02.09.08
Religion and Violence
Religion and Violence
Roger Sandall
(A version of this appeared in Quadrant, December 2007)
As incendiarists Hitchens and Dawkins make a fiery duo: the blaze they lit is burning merrily, the sparks fly up, and their books sell well. It’s another matter entirely whether Roger Scruton will succeed in either smothering the flames, or suffocating the authors, in a mephitic cloud of anthropology.
Writing in last August’s UK monthly Prospect, Scruton said that dealing with the dogmatic certainties of the HitchDawk camp required that three questions be answered first:
What is religion?
What draws people to it?
And how is it tamed?
With the greatest respect, I’d say the opposite. I’d say that as we try to shore up the civilized world against external bombers and internal vandals, the very last thing we need is a glorified academic seminar on “the anthropology of religion”—a phrase that occurs both in the prefatory gloss for Scruton’s article and throughout its text.
The uses of erudition
Nevertheless “The Sacred and the Human” contains much of interest. Opposing Hitchens’ view that religion “poisons everything” and provokes conflict, aggression and war, Scruton argues that “religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it [that is, without religion] since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together.”
John said,
February 10, 2008 at 8:51 pm
The fact of the matter is that what is usually called “religion” is the primal generator of all violence—this is particularly so with the semitic religions which share three basic assumptions to a rigidified degree.
But first a quote from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad. “It is from the other that fear arises.”
The three common assumptions are that the Divine, the world process, and all other beings (human and otherwise) other inherently separate or OTHER to us, both individually and collectively. The Divine, the world, and all beings us thus also objectified.
Altogether these three presumptions produce a fear saturated “culture”..
Plus because they are presumed to be entirely other the Divine, the world process, and all other beings always thus become your enemy, and you are also thus always at war with everything that is presumed to be “other”, including the Divine.
What is more the moment you objectify anything (the other) you immediately seek to control this “other” and even to destroy it.
Christianity for instance, always promoted the self-serving idea that the Divine was the wholly other, and thus objectified, “great relation”.
Such thinking was in effect a collective effort to both control the Divine and simultaneously to reduce the Divine to the meat-body human scale.
Consequently it was quite easy for the ecclesiastical “authorities” to invoke the thus objectified tribal deity to justify all the inevitable horrors that flow from the objectification process. Imperial conquest and empire justified by bringing “jesus” (rather the murderous tribal ego) to the “heathen savages”.
Plus any religion that claims to possess the ONE way/truth/revelation has effectively declared war against ALL other religions and their cultural expressions. And given half the chance WILL use whatever means they can to achieve this totalising agenda.
The two would be world-conquering political “religions” of Islam & Christianity specialize in this totalizing meme, and are both currently gearing up for the “final showdown”, which, if it is allowed to proceed to its unspeakably dreadul logic/momentum, will destroy Humankind.
Of course the ideology of scientism shares the three separative and objectification presumptions—and even more so because the Divine is done away with altogether. Everything is reduced to the fear-saturated entirely mortal meat-body human scale. Thus the “culture” produced in the image of scientism is just as dark and inevitably more deadly than that produced by conventional “religion”—even more so.
By the way Quadrant Magazine is an ardent booster of this power and control seeking objectification “culture”. They simultaneously promote the dim-witted reductionist tribalist cult called christianity, and the “culture” of scientism. The tribal deity is invoked to justify the entire TOTALIZING power and control process of Western “culture”.