious ideas have had throughout history and continue to have today. It is a much nerdier approach than a knock out, and it certainly doesn't possess its discussion-ending clarity, but it's the next best thing. We can observe the historical consequences of certain beliefs, and decide which ones have had more desirable effects on our lives. Clearly, a subjective element enters the game here. Different people are going to judge the same consequence positively and negatively. But we don't need to fall in a relativistic trap. We are not going to accept some cop-out excuse about how it's all just a matter of opinion. Beliefs that cause people to behave decently toward each other are not just different from beliefs leading to widespread warfare, bloodbaths, and misery. Positive beliefs are qualitatively superior much in the same way that health is preferable to sickness. In creating our own religions, we should carefully separate those ideas that have contributed to the amount of violence, conflict, and suffering in the world from those that have helped alleviate or diminish those things.
    Our task is going to be complicated by the fact that beliefs have different effects on different people. The same belief can often result in both pleasant and horrific consequences for different people. What we need to figure out is what seems to be the exception and what is the rule. For example, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that so-called family values among