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I’ve gotten to this interesting place where I have access to far more resources on any given topic than I, or anyone, could ever really realistically read. It’s fun, but also very intimidating. I think I do the best for myself if I try to hone in on just a few sources and try to understand what they’re saying and the relationship between them. This makes the choice of source particularly important. I have three in mind for this episode:
- God Is Not Great, a belligerant polemic against religion by lauded British writer and social critic Christopher Hitchens
- Atheism, A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini, author of The Pig Who Wants To Be Eaten, one of my all-time favorite introductory philosophy books, who argues in favor of atheism in a way that is not “parasitic upon” religion
- The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh, an Anglican priest and philosopher, who argues that religion’s being a cause of violence is a myth predicated upon a misunderstanding of what religion is
Let’s start, as usual, by defining our terms. I think, first of all, that many different kinds of people who hold to many different kinds of belief systems can potentially be atheists, so I try not to posit anything beyond the minimum I can get away with. So typically I understand atheist to mean nonbelief in any gods. The many potential meanings of the word “god” complicate the issue considerably, but ultimately the atheist will claim that they don’t believe that anything that could be called “God” or “a god” or “a goddess” or anything like that exists. This does not necessarily equate to an affirmative belief that such things do not exist, but is rather, at the minimum, the absence of an affirmative belief that they do exist.
Theists, then, are those who assert some belief in something that could be called “God”, “a god,” “goddess,” etc., etc., and again the many potential meanings of the word “god” (and so forth) complicate the issue considerably, but I’ll just try to take the minimal route of understanding and say that theists have an affirmative belief in at least one of those hypotheses. Stipulating the matter in such a way, I am a theistic Satanist, or at least a Satanist who is also a theist. “Theist” as a term used in everyday language has some connotations that I don’t accept—it seems to hone in on a few particular theistic hypotheses that I don’t accept—so I’m hesitant to simply refer to myself as such. Theistic Satanism in particular commonly denotes certain belief systems, such as that of the Temple of Set, which I do not hold. My preference would be to say that I am neither a theist nor an atheist. An agnostic, then? No, I think that my specific theistic claims are ones of which I have knowledge. So a gnostic theist, by the strictest sense of the words, however little my beliefs cohere with those of others who might be describable according to such terms. Again, if this is, for some reason, coming up in casual conversation, I would probably say that I am neither a theist nor an atheist nor an agnostic, but if I’m afforded the space to clarify specifically what it is that I mean, then I’m a gnostic theist.
The me of maybe about 15 years ago would have been very surprised to learn that I now identify myself as such. And the more I find myself thinking that way, the more I run up against the myriad of atheistic arguments against theism and religion, like those of Christopher Hitchens, for example.
God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great is my only exposure so far to Hitchens’ writing. He’s quite the stylist of the English language; I’d like to know what he has to say when he’s not completely off the rails, as he is here. In all fairness, I think at least some of the mistakes he makes are easy ones to make. They’re ones I made myself for a very long time. When a group of very-aggressively-Muslim men fly planes into your buildings, it’s hard not to feel a sense of enmity towards Islam and perhaps towards religion in general.
As I was reading God Is Not Great, I found I had to keep a running list of the fair claims he makes against religion. I was up to a dozen before I’d even made it a quarter of the way through. We should indeed be distrustful of those things which contradict science and reason (Hitchens, 2007, p. 5). It is indeed true that one does not need religion to live an ethical life (ibid., p. 6). It is indeed vain to consider oneself the personal object of some divine plan (p. 7). He describes the persecution of his friend, the brilliant novelist Salman Rushdie, for having been a Muslim-born person who so much as dared to investigate the relationship between liturgy and belief (pp. 28-32). I could go on for a while, but the full title of Hitchens’ book is: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. That’s a fairly radical claim to make and one familiar with Hitchens’ work might suspect that he’s using an especially pugnacious title as a matter of hyperbole, but it’s a thesis that he returns to repeatedly throughout the book, although, in my assessment, at no point is he successful in arguing it.
One of the primary reasons that his arguments fail is that he never bothers to define what it is exactly that he means by “religion.” But let’s put that aside for a moment and proceed from a common-sense understanding, however problematic that might turn out to be later on. Among his examples of religion poisoning everything is the Troubles, the late 20th century conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. He describes some of the details of the conflict, along with those of several other ostensibly religious conflicts, and returns to his conclusion that “religion poisons everything.” But he fails to state what it is exactly that religion has poisoned in any of these cases. With regards to the Troubles, one might assume that Hitchens’ claim as to what religion has poisoned was that it was the state of peaceful coexistence between ardent nationalists loyal to the Republic of Ireland and those loyal to Great Britain that would have existed had there not been any religious differences between them. Such a reading flies in the face of both history and common sense; indeed, the current scholarly consensus is that, while religion was certainly involved in the Troubles, it was not the underlying cause of the conflict (Hayes & McAllister, 1995; Jenkins, 2008; Mitchell 2006).
An alternate reading is that the conflicts themselves were poisoned by religion, that they would have been perfectly acceptable and reasonable if they had not been religious in nature. Once again, the subtitle of the book is How Religion Poisons Everything, and Hitchens states that thesis repeatedly. This is to imply that religion is doing something that what might be called “secular” ideologies do not, or that, in cases where both are viable, religion’s involvement makes the situation somehow worse. This claim is not one that I believe Hitchens himself would have endorsed, but still the only one that remains viable in light of historical fact. Hitchens himself seems to believe that the conflict would never have occured had it not been for the religious differences, and indeed that secularism in general prevents violence (2007, p. 28). This is a claim I’ll be examining in detail a little further on.
Having spent much of my life as a devout Zen Buddhist, I can address Hitchens’ arguments against Buddhism more directly. In this matter, Hitchens displays what I can only describe as a profound and belligerent ignorance. On page 201 of my copy, Hitchens quotes the Japanese Buddhist priest and teacher Gudo Wafu Nishijima:
As a propagator of Buddhism I teach that “all sentient beings have the Buddha nature” and that “within the Dharma there is equality with neither superior nor inferior.” Furthermore, I teach that “all sentient beings are my children.” Having taken these golden words as the basis for my faith, I discovered that they are in complete agreement with the principles of socialism. It was thus that I became a believer in socialism.
The source of the quote is cited as Zen at War by Brian Victoria (Weatherhill, 1997), about which more later. Hitchens’ response to the quote is as follows: “There you have it again: a baseless assumption that some undefined external ‘force’ has a mind of its own, and the faint but menacing suggestion that anyone who disagrees is in some fashion opposed to the holy or paternal will” (2007, p. 201). First of all, its clear that Hitchens has made not the slightest attempt to understand what Nishijima was saying here, because his reading of the quote is so far off as to have the appearance of a deliberate and malicious misinterpretation. Second, Nishijima’s claims here are not “baseless assumptions” but rather are predicated upon entire libraries of sacred Buddhists texts that both explain the underlying terms and make rigorous philosophical arguments in their favor. Now, it may have been the case that, had Hitchens familiarized himself with these arguments, he would have remained in disagreement. That would have been perfectly acceptable. I certainly wouldn’t expect him to familiarize himself with the entire Buddhist canon, which is voluminous and which contains many texts that have never been translated into English, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect someone to perhaps read a book on Buddhist teachings before dismissing a 2600-year lineage of thought wholesale.
This recurs in his conclusion to the chapter, where he states, in reference to Buddhism, that “[a] faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism” (2007, p. 204). This is, again, a pernicious misunderstanding of Buddhist teachings. I’ve seen nothing of Buddhism anywhere that “despises the mind.” Quite the contrary, Buddhism is deeply fascinated by the mind. Zen meditation in particular involves quietly observing the mind for hours, days, weeks, months, sometimes years on end so as to get a look at what it really is. Life, in Buddhism is not seen as being necessarily poor, but rather characterized by dukkha, which is imprecisely translated as “unsatisfactoriness.” There is nothing in Buddhism to suggest that one can’t or shouldn’t enjoy life, only that such enjoyment is always impermanent. And on that matter, as to the transience of life… is that something that Hitchens would have disputed? If Hitchens honestly believed that he had found an immortal life of perfect and permanent satisfaction, he did the world a grave disservice by not sharing his discovery with the rest of us before he died. As it is, I think the fact of the matter is that he decided on style over substance, on being biting and pugnacious so as to entertain rather than on making thoughtful, well-reasoned and well-informed arguments so as to make an intellectually honest case.
This is not to say that Buddhism does not have its own problems (I left the religion for a reason, after all), or that all of Hitchens claims to that effect are mistaken. As is described in the aforementioned book Zen at War by Brian Victoria, Zen Buddhism was used as the doctrinal support for Japanese imperialism during the Second World War. And I think that Buddhism is just as much subject to religious nihilism as any other religion.
In any case, I’m certainly not alone in finding Hitchens and his atheist compatriots’ understanding of religion to be wanting. In the essay “Is God a Hypothesis? The New Atheism, Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophical Confusion,” Professor of Philosophy Ryan C. Falcioni states that
“…critics have pointed out the lack of philosophical and theological sophistication of the New Atheists, who[m] they accuse of holding to an ill-informed conception of what religious beliefs really are. Furthermore, they accuse the new atheists of a self-serving, predatory selectiveness in choosing their battle partners.”
Amarasingam, 2010, p. 204
I have to point out that the aim of Falcioni’s essay is not only to affirm this criticism but also to direct it against both defenders and detractors of religion in the contemporary field of philosophy of religion.
I think it’s important to remember—and I say this as much to myself as to anyone—that I’m really very sympathetic to the core atheist position of nonbelief in any gods. As Richard Dawkins likes to point out, I am indeed an atheist with regards to certain specific theistic claims, as are most Christians and Muslims, although we obviously differ as to which ones we disagree with. With that in mind, I turn to the more measured analysis of Julian Baggini as presented in his Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (2003).
Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
I’m familiar with Julian Baggini through another book of his, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten (2005), a collection of famous thought experiments from the corpus of the Western philosophical tradition. It’s an excellent book and one of my go-to recommendations for those looking for an introduction to not just learning about but actually doing philosophy. Baggini’s earlier book on atheism takes a much more measured approach than Hitchens does in God Is Not Great (or do Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in their respective books) and he actually takes a few pages to repudiate their dogmatic thinking. He explains atheism clearly, framing it as essentially being an extension of naturalism (the belief that everything arises from the natural world, with no supernatural causes), and he makes a well-reasoned case in atheism’s favor without resorting to the kind of sophist polemics typical of the New Atheists. That said, I’ll point out a few places where I find that his arguments fall through.
In chapter 2, “The Case for Atheism,” Baggini makes an abductive argument for atheism. I’ve talked about abductive reasoning on the show before. It’s also referred to as “inference to the best explanation” and consists of a collection of heuristics for judging which of several possible explanations for a given phenomenon or a group of related phenomena is the best one. He makes an excellent point about the nature of abductive reasoning, which is that it is not a foolproof procedure for finding the correct explanation in any given case—no such procedure exists—but that this is one of the best tools we have for getting to the bottom of things (2003, p. 28).
Baggini’s case is as follows: one, atheism “requires us to posit only the existence of the natural world” (ibid., p. 28), and so it is more simple than explanations that require an additional spiritual or supernatural reality. As per Occam’s Razor, the more simple explanation is more likely to be the correct one. Two, atheism is more coherent than other views because it fits everything in the universe into a single, natural scheme of being. The assumption of an additional, supernatural reality requires an additional explanation for how that reality and the natural reality interact. Three, atheism explains why there are so many different religious beliefs: religion is a “human construct that does not correspond to any metaphysical reality” (p. 29). If there is one true religion, Baggini claims, then an additional explanation is needed for why there are so many wrong ones. Four, atheism has strong explanatory power with regards to various specific religious and philosophical questions, such as the existence of evil. If the universe was indeed created by a benevolent God, the existence of evil requires additional explanation, whereas it is already explained by the atheist viewpoint.
This is sensible enough. Religion, as Baggini sees it, always requires additional explanations beyond those required by atheism. However, with regards to his first and second points, I’m not convinced that religion universally requires an additional, supernatural reality or that theistic viewpoints are always supernatural in character. In support of the third point, that atheism explains why there are so many different religions, Baggini makes a few claims that are problematic. First: “It’s no good saying that all religions are different paths to the same truth: the fact has to be accepted that religions flatly contradict one another” (p. 29). I wouldn’t say that all religions are different paths to the same truth, but any contradictions are only a problem if religion is understood in a realist way.
Religious realism takes metaphysical religious claims, such as the existence of gods, at face value. This is the typical understanding of the nature of metaphysical religious claims. On a realist reading, the first chapter of Genesis, which describes the world being created by God in six days, means that the world was, in fact, created by God in six days. A non-realist reading, in contrast, would say that the first chapter of Genesis is allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic, a story tied to cultural traditions of meaning, not to be taken literally, perhaps a medium for conveying deeper spiritual truths, whether or not it was intended that way by the original authors. Under such a non-realist understanding, God, for example, would not be an actual divine, supernatural being but rather just a way of understanding and relating to the “abstract divineness and moral structure of the universe,” as William James or Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it. Religious non-realism evaporates the problem of contradictions between religions. While religious beliefs are obviously very different from beliefs about fictional worlds in a number of important respects, it remains the case that we need not worry about contradictions between non-realist understandings of Christianity and Islam any more than we need worry about contradictions between Star Wars and Star Trek.
One might counter that this is not the way that people typically understand their religious claims; that most religion is, in practice, realist. I would respond that that’s arguable—as we saw in the last episode, many people may be more non-realist about their religious beliefs than even they realize—but even if we were to accept that, it remains the case that the problem of religious contradiction is not an indefeasible one and that the blanket statement “Religions flatly contradict each other” is false.
My other two points against Baggini here are more technical matters, but I think they’re worth pointing out. They’re fairly innocuous, but nevertheless fit with the pattern I’ve found of atheist apologists not sufficiently understanding what it is they’re arguing against. First, in support of his argument for the problem of religious contradiction, Baggini writes, “Hindus and Christians are not worshipping the same God, not least because Hindus do not believe in one God” (p. 29). But this is maps the Western concept of God onto the Hindu one when those concepts, as understood by their respective cultures, do not neatly align. Christians might disagree, but the Hindus I’ve spoken with have indicated to me that they don’t see Christianity as being at all in conflict with Hinduism. In the article “Hindu-Christian Dialogue: A Hindu Perspective” published in the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies in 2001, K.L. Seshagiri Rao writes, “Hindus do not accept the Bible as the only scripture and Jesus Christ as the only instance of God’s self-disclosure. And yet the Hindus accept the Bible, and the scriptures of other religions along with the Vedas as God-given” (p. 4).
The next sentence Baggini writes is “Christians and Muslims fundamentally disagree in that the former see Christ as the messiah and the latter do not” (2007, p. 29). Baggini would be correct to say that there are many differences between Christianity and Islam given a realist understanding of both, but this isn’t one of them. While there are some key distinctions in the nature of this understanding, Muslims do indeed recognize Jesus as the messiah, just not as being the son of God or being the final prophet and messenger of God.
For all that, Baggini makes an effective argument for atheism even if he fails to make an effective argument against religion, but there’s one point in the text where he makes a more serious misstep. In chapter 6, in which he argues against what he calls militant atheism, which is, broadly speaking, atheism that is not only non-religious but actually anti-religious, he makes the following statement: “Atheists are necessarily anti-religious in one sense only: they believe that religions are false” (2007, p. 92). But to say that no gods exist—which is the base definition of atheism that he’s working with—and to say that all religions are false are very different claims, and the latter of the two is not one that Baggini has successfully argued, or that he has even attempted to substantively argue at all. Atheist and religious are not mutually exclusive adjectives; I myself was both a Zen Buddhist and an atheist for the better part of two decades. Baggini’s claim here could only be true if the term religion referred to mere collections of realist theistic claims, which I’m very certain is not the case. But then we get back to the famous atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins, who we saw in the last episode treating such religions absent theistic claims “not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life” (2008, p. 59). And this brings me to my final primary source for this week’s episode, The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh.
The Myth of Religious Violence
William Cavanaugh is an American Roman Catholic theologian, and the title of his book seems ridiculous on its face. “Religious violence is a myth? Did he not hear about 9/11?” But his thesis is somewhat more nuanced than that, and I can say that few books have changed my perspective on the nature of religion as much as his.
Cavanaugh is not claiming that religion is not a potential cause of violence or that its role as a cause of violence should not be deeply and critically interrogated, but rather that there’s a problem with how we in the West construe religion in the first place, and that that construal is the source of a fundamental and problematic misunderstanding about the relationship between religion and violence.
The basis of his argument is the following claim: there is no transcultural or transhistorical definition of religion. For something to be transcultural, it must exist in an identical or at least similar form across the world’s different cultures. To say that no transcultural definition of religion exists is to say that there is no understanding of religion that exists apart from the cultures in which it is defined. Similarly, for something to be transhistorical, it must exist in an identical or similar form throughout history, and to say that no transhistorical definition of religion exists is to say that there is no understanding of religion that exists apart from the particular historical time period in which it is being defined. If Cavanaugh is correct, then by identifying religion as a particular cause of violence, we are, in a very arbitrary and even capricious way, collecting completely different ideas under a single heading so as to be able to identify them as violent and thus subject to social control.
Cavanaugh first surveys various arguments linking religion and violence and groups them into three categories: arguments that religion causes violence because it is absolutist, arguments that religion causes violence because it is divisive, and arguments that religion causes violence because it is irrational. For each of these three categories, he surveys the arguments presented by three authors, and in each case finds their arguments lacking, typically because they fail to effectively distinguish between the religious and the secular, often in ways that beg the question of religious violence: those things are defined as religions which are associated with absolutist, divisive, or irrational violence, and thus religion is described as being inherently subject to such violence. In many cases, religions that do not neatly fall into this picture are framed as being secular, and secular ideologies (such as nationalism) that meet the description are framed as being religions. This is exactly what we encountered in Dawkins’ The God Delusion: religion, as Dawkins describes it, is inherently violent, exactly because those ideologies which are not inherently violent are not religions but rather “ethical systems or philosophies of life.” Cavanaugh’s point here is not only that these particular arguments fail, but that all such arguments must necessarily fail because there is no transhistorical or transcultural definition of religion and because “[w]hat counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power” (2009, p. 4) rather than reflecting any natural distinction between them.
Cavanaugh’s support for this claim, as found primarily in the second chapter of his book, “The Invention of Religion,” is exhaustive. He examines both the uses of the word “religion” (and the Latin word religio from which it was derived) across cultures and throughout history as well as the practical understanding of those things which we in the modern West would call religion as it existed in various cultures in various times throughout history.
To summarize Cavanaugh’s thesis, the entire concept of religion is an invention of the modern West used to authorize and endorse certain forms of discourse and certain forms of violence and to denounce others. This seems on its face to be a radical claim, but it’s one that I’ve come to fully endorse, and so I’ll summarize as well Cavanaugh’s support for it.
First, ancient languages have no word that approximates what modern English speakers mean by religion (Cavanaugh, 2009, p. 62). The Latin word religio means something closer to “duty” or “obligation.” If you traveled back in time and asked a Roman citizen about their religio, they would respond that they have certain religiones towards the state, towards their fellow citizens, and towards the various gods that they worshipped. An offering at the altar of Jupiter would be religio, but so would paying taxes or paying fealty to the Emperor. Similarly, if you traveled back in time to pre-colonial India and asked the locals about their religion, you would find yourself confronted by a language barrier insurmountable even if you knew the indigenous languages as they were spoken at the time. “You mean truth?” they might ask. “You mean knowledge? Duty? Honor? I don’t understand you! What is this ‘religion’ you speak of?” Any pre-modern person to whom you spoke would make no effort to separate their various ideologies and affiliations into categories like “politics” and “religion,” such as we do, and would not understand your reasons should you try to impose such divisions on the conversation yourself.
As Cavanaugh describes, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the modern concept of “religion” came into being, and this development was accompanied by the emergence of the nation-state as a political entity. Cavanaugh does not see these parallel developments as being coincidental; rather, the modern understanding of “religion” was construed by the emerging nation-state in such a way as to authorize and justify its power and violence.
This dynamic can be observed in several case studies that Cavanaugh presents.
In their initial contacts with the native peoples of the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific islands, European explorers reported, with remarkable consistency, that the local people had no religion at all…. In their initial encounters, Europeans’ denying religion to indigenous peoples was a way of denying them rights. If they lacked a basic human characteristic like religion, then native peoples could be treated as subhumans without legitimate claim to life, land, and other resources in their possession.
2009, p. 86
Cavanaugh continues his extensive documentation, describing how the native peoples thus colonized were later “discovered” to have religions after all, which were then “fitted into genus-and-species taxonomies of religion” (ibid., p. 86) so as to be able to compare those religions to Christianity and find them wanting.
Chapter 3 of Cavanaugh’s book is a full case study of this myth of religious violence as it is used to describe the Wars of Religion, the wars in 16th-century Europe that followed the Protestant Reformation. Much like our earlier discussion of the Troubles, historical discourse frames the Wars of Religion as being exactly that: wars fought between different factions that were both caused by and based on religious differences which were, one, analytically separable from political, economic, and social causes at the time the wars were fought, and two, solved by the rise of the nation-state. Cavanaugh provides extensive counterexamples demonstrating that these claims are false both individually and in their presenting a general picture of the wars as being an example of the inherent violence of religion. As with the Troubles, while religion was unquestionably involved in the wars, it does not seem to be the case that it caused them or motivated their continuation. Religion was not, in fact, analytically separable from political, economic, and social causes at the time of the wars, and Cavanaugh claims that they were caused by, rather than solved by, the rise of the nation-state.
The function of the myth, as Cavanaugh describes it, is manifold. It marginalizes certain discourses while promoting the nation-state, it reinforces Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, and it diverts moral scrutiny away from certain acts of violence. To be clear, Cavanaugh is not claiming there is some grand conspiracy to frame religion in this way for these purposes.
Although the myth authorizes certain uses of power, I do not think that there exists a conscious conspiracy on the part of certain powerful people to construct the myth as deliberate propaganda. The myth of religious violence is simply part of the general conceptual apparatus of Western society. It is one of the ways that the legitimacy of liberal social orders is continually reinforced, from official government actions to the common assumptions of the citizen on the street.
2009, p. 183
Regarding this first point on the functions of the myth of religious violence—the marginalization of discourses beneath those of the nation-state—Cavanaugh provides the example of the 1940 Supreme Court case Minersville School District v. Gobitis. Lillian and William Gobitis were Jehova’s Witnesses who were expelled from Pennsylvania public schools in 1935 for refusing to salute the American flag. In their religion, such would constitute idolatry. Writing for the 8-1 majority that affirmed the expulsion, Justice Felix Frankfurter stated that
…the manifold character of man’s relations may bring his conception of religious duty into conflict with the secular interests of his fellow men. When does the constitutional guarantee compel exemption from doing what society thinks necessary for the promotion of some great common end, or from a penalty for conduct which appears dangerous to the general good?
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), n.d.
On Cavanaugh’s second and third points regarding the function of the myth of religious violence, that it reinforces Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world and that it diverts moral scrutiny away from certain acts of violence, we can look to the examples of the American wars in the Middle East which followed the 9/11 attacks.
Cavanaugh describes the discourse regarding the wars and our policies towards the Middle East in general as being framed by the myth in the following way: “Their violence—being tainted by religion—is uncontrolled, absolutist, fanatical, irrational, and divisive. Our violence—being secular—is controlled, modest, rational, beneficial, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence” (2009, p. 211). And it is the very division between the secular and the religious—which, as we have seen, is purely a social construction rather than a natural distinction between kinds of ideologies—that maintains that double standard and authorizes the violence of the state against its enemies.
Conclusion
In the first essay in this series, I listed various questions about violence and religion to which I would seek answers in the course of my writing and research. I’ll enumerate them here, along with my conclusions:
- What are the problems of religion, and are those problems actually caused by religion or merely associated with it?
- Why does it seem that religion has such power to effect violence, oppression, ignorance, and generally reprehensible human behavior?
- What does religion need to be in order for it to be healthy and viable?
Looking at it now, these questions seem to me to be wrong questions. This is far from a failure; asking better questions is one of the things that philosophy is aimed at doing. The “problems of religion” are impossible to identify in a meaningful way because religion itself has been historically construed in such a way as to beg the question. The problems of religion as such are precisely the problems resulting from that construal, such as its use in marginalizing certain discourses and authorizing certain forms of violence. I think I’ve learned enough, though, to be able to answer the question in a generalized way… by which I mean, to be able to kick the can down the road. The problems of religion are the problems of human ideology in general: religious, political, scientific, economic, cultural, and so forth. I believe that the problems that I have identified in the past as belonging to religion—dogma, hegemony, and nihilism—can be expanded into this broader category and analyzed in that context, and this will be the subject of my next three essays.
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Works Cited or Referenced
Amarasingam, A. (Ed.). (2010). Religion and the new atheism: A critical appraisal. Brill.
Baggini, J. (2003). Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192804242.001.0001
Cavanaugh, W. T. (2009). The myth of religious violence: Secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict. Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (2008). The God delusion (1st Mariner Books ed). Houghton Mifflin Co.
Hayes, B. C., & McAllister, I. (1995). Religious Independents in Northern Ireland: Origins, Attitudes, and Significance. Review of Religious Research, 37(1), 65. https://doi.org/10.2307/3512071
Hitchens, C. (2007). God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hachette Book Group.
Jenkins, R. (2008). Rethinking ethnicity (2nd ed). SAGE Publications.
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940). (n.d.). Justia Law. Retrieved November 19, 2020, from https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/310/586/
Mitchell, C. (2006). Religion, identity and politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of belonging and belief. Ashgate Pub.
Rao, K. L. S. (2001). Hindu-Christian Dialogue: A Hindu Perspective. Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1249