Posted on 04/11/2002 2:47:21 PM PDT by catonsville
Tangents Gregg Easterbrook
Would the World Be Safer Without Religion? Faith makes people want to kill each other--from Israel to Northern Ireland, to Afghanistan and back
Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other by the hundreds in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering each other in India, herding neighbors into house or trains then setting them afire. Catholics and Protestants continue to kill each other in Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shias have their arms wrapped around each other's throats throughout the Islamic world. And of course, on Sept. 11, 19 Muslims were so determined to murder helpless Christians and Jews that they were willing to die to shed the blood of other religions. Not a terribly good reflection on faith, is it? If religion makes people want to murder each other, maybe religion is bad for the world. Religion has certainly been bad for history. In recent decades alone, Hindus and Sikhs have been slaughtering each other, blowing up airliners and firing artillery shells into temples. In the fighting over Sri Lanka, Tamil Hindus have fired machine guns at school buses full of Sinhalese Buddhist children, and the Buddhists in turn have firebombed Hindu schools.
Thousands of Chinese grew up as orphans because their Buddhist parents were murdered during World War II at the urging of Shinto priests. Looking further back, huge numbers of Eastern Orthodox Armenians were murdered by Muslims at the turn of the century. Much of Europe's history has been a nightmare of Christian-on-Christian killing, including the 30 Years' War, in which an estimated 7.5 million people--one-third of the European population at the time--died owing to Catholic-versus-Protestant slaughter. England's history is full of Protestants murdering Catholics; France's history is full of Catholics murdering Protestants; Spain's history is full of Christians murdering Jews. Pretty much all of Europe is to blame for the Crusades, in which Christians murdered Muslims. This inventory could go on at considerable length. King Olaf Tryggvason's declaration from about the year 1000--"all Norway will be Christian or die!"--sums it up. So is faith bad? The fact that religions preach love, but often generate violence, cannot be dismissed as a minor imperfection. And if you talk of mere hatred--as opposed to all-out killing--the accounting is even more horrifying. Many faiths and denominations have throughout history dedicated themselves to hating other faiths and denominations. About 100 years ago, to cite one of many examples, Protestant denominations called the Pope the Whore of Babylon, while Pope Leo XIII declared Protestants "enemies of the Christian name." Sunnis and Shias have been denouncing each other since just a few years after the Prophet Muhammad died. The Eastern Orthodox church has in its past denounced Catholicism as a false religion. In 1997, a small group called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis declared that the Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism are "not Judaism at all." Intrigue among Buddhist and Shinto sects have led to much violence.
Considering this bill of attainder, it could be awfully tempting to turn away from religion as a retrograde or divisive influence. This seems to be the view in Europe, where rates of religious observance have been in sharp decline for a century. Today, just 10 percent of the citizens of the European Union regularly attend worship services of any faith; in the United States, the comparable figure is a little more than half. Europeans seem to be aware of the bloodshed that faith has cost in the past--religious killing has been comparatively rare in the United States, probably a reason observance remains relatively high--and to be saying, "To hell with it." Killing in the name of God or belief, which shames every religion, ought to give the person of faith pause. But should it cause us to abandon faith?
Would the world be better off if religion disappeared? Some people would say yes, and since it's impossible to conduct this experiment, as faith is definitely not going away, we can't be sure. But when we observe the horror of religiously motivated violence or hatred, maybe the correct question is, Without religion would it be even worse? What's really underlying many "religious" disputes is ethnicity, money, and national distinctions, factors that would exist regardless of whether anyone had ever heard the word "God." The fighting in Israel today, for example, is not primarily about religion--Jews, Muslims and Christians have coexisted fairly peacefully in that area for most of the last 1,300 years. Until recently, the Holy Land fighting was mainly about land, and whom it's been promised to. Palestinians hated Israelis because they viewed them as oppressors, not because they were Jews--although that hatred has turned lately to anti-Semitism. Israelis hated Palestinians because they viewed them as terrorists, not because they were Muslims--although, lately the hatred has turned anti-Muslim. If the land dispute could be resolved, the religious dispute would rapidly fade to secondary or tertiary status--though ethnic tensions pitting Ashkenazim and Sephardim against Arabs might drone on.
Similarly, the tension between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland has a religious component, but its essence is class-based and nationalist. Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to be well-off and Anglophile; Catholics, to be working class and to want the Brits out. Suppose religion vanished tomorrow morning, and these two groups divided themselves by arbitrary labels that had nothing to do with faith. Let's say one position was arbitrarily designated "Orange" and the other "Green." Do you think the conflict would instantly end? No, it would continue as before, if not worsen, since Christianity--both Catholicism and Protestantism--would no longer be present to urge each side to love its neighbor. Similar ethnic, class, and nationalistic disputes underlie pretty much every fight that looks on the surface to be about religion. Suppose the Christian and Islamic faiths vanished. Sept. 11 might still have happened. Within the Arab world, where many resent the West, violent fanatics might have vowed to kill themselves solely on secular grounds. Indeed, it can be argued that since the mass murderers of Sept. 11 openly violated the Quranic prohibition against killing the innocent, they weren't true Muslims anyway. What they were was terrorist fanatics. And a certain number of people like this would exist in the world whether religious faith existed or not. Men and women of all faiths must feel deeply chastened about the continuing violence in the name of religion. We ought to feel the very worst about violence, or hatred, perpetrated by those who say they believe what we believe. But this does not mean we should give up those beliefs. Rather, we must work to make belief sincere. Only then is there a chance the violence will stop.
Not true. Faith is merely an excuse to kill other people.
The fundamental problem is that there are some people who just want to tell other people how to live their lives.
In some cases, it's "Worship my god, or I'll kill you".
In other cases, it's "Worship me, or I'll kill you".
In other cases, it's "Don't eat/smoke that plant, or I'll kill you".
And so on.
If it wasn't Faith used as an excuse to kill, it would be something else.
The real question, then, cannot be Whether the world would be better off without "religion."
Actually, it was fought to keep North America from picking up a new country.
I remind you that Lincoln himself said "If I could save the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I would do that. If I could save the Union by freeing some of the slaves and leaving others in shackles, I would do that" (or something along those lines).
Flawed Article.
He needs to prove that the examples he cited are religious conflicts. Are they really religious conflicts, or simply conflicts between people of different religions.
He needs to prove his dichotomy of all religions vs no religions. No devote member of a religion would consider all religions equal. Nor would they defend the actions of the other religions, in order to justifiy their own.
He needs to compare religious wars vs all wars. Is religion a major cause of war, or a rare cause.
and finally
He needs to examine all the good that religion has done vs the harm. How does the good compare to the evil.
1Chronicles 17:21. I think this United States is this nation. It says, "WHAT ONE (ECHAD, UNITED) NATION in the earth is like thy people Israel, whom God went to redeem to be his own people, to make thee a name of greatness and terribleness, by driving out nations from before thy people, whom thou hast redeemed out of Egypt?" Jeremiah 6: 16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
Peace,
DrMike
1Chronicles 17:21. I think this United States is this nation. It says, "WHAT ONE (ECHAD, UNITED) NATION in the earth is like thy people Israel, whom God went to redeem to be his own people, to make thee a name of greatness and terribleness, by driving out nations from before thy people, whom thou hast redeemed out of Egypt?" Jeremiah 6: 16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
Peace,
DrMike
Radio Free Republic Thursday night April 11th 8PM CST "Faith in Action" with Michael Curtiss MD. Join us in our inaugural show when we discuss the biblical foundations of the United States of America. Call in lines are 1-886-radioFR and 1888-802-9293.
Bump this post and FReep mail me your input. Agape, DrMike
Ahhh, I should have made myself clearer. I was attempting to imply that religion as a social force can be a brake on the excesses of a state if they are decoupled.
Personal relationships with God are productive. But that would mean individual decisions, based on personal, independant thought. Not for the faint of heart. It's a lot easier to just follow your book, and priest (rabbi, whatever), and be part of the "accepted" crowd. We want to belong, to not think, to not question, to not be ostracized. That hurts.
Organized religion leads to "us against them."
"WE are the true believers, and those that oppose us oppose God. Everyone else is wrong, and are going to hell."
Sound familier?
Would the world be better without TV, the Internet, or politicians?
Not a question of religion, but of faith. The world would not be better without faith, because of belief in tomorrow we can get through today. Faith that things will get better requires hope and love. Faith that things will get worse is not faith at all, but depression and despair, which require a faith that things will get better to keep on living.
"Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow. You're only a day away."
If we didn't have religion, we would revert to tribalism as a substitute. Just look to Somalia to see what it would be like.
A very odd statement. Tribalism is inherently religious. The Somalis are very religious.
I think, in interpreting what many people here are saying, is that they think of religion in strictly western/levantine terms: a universal religion, absolutely true for all time and for all peoples, without exception. If that is "religion" then some "bad guys" have been religious, and some have not, some have been "tribal" and some have not.
But communism and other "non-religious" ideologies happen to share most of the underlying assumptions of "religion": that they have all the answers, for all people, for all time, everywhere, and that everything will be fine once their "truth" is universally acknowledged. This kind of thinking leads to war and intolerance more often than not.
But you can't just look at total body counts when talking about the 20th century: there were a lot more people alive then - you have to look at "per capita slaughter" if you want to claim to be objective. What distinguishes the larger body count of 20th century ideologies compared to, say, the wars of religion in Europe (one of which, for example, the 30 Years War, killed 1/3 the population of Germany), is that the 20th century had larger populations of "people in the way" and better technological means at the disposal of warring parties to more efficiently wipe them out.
That's "progress" for you.
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