Religiously Inspired Violence: perhaps a sign of doubt, not certitude

Among the sales-pitch hooks of Catholicism, this gambit is a common one: certainty through faith is not a prerequisite; the desire to believe is enough for Mother Church.

Help thou mine unbelief!
Mark 9:24

The long, dark night of the soul is surely not peculiar to Christianity.  Rare indeed must be the believer who has never doubted, for a moment, the existence of his revered, omnipotent big brother, who will protect him from death, who will set right all injustices against his followers, who will wipe away the tears and lead his flock into sunlit meadows. Apart from the truly brainless, who never think and never question anything they are told (a tiny minority, I hope and think likely), all theists must have had doubts at some point. Perhaps, in at least a few, those niggling, nagging, naysaying voices persist for a disturbingly long time. Perhaps, in some cases, more numerous than we imagine, they never go away.

A lifetime of unanswered prayer will do little to assuage the indecision. The theist wants, oh so wants to be sure he will survive his own extinction; that his foes will suffer eternal torment, and that his loved ones will share his eternal bliss. But his rational mind will not lie quiescent. What if it is all a story? Why doesn't god come forth and show himself? Where might the doubter seek solace, and what peevish behaviours might his never-sleeping subconscious serve up, in answer to the doubting whispers?

I contend that a frustrated desire to believe will favour two consequences. Firstly, the wannabe believer will seek reinforcement and reassurance from all quarters. Routine company of other believers, to whom it is natural to suppose faith comes much more easily than it does to oneself, together with rabidly-obsessive adherence to many-times-daily ritual, is the first of these. Which religion comes most readily to mind when you read the last sentence? Dubious acolytes will tend to gravitate towards patriarchal leader figures, founts of certitude based on quotations from ancient texts and supposed scholarly research.

The second, and unquestionably the more dangerous, consequence is likely to be a powerful urge to vilify and attack other unbelievers. For one thing, the presence of infidels is a permanent, standing reminder of one's own potential for infidelity. Lash out at the unbeliever, the embodiment of your own projected doubts. Destroy them all, and affirm your own status, in your own eyes, as a true follower for evermore. By stamping out the infidel, you stamp out your own misgivings. Wipe them from the face of the earth, until only the yes-men remain, mirroring our own desired perception of ourselves, welded unshakeably to the brotherhood.

Shifting the Zeitgeist

Who decides which traditions and mores may change, and which should remain unaltered?

Public opinion is not fixed. Minds change. Cultures evolve. History shows a general, if erratic, trend toward the positive and the constructive. Slavery was once a legally recognised system through which humans were the disposable property of other humans. Slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world. What was once accepted as normal, right and proper is now (almost) universally abhorred.

Apartheid in South Africa was enforced through legislation from 1948 to 1994. During that time, school teachers in the UK were forbidden to comment upon the system. Now, it is globally condemned as a gross contravention of human rights.

Slavery and apartheid are just two examples of mindsets that humankind has done well to drop. No-one in their right mind would want to bring either of them back. We all agree that we are better off without them. National socialism and fascism, along with communism and brutal dictatorship, are political ideologies that have been tried and proven to fail, now abandoned by nations interested in a prosperous, healthy future for their citizens.

Why, then, do we insist on clinging to, and protecting, mediaeval religious belief systems that continually prove themselves no less delinquent than those listed above? Neither a typical 19th century slave owner, who doubtless considered himself a benevolent employer, nor a South African farmer with a large, underpaid indigenous workforce, would have been likely to welcome reform with open arms. There would have been stolid resistance from those with a vested interest, and it was surely no mean task to divert the momentum of tradition. Yet, it was achieved.

After every suicide bombing, every beheading, every shooting perpetrated by scripture-shrieking thugs, the liberal progress-deniers come out in their droves to defend Islam, Christianity, Judaism and whatever other irrational belief system is the flavour of the day. People should be free to practise their own culture, they argue, and the rest of us have no right to stop them. It is fine for husbands and fathers to stultify the educational, social and working lives of their wives and daughters, because in their culture that is the way it has been done for a long time. TTWWADI. That's the way we've always done it. Well, you could have said the same about slavery in 1833, and about apartheid in 1994.

What makes religion different? Why can the most dreadful human rights abuses not only be allowed to continue, but actually be championed and protected by liberal accommodationists who do not themselves indulge in such behaviour?

It comes down to the almost universal assumption that religion is, at bottom, all about being nice to one another. That is why myopic liberals fail to accept the clear causal link between literal religious belief and suicide bombing. Because it is simply a given that religion = kindness and love, anyone who says religion causes violence must be simply wrong, having misunderstood something basic. The liberal defender might not have the first clue as to what has been misunderstood, nor how a true understanding might be achieved, but that doesn't matter. Religion is nice, and humane, and comforting, and noble, so any nasty things that appear to stem from religion must in fact stem from something else.

It is time for the zeitgeist to take another forward step. It has to become acceptable to say, loudly and clearly, that the solutions to mankind's problems cannot be found in a confused miscellany of texts, confected in centuries past. The notion that an omnipotent creator god spoke his final, unalterable words 1400 years ago to an illiterate peasant in a desert cave, and that all human laws and ways must flow from those words, is ridiculous, outdated and potentially extremely harmful. The liberal firewall of immunity around such a ludicrous assertion is a direct barrier to progress, to the safety of our children, and to the future of our civilization.