MODERN CIVILIZATION AND RELIGION
“I,
at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice.” Albert Einstein
John Chuckman
Even the greatest minds sometimes are
befuddled by emotional preconceptions, as this famous quote shows Einstein was
by his rejection of randomness implicit in quantum mechanics. Ironically,
Einstein himself was one of the founders of quantum theory with his work on
black-body radiation.
Nothing is more befuddling than the topic
of religion because it consists of nothing but preconceptions, veiled under the
more seemingly-weighty word, faith.
The topic destroys friendships, has caused immense oppression, and has started
many bloody wars. These facts alone should provide strong warning against
bringing it into public political discourse.
Not everything an individual deems as good
for himself is good for society. This touches one of the basic flaws in
Christian thinking which can so destructive to civil society. Christians regard
all people as being essentially the same in the sense that they all are expected
to be nearly identical over a wide range of human behaviors. It is departure
from this set of expected behaviors that marks a person as a sinner. But it is
easy to see that people are not the same in almost any physical and mental characteristic
you care to measure: they in fact represent a spectrum of differences in each
category of human behavior and thought, the mix being never quite the same
twice.
The Christian way of looking at people is
just another, older stream of 1950s’ thinking about what is normal. In those
days, it was easy to be classed as deviant or abnormal just on the basis of
dress or behavior which did not fit into society’s fairly narrow expectations
for normality. Those were the days when the FBI busied itself with matters like
garbage checks on people such as Einstein himself. Those were the days when a
boy could become a Junior G-Man for snitching on someone. Those were also the
days when people with mental illnesses could be involuntarily institutionalized
and even lobotomized. Government took full advantage of the 1950s’ frame of
mind, indeed it helped create it, encouraging the idea that those looking or
acting different are potentially dangerous. The naturally-occurring paranoia
which has always been a feature of American society (a genetic heritage from
the Puritans perhaps) just needs a framework like that to kick into high gear
with witch hunts and citizens snitching on their neighbors. In both cases –
Christianity and secret police - there is an underlying impulse to regiment and
classify a population, much as every army recruit receives a buzz-cut, dog
tags, and standard issue underwear.
The people who classify others as sinners
or deviants, of course, believe they are promoting good behavior, but the idea
of good in both cases is not a
standard set by anyone but themselves in their interpretations of ancient
texts, often corrupt from generations of copyists, always inaccurately
translated, censored and picked through by the Church ages ago for what is
acceptable and what is not, and readily misunderstood in the ambiguity or even
nonsense of various passages. Even with such specific and generally accepted
ideas as “Thou shalt not kill,” we know modern courts recognize many kinds of
killing, not all carrying the same blameworthiness and penalty. Remember the
famous line by Hannah Arendt about “the banality of evil”? That is a perfect
description for both the Stasi/FBI-friendly citizen and a good many Christians:
in being repressive, they think they are doing good by the accepted norms of
their society.
At least general thinking in our society
has progressed somewhat beyond that of the 1950s, although the FBI carries on in
its frat-boy-with-a-badge stupidities, just having new targets. The fundamentalist
Christians also carry on with hell-fire sermons, often invoking intense and
mindless hatreds, as of homosexuals or foreigners. One well known preacher,
Franklin Graham, invoked the use of atomic weapons after 9/11. Another, Pat
Robertson, blamed destructive hurricanes on homosexuals and advocated
assassinations. Then there are the folks who writhe on the church floor
blubbering incoherent grunts and shouts, calling it “speaking in tongues,”
those who insist on poisonous snake-handling as part of worship, and many, many
who practice prayer for winning football games, particularly homecoming games
when grateful alumni can fill the institution’s coffers in their delirious
happiness over victory . Hard to see anything of what we know of Jesus in any
of that, yet it all has legions of eager American consumers.
Apart from such carnival side-show
excesses, all Christians believe they have a set of received truths and that
everyone should be brought to hear them, rejecting them at their peril. These
truths include the odd conception that all men are hopeless sinners without
Christianity. This very urge to convert others, this belief in a single,
unchangeable truth, and, importantly, the implicit idea that all people are
somehow just alike is destructive to democratic thinking and the values of
modern free society.
The very sins of the sinners tend to be
defined by criteria that science daily reduces to nonsense. Many differences
among individuals - from sexual behavior to truthfulness, from propensity to violence
to compassion, from ability to understand to various mental illnesses - reflect
nothing more than differences in the make-up of individuals, differences
largely in genetic endowments but also to a lesser degree in environmental
experiences. Even the tendency to embrace certain religions and political
parties as opposed to others almost certainly is shaped by these fundamental
differences in make-up. The genuine acceptance of differences is a key to a
modern democratic society.
And if there is one country in the advanced
world that often does not accept this principle, it is the United States. In
its foreign affairs, it is guided by what often are called Christian principles
- a rather fuzzily defined and selective set of them and certainly not the rigorous
precepts of historical Jesus so far as we know them. These principles are not
written down, codified, or officially announced, but casual discussion and the
words of innumerable private and religious organizations confirm the
widely-held view. This explains in part the embrace of modern Israel, a
relationship as destructive to civil society in its nature as the two-thousand
year-old, frightening hallucinations of the Book of Revelations upon which it
is partly based. Well, the conflation of ancient rubbish and modern society’s needs
doesn't work well even within the United States - that is why it is such a
divided and angry society - and it certainly doesn’t work for the world in
general.
And the United States is a divided and
angry society. It is revealed in the rhetoric of many politicians, it is
revealed in the sermons of many extreme preachers, it is evident in the extreme
violence and lack of regard for citizens of police forces all over the country,
it is revealed in the countless schemes to defraud ordinary people, it is
revealed in the intolerance for so insignificant a difference as a politician
not wearing an American flag lapel pin, it is felt in the embrace of utterly
ignorant political figures (Sarah Palin, George Bush, Newt Gingrich, John
McCain) by large factions, and its pulse can be felt in many television shows
such as the ones showing police doing their worst nasty work on citizens.
Once admitted to public institutions and
policy, religion, in any form, leaves little room for rationality or criticism
or individuality, which is almost identical to saying, it leaves little room
for thought. You are not supposed to criticize someone’s religion – it tends to
create anger and aggression - so what do you do when people bring their religion
into public institutions with which you must deal? The human race has terrible,
bitter experience with this conflict in everything from the long creaking span
of the Dark Ages to countless murderous, meaningless wars. And it is important
to understand that religions are not always about a god. They may equally be
about an ideology or cult of personality. Communism and fascism were both
modern religions in every sense of the word, as is every form of inflexible political
ideology.
But the human race learns only very, very
slowly from its own history. Why else do we keep commemorating the horrors of
World War I? Why else do people feel it necessary to build things like
Holocaust museums? You might think such titanic murderous events could no more
be forgotten than a natural disaster, but then natural disasters are forgotten
regularly. The human brain does not want to dwell on past pain. It is a
survival mechanism. And likewise each generation wants to create and experience
new dreams and hopes. Too often, though, sweeping dreams and hopes are
dangerous fantasies which threaten, perhaps unintentionally, to repeat
forgotten horrors. Dreams and hopes, especially sweeping ones, are often the
begetters of new and dangerous religions.
The continued commemoration of past horrors
is itself a religious rite, one not useful for any good social purpose. World
War I, for example, was little more than a gigantic blunder made by men
bristling with pride and religious-like patriotism. Twenty million died
horribly just so one branch of a royal family could not dominate in Europe at
the expense of another. It achieved nothing, and indeed set the stage for the
even worse terrors of World War II, including the Holocaust. We commemorate
World War I largely to keep young men inspired enough to go off to the next
useless war their shabby political leaders decide to fight. The constant
commemoration of the Holocaust also is a religious rite using guilt and fear to
manipulate support for Israel in the face of what is plainly its own savagery
towards neighbors.
For as little as we might like it, it is a
fact that all of humanity's great horrors grew out of sweeping dreams and hopes
taken to extremes, from the Crusades and the Hundred Years War to the Holy
Inquisition and the great world wars. Catholicism, for example, provided and
helped enforce for centuries the dangerous and delusional idea of the divine
rights of kings. It blessed the conquest and slaughter of great Indian
civilizations in the Americas. One Pope even issued a special gold medal
commemorating Catherine de Medici’s work for the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
in which thousands of French Protestants were slaughtered in their beds or on
the streets. And through the centuries of the Church’s dominance in society,
its followers believed they were doing what is right because a respected
authority told them it was.
Fascism and Communism were only the
Twentieth Century's contributions to religion in politics. Wisdom from the
writings and speeches of a few men with either messianic claims for themselves or
claims for great sweeping changes in society were received by millions who had suffered
bad times. It might not be bad to reflect on the fact that Hitler, Mussolini,
and Stalin were all raised in the Church.
In America, fundamentalist Christianity was
the main pillar of slavery for centuries. Christianity, from the early Great
Awakenings (a series of mass, semi-hysterical back-to-Christian-basics
movements in early America) to the Scopes Monkey trial in the 1920s, has always
been in the forefront of rejecting new ideas and supporting human oppression in
one form or another. Missionaries have gone hand-in-hand with the military
seizure of other people's lands time and time again, the case of the Hawaiian Islands
being only one of the most egregious. The only time these people served a
progressive influence in their long history was a period of advocacy for public
education – something many have turned their backs on now – which had the
motive of exposing all to the Gospels. A small portion of them also spoke out
against slavery in its last days.
Christianity appears to have arisen as a
sect or sects of Judaism. Look at the bloody turmoil of the Old Testament.
Murder, war, rapine, slavery are just a few of its delightful themes. That is
why the most bloody-minded Israelis or Christian fundamentalist supporters of
Israel can cite scripture to support almost any excess that appeals to them. 19th
Century Zionism also was one of the modern forms of fanatical political
religion, and the damage it has done is there for all to see. In its early days,
it never went beyond being a narrow cult rejected overwhelmingly by Jews, but
the fears and guilt around the horrors of World War II enabled it to gain a
serious foothold and begin its own horrors inflicted on innocents.
We now regularly make new discoveries in
almost every branch of science, and, with each advance in rapidly-changing
technology, we acquire still more able tools with which to make still more
discoveries. This process is only going to accelerate to rates we cannot imagine,
and, indeed, with which much of humanity may have great difficulty coping. The
received popular wisdom about things changing so rapidly now is close to
meaningless small talk: things began to change rapidly at the dawn of the
modern era, five or six centuries ago, the change gaining in rapidity with each
significant increment of time, and there is nothing to say the established pattern
should not continue. Coming, just over the horizon, are the assembly of
synthetic life forms, robots that can do almost anything, and machines that
will replace the experts in every profession, but even those coming “scary”
realities are only the beginning of a journey whose end, if it ever has an end,
none can imagine. Any trouble in our
coping along the way may well be met with new intrusions of religion into
public life, either from traditional faiths feeling oppressed or new secular
ones having sprung into being, a disturbing possibility.
All discoveries in science tend to confirm
and reinforce the concept of randomness and such fundamental ideas as evolution
and quantum theory. Remarkable new fossils are discovered and dated almost
weekly, pointing to the rise and fall of innumerable species over time as well
the interrelated nature of all life. At the microscopic level, studies of human
and animal DNA point in the same direction, that is, to the interrelated nature
of all life. In astronomy, the strange nature of the cosmos comes to us in wave
after wave of discovery from black holes and dark matter to the very chemical
building blocks of life being randomly created in the turmoil of galactic
clouds, perhaps to be randomly rained down on countless passing planets with
only those randomly possessing the suitable physical conditions becoming the
incubators of life.
It is more than a little odd that the only
source, regarded by Christians and other faiths as authentic, for the idea of intelligent
design has not been supplemented in two thousand years, since the time when
some religious eccentrics living in caves scribbled their dreams, hopes, and
poetic fantasies on papyruses, giving their work the most sweeping publisher's
blurb of all time, that of being authorized by the Creator Himself.
Society’s needs through politics,
government, and public institutions can hardly benefit from concepts unchanged
in two thousand years. Saying otherwise really is a bit like saying we should
still use chariots and papyrus and oxen in the fields, but then there are
religious groups who do pretty much that. Amish, Mennonites, strict Catholic
religious orders, and ultra-Orthodox Jews all live as if it were another
century. Just why each of them settles on a particular era’s set of conveniences
and dress is rather a mystery. Why the 18th or 19th
century rather than, say, 50 BCE or the Stone Age? The choices are just a few
of the countless irrationalities displayed by religions, with the intensity of the
irrationality being greater the more extreme the faith. And this is no less true
of the political religions, from those who insisted on an ancient Indian symbol
on armbands to those insisting on little enameled flag pins on lapels.
As someone who cherishes human freedom and
democratic values, I certainly don’t oppose the practice of religion, but I
very much oppose any of those practices being imposed on public institutions or
manipulated for political purposes. As someone wisely observed, freedom of
religion means also freedom from religion. Jesus himself said that prayer was
for your private closet, not for exhibition as practiced by the publicans of
his day. Remember, as soon as any politician or public official flaunts any
kind of religiosity – from public prayer to the display of giant flags, you are
being emotionally manipulated by the suggested support of higher powers for
particular policies and acts, much as the Catholic Church once crowned and
blessed the acts countless bloody kings and tyrants.
