Like most Americans of my age, I grew up surrounded by religion – even though my parents were not religious. Religion has always fascinated me, and I used to read a lot about it, though I’m not sure exactly what I learned from all that reading.
I believe, though I am not certain, that various religions have produced a lot of good in the world. Many of Jesus’ teachings form the core of the same kind of beliefs that permeate the Democratic Underground and other liberal/progressive organizations today. In the mid-19th Century, some Christian groups played a prominent role in the
abolitionist movement, as well as other progressive causes. And religion provides comfort to hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of the world’s inhabitants today.
It even sometimes provides comfort to
me, though I practice no formal religion, never attend church any more, and have only vague and unformed beliefs on the subject. But I never, as far as I can tell, base any of my decisions on whatever religious beliefs I do hold. To the extent that I believe in God (which varies over time), I believe that he/she/it expects us to make our own decisions. Why give us free will if we are expected to simply do as we are told?
Many have argued that, over the course of human history, religion has been far more destructive to humans, other creatures and our planet than it has been a force for good. Perhaps the biggest reason for believing that is that many or most wars and other abominations throughout human history have been justified on the basis of religion. But that is not necessarily the fault of religion per se. One of the major excuses that George W. Bush used for his invasion of Iraq is that he wanted to spread freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. That is no indictment against freedom and democracy. Those ideals merely served as convenient excuses for George Bush to do what he wanted to do. The truth of the matter is that any time a person or a nation does something horrible, that person or nation will always find some honorable intention with which to justify it. If religion had never been invented there would always be some other rationalization available to justify any atrocity that one is inclined to commit.
The highest ideals of religionI recently read a brief description of religion at its best in a book titled “
Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World”, by Paul Hawken. That book is not about religion. It is about a confluence of the environmental and social justice movements all over the world. But the last chapter in the book touches on religion at its best, or as it was meant to be, referencing another book by another author:
In a seminal work,
The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong details the origins of our religious traditions during what is called the Axial Age… from 900 to 200 BCE, during which much of the world turned away from violence, cruelty, and barbarity. The upwelling of philosophy, insight, and intellect from that era lives today in the works of Socrates, Plato, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and others. Rather than establishing doctrinaire religious institutions, these teachers created social movements that addressed human suffering. These movements were later called Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, monotheistic Judaism, democracy, and philosophical rationalism; the second flowering of the Axial Age brought forth Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinical Judaism. The point Armstrong strongly emphasizes is that the early expressions of religiosity during the Axial Age were not theocratic systems requiring belief, but instructional practices requiring action. The arthritic catechisms and rituals that we now accept as religion had no place in the precepts of these sages, prophets, and mystics. Their goal was to foster a compassionate society, and the question of whether there was an omnipotent God was irrelevant to how one might lead a moral life. They asked their students to question and challenge and, as opposed to modern religion, to take nothing on faith… They urged their followers to change how they behaved in the world. All relied on a common principle, the Golden Rule: Never do to anyone what you would not have done to yourself…
Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness… Nearly all of the Axial sages realized that you could not confine your benevolence to your own people: your concern must somehow extend to the entire world… If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world.
If that’s a description of religion at its best, it sounds damn good to me. I read a book by Karen Armstrong many years ago. It was called “
A History of God – The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam” (copyright 1993). I don’t remember many of the details, but I do remember that I considered the book to be scholarly, balanced, enlightening, and not too difficult to read for such a complex subject.
The role of ideology in justifying atrocity Religions are ideologies – which is simply to say that
they are a “set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.” Andrew M. Lobaczewski, in his book “
Political Ponerology – A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes”, writes about the role of ideology in the process that leads to pathocracies (a pathocracy is a social movement, society, nation, or empire that is controlled by evil individuals and habitually perpetrates evil deeds on its people and/or other people.) The ideology itself is usually not inherently evil, and the ideology does not generally characterize the movement or group. Rather, the ideology serves as a mask, to hide the actual intentions of the group. Lobaczewski explains it like this:
It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda…. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.
If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke “moral outrage”, and not only among the members of the union.
The fact is, even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals.
That explains why so many normal Americans are willing to accept the Bush administration’s lame excuses for everything it does. Acknowledging that our President and Vice President are no more than criminal thugs and psychopaths is just too painful for most Americans. It is much more comfortable for them to believe that their President’s actions are motivated by a desire to defend Americans against danger, to spread democracy and freedom to other parts of the world, or any of a variety of pure “Christian” reasons.
The justification of religion as a reason for committing atrocities is probably as old as religion itself. One of the best known examples is the Christian
Crusades. These were a series of military actions and wars conducted by European Christians, primarily against Islam, between 1096 and about 1272. The motivation for these wars was probably no different from that of most other wars, and as with many other wars, religion was used as the primary justification. Though Muslims were the primary targets, the Crusades
also unleashed massacres of Jews and other Christian sects.
Here is a
brief description of several other atrocities committed in the name of religion, including the Roman persecution of Christians, human sacrifices by the Aztecs, the Puritan witch hunts, the Medieval Inquisition, and Islamic Jihads.
The worst of religionBill Moyers, a former Baptist minister, describes in a speech titled “
9/11 and the Sport of God”, the culmination of the worst of Christian tradition in our country, and how it has allied with the wealthy and powerful to threaten the very foundations of our democracy and the quality of life for most Americans:
The radical Religious Right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties – the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is – and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services, and so on.
What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance – their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge – has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the “Christograph”) on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome….
Alas, these “great moral issues” do not include building a moral economy. The Christian Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based Initiatives) but is silent on social and economic justice. Inequality in America has reached scandalous proportions… None of these harsh realities of ordinary life seem to bother the radical religious right. To the contrary, in the pursuit of political power they have cut a deal with America’s richest class and their partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle strategy to “starve” the government of resources needed for vital social services that benefit everyone while championing more and more spending on rich corporations and larger tax cuts for the rich.
How else to explain the vacuum in their “great moral issues” of the plight of millions of Americans without adequate health care? Of the gross corruption of politics by campaign contributions that skew government policies toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers? …
This is the crux of the matter: To these fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know what it means. Behind their malicious attacks on the courts (“vermin in black robes,” as one of their talk show allies recently put it) is a fierce longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the Constitution according to standards of biblical revelation as fundamentalists define it. To get those judges they needed a party beholden to them. So the Grand Old Party – the GOP – has become God’s Own Party, its ranks made up of God’s Own People “marching as to war.”
Leaders and followers – The use of hate and fear to take over our countryThere is no evidence that the move of fundamentalist Christians towards the Republican Party in recent years is because of Republican policies being more representative of the Christian religion than are Democratic policies. In fact, Democrats favor policies that are much more in accordance with the heart of the Christian religion than do Republicans.
Jesus Christ was a liberal. As explained by Gary Vance, a Christian Evangelical Minister:
Jesus was the ultimate liberal progressive revolutionary of all history. The conservative religious and social structure that He defied hated and crucified Him. They examined His life and did not like what they saw. He aligned Himself with the poor and the oppressed. He challenged the religious orthodoxy of His day. He advocated pacifism and loving our enemies. He liberated women and minorities from oppression.… Jesus was the original Liberal. He was a progressive, and He was judged and hated for it.
Then how have the radical right leaders of the Republican Party managed to convince fundamentalist Christians to vote for them in such large numbers? They do it through hate and fear. Mostly, they convince a certain segment of fundamentalist Christians that liberals are out to destroy their religion. They say that liberals have proclaimed
war on Christmas; liberals are out to destroy Christian marriage by pushing for
equal rights for homosexuals; and they say that by keeping prayer out of the public school system liberals would deny the right of Christians to practice their religion.
This is all a smokescreen. Liberals have no interest whatsoever in destroying Christianity. They simply believe in the separation of church and state, and they believe that minorities should not be discriminated against in the interest of those Christians who are intolerant of the beliefs of others.
Vance puts this all in perspective and asks Christians to consider behaving in accordance with the best traditions of their religion rather than the corrupted version that their political leaders have tried to sell them in recent years:
I am glad that conservative Republican candidates advocate for the family and a few Christian issues, but we must quit pretending that they are the only ones that Christians should consider voting for. People should not call themselves pro-life if they are only anti-abortion and yet feel no twinge of conscience over the unfair application of capital punishment or wars fought for dubious motives. A true pro-life position cares just as passionately for the born as the un-born and views war as a last resort when all other options are exhausted.
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