Why is it that at one and the same time our society has had the largest religious revival in over two hundred years and has at the same time the most bellicose, corrupt and ideologically rigid government in its history? It is generally assumed that religion and morality are intimately connected such that, for example, any group given the task of investigating social morality almost always includes a member of the clergy. I suggest this congruity is not coincidental.
The extent of religious enthusiasm is not only greater than the Great Awakening of the 1730’s it is, especially considering the vastly extended range of human knowledge and awareness of other societies, more deliberately ant-intellectual as evidenced by creationism and its efforts to suborn science with politics amply illustrate. It is, like its 18th century predecessor essentially a fundamentalist movement. As such it:
· is suing the
· is more bellicose in its willingness to unleash the world’s largest military establishment on the citizens of small nations. One of its favorite hymns, Onward Christian Soldiers, expresses the latent militarism in Christianity. It has not shied form the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and their children.
· has, through its political leaders, for the first time in American history, formally espoused and practiced heinous forms of torture.
· has instigated and tolerated the destruction of our fundamental liberties and rights.
· has engendered the largest per capita prison population of any developed country in the world, largely due to its paranoia about and punishment response to drug use. One wonders per Karl Marx, if religion sees competition from drugs.
· has used millions of taxpayer funds to enrich itself.
· has corrupted the language that our society depends upon for communication with the intent to delude our citizens. Notice how they have conflated the common meaning of the word theory with the rigorous use of that term in science.
· would demolish abortion and birth control in spite of a human population growth that now threatens human survival, not to mention a decent quality of life.
In short they care nothing for mankind, except to dominate it. Note the Christian Dominionism movement, that volatile mix of religion and politics, which can so easily end in Fascism.
To the above charges, and there are many more, some may say that I am myself conflating fundamentalism with other kinds of religion. My reply is that when an institution puts reason first, rather than faith, belief or spiritualism, I shall cease calling it a religion. Faith has no inherent test for relevance and hence can be attached to anything – and that is where the trouble begins.
One of the fundamental reasons religion can have such deleterious consequences is that it deals in certainties when regarding the natural world and absolutes when dealing with morality. Because the natural world is highly variable and less than adequately known, reality defeats religion’s certainty repeatedly, often with disastrous results as exemplified by the refusal to treat AIDS as a disease rather than God’s punishment of evil doers. Similarly, because humans are very complex entities dealing with a complex reality and other complex humans, the rigidity that religion’s absolutes introduce into human value systems not infrequently leads to catastrophic results. People are currently being slaughtered by the thousands because of the inability of Islam’s various factions to accept each other’s humanity, not to mention G. W. Bush’s declared guidance from his god and the slaughter that has entailed.
Thus it is that when mankind feels most certain of its moral bearings it commits its most horrendous crimes. When will we demand of religion that, like science, it realize its own limitations and allow mankind to approach the natural world and each other with the same tentative, evidence searching, posture?
Bob Newhard
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