The 12 Worst Ideas
Religion Has Unleashed On The World
These dubious concepts
advocate conflict, cruelty and suffering.
By Valerie Tarico
January 24, 2015 "ICH"
- "Alternet"
-
Some of humanity’s
technological innovations are things we
would have been better off without: the
medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered
lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to
invent ideas or concepts rather than
technologies, but like every other creative
human enterprise, they produce some really
bad ones along with the good.
I’ve previously
highlighted some of humanity’s best
moral and spiritual concepts, our shared
moral core. Here, by way of contrast, are
some of the worst. These twelve dubious
concepts promote conflict, cruelty,
suffering and death rather than love and
peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens,
they belong in the dustbin of history just
as soon as we can get them there.
Chosen People –The
term “Chosen People” typically refers to the
Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has
given certain tribes a Promised Land (even
though it is already occupied by other
people). But in reality many sects endorse
some version of this concept. The New
Testament identifies
Christians as the chosen
ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,”
believing that they themselves are
the special few who were chosen before the
beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses
believe that 144,000 souls will get a
special place in the afterlife. In many
cultures certain privileged and powerful
bloodlines were thought to be descended
directly from gods (in contrast to
everyone else).
Religious sects are
inherently tribal and divisive because they
compete by making mutually exclusive truth
claims and by promising blessings or
afterlife rewards that no competing sect can
offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts,
attire, hand signals and jargon
differentiate insiders from outsiders and
subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both
that insiders are inherently superior.
Heretics
– Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the
medieval Catholic
term) are not just outsiders, they are
morally suspect and often seen as less than
fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from
among outsiders don’t merit the same
protections as Hebrew slaves. Those who
don’t believe in a god are corrupt, doers of
abominable deeds. “There is none [among
them] who does good,” says the Psalmist.
Islam teaches the concept
of “dhimmitude” and provides special rules
for the subjugation of religious minorities,
with monotheists getting better treatment
than polytheists. Christianity blurs
together the concepts of unbeliever and
evildoer. Ultimately, heretics are a threat
that needs to be neutralized by conversion,
conquest, isolation, domination, or—in worst
cases—mass murder.
Holy War
– If war can be holy, anything goes. The
medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a
twenty year campaign of extermination
against heretical Cathar Christians in the
south of France, promising their land and
possessions to real Christians who signed on
as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have
slaughtered each other for centuries. The
Hebrew scriptures recount battle after
battle in which their war God, Yahweh, helps
them to not only defeat but also exterminate
the shepherding cultures that occupy their
“Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, like
the modern rise of ISIS, divine sanction let
them kill the elderly and children, burn
orchards, and take virgin females as sexual
slaves—all while retaining a sense of moral
superiority.
Blasphemy
– Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas
are inviolable, off limits to criticism,
satire, debate, or even question. By
definition, criticism of these ideas is an
outrage, and it is precisely this
emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy
evokes in believers. The Bible
prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran
does not, but death-to-blasphemers
became part of Shariah during medieval
times.
The idea that blasphemy
must be prevented or avenged has caused
millions of murders over the centuries and
countless other horrors. As I write, blogger
Raif Badawi awaits round after round of
flogging in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in
batches of 50—while his wife and children
plead from Canada for the international
community to do something.
Glorified
suffering
– Picture secret societies of monks flogging
their own backs. The image that comes to
mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, The
Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he
made up. A core premise of Christianity is
that righteous
torture—if it’s just intense and
prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage
done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of
crucifixes litter the world as testaments
to this
belief. Shia Muslims beat themselves
with lashes and chains during Aashura, a
form of sanctified suffering called Matam
that commemorates the death of the martyr
Hussein. Self-denial in the form of
asceticism and fasting is a part of both
Eastern and Western religions, not only
because deprivation induces altered states
but also because people believe suffering
somehow brings us closer to divinity.
Our ancestors lived in a
world in which pain came unbidden, and
people had very little power to control it.
An aspirin or heating pad would have been a
miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran,
or Gita. Faced with uncontrollable
suffering, the best advice religion could
offer was to lean in or make meaning of it.
The problem, of course is that glorifying
suffering—turning it into a spiritual
good—has made people more willing to inflict
it on not only themselves and their enemies
but also those who are helpless, including
the ill or dying (as in the
case of Mother Teresa and the
American Bishops) and children (as in
the child
beating Patriarchy movement).
Genital mutilation
– Primitive people have used scarification
and other body modifications to define
tribal membership for as long as history
records. But genital mutilation allowed our
ancestors several additional perks—if you
want to call them that. Infant circumcision
in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal
membership, but circumcision also serves to
test the commitment of adult converts. In
one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to
convert and submit his clan to the procedure
as a show of commitment to a peace treaty.
(While the men lie incapacitated, the whole
town is then slain by the Israelites.)
In Islam, painful male
circumcision serves as a rite of passage
into manhood, initiation into a powerful
club. By contrast, in some Muslim cultures
cutting away or burning the female clitoris
and labia ritually establishes the
submission of women by reducing sexual
arousal and agency. An estimated
2 million girls annually are subjected
to the procedure, with consequences
including hemorrhage, infection, painful
urination and death.
Blood sacrifice
– In the list of religion’s worst ideas,
this is the only one that appears to be in
its final stages. Only Hindus continue toritually
hack and slaughter sacrificial animals on a
mass scale.
When our ancient ancestors
slit the throats on humans and animals or
cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of
sacrifices heavenward, many believed that
they were literally feeding supernatural
beings. In time, in most religions, the
rationale changed—the gods didn’t need
feeding so much as they needed signs of
devotion and penance. The residual child
sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes
it is there) typically has this
function. Christianity’s persistent focus on
blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the
be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the
final “propitiation” for human sin—is
hopefully the last iteration of humanity’s
long fascination with blood sacrifice.
Hell
– Whether we are talking about
Christianity, Islam or
Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons,
monsters, and eternal torture was the worst
suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive
and medieval minds could elaborate.
Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the
human desire for justice, the concept of
Hell quickly devolved into a tool for
coercing behavior and belief.
Most Buddhists see hell as
a metaphor, a journey into the evil inside
the self, but the
descriptions of torturing monsters and
levels of hell can be quite explicit.
Likewise, many Muslims and Christians hasten
to assure that it is a real place, full of
fire and the anguish of non-believers. Some
Christians have gone so far as to insist
that the screams of the damned can be heard
from the center of the Earth or that
observing their anguish from afar will be
one of the pleasures of paradise.
Karma
– Like hell, the concept of karma offers a
selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll
come back at you later—but it has enormous
costs. Chief among these is a tremendous
weight of cultural passivity in the face of
harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of
karmasanctifies the
broad human practice of blaming the victim.
If what goes around comes around, then the
disabled child or cancer patient or
untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or
mangy dog) must have done something in
either this life or a past one to bring
their position on themselves.
Eternal Life
– To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the
idea of gem encrusted walls, streets of
gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity
of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may
have seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t
take much analysis to realize how quickly
eternal paradise would become hellish—an
endless repetition of never changing
groundhog days (because how could they
change if they were perfect).
The real reason that the
notion of eternal life is such a bad
invention, though, is the degree to which it
diminishes and degrades existence on this
earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward,
we can’t see the intricate beauty beneath
our feet. Devout believers put their
spiritual energy into preparing for a world
to come rather than cherishing and
stewarding the one wild and precious world
we have been given.
Male Ownership of
Female Fertility
– The notion of women as brood mares or
children as assets likely didn’t originate
with religion, but the idea that women were created
for this purpose, that if a woman should
die of childbearing “she
was made to do it,” most certainly did.
Traditional religions variously assert that
men have a god-ordained right to give women
in marriage, take them in war, exclude them
from heaven, and kill them if the origins of
their offspring can’t be assured. Hence
Catholicism’s maniacal
obsession with the virginity of Mary and
female martyrs.
As we approach the limits
of our planetary life support system and
stare dystopia in the face, defining women
as breeders and children as assets becomes
ever more costly. We now know that resource
scarcity is a conflict trigger and that
demand for water and arable land is growing
even as both resources decline. And yet, a
pope who claims to care about the desperate
poor lectures
them against contraceptionwhile Muslim
leaders ban
vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their
enemies.
Bibliolatry (aka
Book Worship) – Preliterate
people handed down their best guesses about
gods and goodness by way of oral tradition,
and they made objects of stone and wood,
idols, to channel their devotion. Their
notions of what was good and what was Real
and how to live in moral community with each
other were free to evolve as culture and
technology changed. But the advent of the
written word changed that. As our Iron Age
ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas
into sacred texts, these texts allowed their
understanding of gods and goodness to become
static. The sacred texts of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship,
but over time the texts themselves became
idols, and many modern believers
practice—essentially—book worship, also
known as bibliolatry.
“Because the faith of
Islam is perfect, it does not allow for any
innovations to the religion,” says one young
Muslim explaining his
faith online. His statement betrays a naďve
lack of information about the origins of his
own dogmas. But more broadly, it sums up the
challenge all religions face moving forward.
Imagine if a physicist said, “Because our
understanding of physics is perfect, it does
not allow for any innovations to the field.”
Adherents who think their
faith is perfect, are not just naďve or ill
informed. They are developmentally arrested,
and in the case of the world’s major
religions, they are anchored to the Iron
Age, a time of violence,
slavery, desperation and early death.
Ironically, the mindset
that our sacred texts are perfect betrays
the very quest that drove our ancestors to
write those texts. Each of the men who wrote
part of the Bible, Quran, or Gita took his
received tradition, revised it, and offered
his own best articulation of what is good
and real. We can honor the quest of our
spiritual ancestors, or we can honor their
answers, but we cannot do both.
Religious apologists often
try to deny, minimize, or explain away the
sins of scripture and the evils of religious
history. “It wasn’t really slavery.” “That’s
just the Old Testament.” “He didn’t mean it
that way.” “You have to understand how bad
their enemies were.” “Those people who did
harm in the name of God weren’t real
[Christians/Jews/Muslims].” Such platitudes
may offer comfort, but denying problems
doesn’t solve them. Quite the opposite, in
fact. Change comes with introspection and
insight, a willingness to acknowledge our
faults and flaws while still embracing our
strengths and potential for growth.
In a world that is teeming
with humanity, armed with pipe bombs and
machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones,
we don’t need defenders of religion’s status
quo—we need real reformation, as radical as
that of the 16th Century and much, much
broader. It is only by acknowledging
religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope
of embracing the best.
See also -
A Shocking Number of
Americans Under 30 Have No Religion:
Americans are abandoning religion in droves.