Thinking Again on God

Foreign Policy magazine has a regular feature where an expert on a subject refutes common wisdom on a given subject - it is called "Think Again." In the Nov/Dec 2009 issue, Karen Armstrong discusses religion in "Think Again: God." Well worth reading - I find her to be one of the most insightful people on matters of faith and religion.

Her points really hit home for me in the discussion of whether God breeds violence and intolerance. She writes:

But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism.

This is my view as well - religion does not cause people to become intolerant. Rather, when times are tough (when the economy falters or diseases break out), people become intolerant of each other. This happens irregardless of religion but often expresses itself via the religion because it is a convenient dividing line. In the case that religion is not a convenient dividing line, ethnicity, skin color, or cultural differences (damn long haired, hippies, for example) become the dividing line between warring parties.

Belief in God provides a justification for intolerance, but mostly does not cause the intolerance itself. As someone who continues to believe human behavior is more shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection than by logic and recent developments in human history (changes to how we organize society since the industrial revolution, for instance), I believe it was an evolutionary advantage for people to become intolerant when resources were scarce.

There are times when all Muslims feel united - as when they watch the a Palestinian home being bulldozed by the Israelis because a member of the family was suspected (or proven) to be a terrorist. Then there are times when the Sunnis and Shia are united amongst themselves in hatred of the other. Then there are times when a city composed of Shia and Sunnis are united in their fear and hatred of the political leader - Saddam Hussein, for instance.

Thinking back over our own history, religion often fails to explain how groups will react to each other. During the Jim Crow era, black Christians were prohibited from worshiping in the same church as the whites. Religious dogma provided justifications for that. Now, religious dogma tends not to be used to justify racial discrimination.

Belief in God and religious teachings are used both to encourage and discourage intolerance and hatred, which is to say that religion is a tool that some use to further their political ends. Humans will continue to search for meaning and some will hijack that search in order to further their own power -- not always cynically, but often. In the absence of religion, people will still war over perceived cultural or ethnic differences.

What I find fascinating is that there seem to be as many religions as their are people. How many Christians are there in the world? Depends on who you count as "Christian." Different people have different criteria for whether one is a true Christian and I suspect that if pressed, most people could find ways of disqualifying everyone outside of their church and 3/4 of those in it as not being true Christians. Everything is a continuum and context defines where we locate ourselves along the continuum and how far we can see in both directions.