bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2007-07-08 12:40 pm
bigmacbear) wrote2007-07-08 12:40 pm
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And Never the Twain Shall Meet
Why is religion the cause of so much hatred, warfare, and suffering on this planet of ours? And how does a nation that professes freedom of religion deal with zealots who believe their freedom of religion trumps everyone else's?
To start off, we have to understand exactly what religion is. As I see it, religion is at bottom any philosophy which
Almost every religion brings with it a set of rules for regulating human behavior. Throughout the millennia of human existence, different societies around the world came up with their own religious philosophies with their own rules. And one of those rules, so often that its absence would be noted by history, was that abandoning the religion of one's ancestry (apostasy) is worthy of punishment by death, never mind what effect this might have on one's posited afterlife. This one rule made every religion fundamentally incompatible with every other.
For most of human history, this fundamental incompatibility didn't really much matter, for people for the most part had no means to travel the vast distances across the globe necessary to run into people who did not share their religion, and few who did lived to tell the tale. Only in the centuries just prior to and at the beginning of the Common Era did military conquest and missionary zeal bring incompatible religious philosophies into contact throughout the world. Thus began a seemingly never-ending battle in which one's religion was still not freely chosen, but rather than being inherited from one's ancestors it was simply imposed at the business end of a sword or a gun.
Accommodations were sometimes made, of course; in the early days of Islamic conquest the punishment for adhering to some other faith was a monetary tribute and a form of public humiliation (provided, of course, that one had never professed Islam before, for the punishment for apostasy was still death).
But for the most part it took the wresting of civil authority from the hands of the religious establishment, or the separation of church and state, to begin to make some inroads into this fundamental incompatibility of one religion with another. Cooler heads came up with the grand idea that people should be able to pursue their own religions in peace, an idea that took hold to a great degree in the United States of America from its founding. Although it was not much practiced in British North America prior to independence, freedom of religion has been the cornerstone of the US government's dealings with religious organizations ever since, in part because those who founded the USA were in many cases those persecuted in Britain because of their religion, and in other cases the few people in this part of the world who saw through the inconsistencies in their own religious philosophy, for the first time were free to disbelieve and did so with gusto.
But remember that the ancient religions of the world that survive unto the present day all have that pesky little rule about apostasy, and while religious authorities are no longer empowered to enforce them to the degree they would wish, those beliefs and rules are still present and still incompatible with the freedom of all to believe what they will -- which is the cornerstone of democratic society as practiced today. Zealots of all stripes still believe that their religious philosophy still compels them to force their beliefs upon the world at large, and I suspect they always will, in sæcula sæculorum.
So what is a modern democratic nation to do? The dilemma is that a nation that recognizes the freedom of religion must also recognize that most religions themselves do not recognize freedom of religion, and the very concept that allows a religion to operate in a pluralistic society is anathema to most religions. Add to the mix the notion that freedom of religion implies freedom from religion, and you have a recipe for confusion that would tie the minds of the world's great philosophers into Gordian knots.
What will save us ultimately is what has made religious freedom possible in the first place; the absolute separation of church and state. In Christianity it is best expressed in terms of Matthew 22:21, "... Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." The civil authority of a nation must never again take on the enforcement of religious law, however devoutly it may be wished by whatever majority of the population. Every religion must likewise recognize that it is no longer empowered with the civil authority. Only in this way can the religions co-exist on the planet.
For those who cry foul and insist that the civil society must be subservient to the posited "King of Kings", I suggest that if they are right and those who operate the civil government must be punished for disobedience to the Creator, that God Herself is perfectly capable of dispensing such punishment, and we humans need not concern ourselves with it. Again Matthew is our friend (chapter 7, verse 1): "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
And for the most part, the Big Three (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) have renounced violent proselytizing (although certainly much more recently than one would have hoped). Now while only Islam still has a sizeable minority of adherents who seek to forcibly convert whole nations by force of arms, there is a sizeable number of Christians, sadly, who seek to forcibly convert their own nations (particularly the US) by apparently democratic means. This can be resisted in the usual way such threats are resisted, by the mechanisms built-in to national constitutions to resist such changes and by vigilance on the part of the voting public.
But in the end, the incompatibility among religions and between individual religions and the civil authority comes down to who is allowed to impose their will upon whom. And in modern society that is the function of the civil authority. For its own survival, a nation must deal with adherents of any religion who attempt to exercise their religion by force of arms in the same way it deals with any other sort of terrorist. It's just a logical extension of the legal doctrine that under ordinary circumstances, my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
In short, most religions are fundamentally incompatible with one another and with the notion of a civil authority to which their adherents must also be subject. But if the civil authority forswears enforcement of religious law, and the religions forswear the use of arms in their practice and proselytizing, that fundamental incompatibility can perhaps be reduced to an intellectual curiosity, rather than the menace it is to peaceful coexistence on this all-too-small planet of ours.
To start off, we have to understand exactly what religion is. As I see it, religion is at bottom any philosophy which
- posits the existence of one or more beings who created what we now know as the universe, and purports to tell the story of how that creation took place;
- posits the existence of an afterlife in which human beings will be judged on the merits of their earthly lives and rewarded or punished accordingly; and/or
- posits the existence of a being who governs all of creation beyond the realm of human government, a "King of Kings" if you will.
Almost every religion brings with it a set of rules for regulating human behavior. Throughout the millennia of human existence, different societies around the world came up with their own religious philosophies with their own rules. And one of those rules, so often that its absence would be noted by history, was that abandoning the religion of one's ancestry (apostasy) is worthy of punishment by death, never mind what effect this might have on one's posited afterlife. This one rule made every religion fundamentally incompatible with every other.
For most of human history, this fundamental incompatibility didn't really much matter, for people for the most part had no means to travel the vast distances across the globe necessary to run into people who did not share their religion, and few who did lived to tell the tale. Only in the centuries just prior to and at the beginning of the Common Era did military conquest and missionary zeal bring incompatible religious philosophies into contact throughout the world. Thus began a seemingly never-ending battle in which one's religion was still not freely chosen, but rather than being inherited from one's ancestors it was simply imposed at the business end of a sword or a gun.
Accommodations were sometimes made, of course; in the early days of Islamic conquest the punishment for adhering to some other faith was a monetary tribute and a form of public humiliation (provided, of course, that one had never professed Islam before, for the punishment for apostasy was still death).
But for the most part it took the wresting of civil authority from the hands of the religious establishment, or the separation of church and state, to begin to make some inroads into this fundamental incompatibility of one religion with another. Cooler heads came up with the grand idea that people should be able to pursue their own religions in peace, an idea that took hold to a great degree in the United States of America from its founding. Although it was not much practiced in British North America prior to independence, freedom of religion has been the cornerstone of the US government's dealings with religious organizations ever since, in part because those who founded the USA were in many cases those persecuted in Britain because of their religion, and in other cases the few people in this part of the world who saw through the inconsistencies in their own religious philosophy, for the first time were free to disbelieve and did so with gusto.
But remember that the ancient religions of the world that survive unto the present day all have that pesky little rule about apostasy, and while religious authorities are no longer empowered to enforce them to the degree they would wish, those beliefs and rules are still present and still incompatible with the freedom of all to believe what they will -- which is the cornerstone of democratic society as practiced today. Zealots of all stripes still believe that their religious philosophy still compels them to force their beliefs upon the world at large, and I suspect they always will, in sæcula sæculorum.
So what is a modern democratic nation to do? The dilemma is that a nation that recognizes the freedom of religion must also recognize that most religions themselves do not recognize freedom of religion, and the very concept that allows a religion to operate in a pluralistic society is anathema to most religions. Add to the mix the notion that freedom of religion implies freedom from religion, and you have a recipe for confusion that would tie the minds of the world's great philosophers into Gordian knots.
What will save us ultimately is what has made religious freedom possible in the first place; the absolute separation of church and state. In Christianity it is best expressed in terms of Matthew 22:21, "... Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." The civil authority of a nation must never again take on the enforcement of religious law, however devoutly it may be wished by whatever majority of the population. Every religion must likewise recognize that it is no longer empowered with the civil authority. Only in this way can the religions co-exist on the planet.
For those who cry foul and insist that the civil society must be subservient to the posited "King of Kings", I suggest that if they are right and those who operate the civil government must be punished for disobedience to the Creator, that God Herself is perfectly capable of dispensing such punishment, and we humans need not concern ourselves with it. Again Matthew is our friend (chapter 7, verse 1): "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
And for the most part, the Big Three (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) have renounced violent proselytizing (although certainly much more recently than one would have hoped). Now while only Islam still has a sizeable minority of adherents who seek to forcibly convert whole nations by force of arms, there is a sizeable number of Christians, sadly, who seek to forcibly convert their own nations (particularly the US) by apparently democratic means. This can be resisted in the usual way such threats are resisted, by the mechanisms built-in to national constitutions to resist such changes and by vigilance on the part of the voting public.
But in the end, the incompatibility among religions and between individual religions and the civil authority comes down to who is allowed to impose their will upon whom. And in modern society that is the function of the civil authority. For its own survival, a nation must deal with adherents of any religion who attempt to exercise their religion by force of arms in the same way it deals with any other sort of terrorist. It's just a logical extension of the legal doctrine that under ordinary circumstances, my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
In short, most religions are fundamentally incompatible with one another and with the notion of a civil authority to which their adherents must also be subject. But if the civil authority forswears enforcement of religious law, and the religions forswear the use of arms in their practice and proselytizing, that fundamental incompatibility can perhaps be reduced to an intellectual curiosity, rather than the menace it is to peaceful coexistence on this all-too-small planet of ours.