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SOC 420 Lesson 6 Module: The Good, Bad, and Ugly (Religion’s Social Aspects) There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist. —G.C. Lichtenberg, 18th century German scientist You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. —Anne Lamott, contemporary American writer and activist I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism. —Barry Goldwater, U.S. Senator and 1964 presidential candidate from Arizona (All three quotes according to http://www.quotegarden.com/religion.html) Religion has had a long and colorful history in human society. Throughout that history, contributions to the development of society have been attributed to religion, notably positive social values as well as advances in knowledge and technology. Likewise, various problems and crises have also arisen. These have included political involvement in religion, bigotry, wars over belief and territory that different groups consider sacred, etc. With apologies to Clint Eastwood, throughout history, we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly arise in connection with religion. Some modern critics blame religion itself for this, though an even more problematic common thread exists in all these religion-connected incidents, good and bad alike: The involvement of human beings. As we’ve discussed in a previous lesson, it’s a bit nonsensical to label any religion a “religion of peace” or any other such generalization. This is not because religions don’t teach peace—virtually all of them do, particularly the world’s major religious movements. But it’s then up to the human beings involved in the religion to put those teachings into practice. Some humans are much better at practicing peace than others. To somewhat grossly paraphrase Karl Marx, the history of religion is the history of human involvement. 1 Let’s take a look at how human involvement in religion has produced good, bad, and ugly alike in these required articles: Reading 1: Idler, Ellen. 2008. “The Psychological and Physical Benefits of Spiritual/Religious Practices.” Spirituality in Higher Education (newsletter), vol. 4 no. 2. Pp 1-5. Reading 2: Dawkins, Richard. 2003 (November 19-20). “The Science of Religion” and “The Religion of Science.” Transcript of The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Harvard University. Online. Recommended for Further Interest: Mochon, Daniel, with Michael I. Norton and Daniel Ariely. 2011. “Who Benefits from Religion?” Social Indicators Research (Springer), vol. 101 no. 1, pp. 1-15. Public Broadcasting System (no date). “History.” Faith and Reason. pbs.org. Web. Now that we’ve covered the readings, just a few words about the humanity of it all, starting with my own. As noted elsewhere, I am a religious believer, though I likewise respect the historic significance of science and the utility of the scientific process. As such, I have attempted to cover this subject fairly and with as little bias as possible. But granted, what bias still remains is likely a believer’s bias—though, as we shall discuss, the believer’s bias is far from limited to only me. As also discussed in previous lessons, I profoundly value the free marketplace of ideas. So in the interest of fairness, I have asked you to read this article by Richard Dawkins, even though I don’t exactly endorse his arguments, shall we say. Still, there is a great deal to learn from in his ideas; for example, few experts today understand the scientific process as well as he does. Also as noted elsewhere, I see little reason to draw a dividing line between science and religion. Although the history of both has seen a fair share of disagreement and even power struggles, such as the trial of Galileo, the outright attempt to fundamentally split the two is only recent— since Darwin, in fact. But in the largely European medieval and Renaissance time periods all the way through the first half of the 19th century, religious men (yes, primarily men in these times and places) explored and shaped what we now know as modern science. Let’s duly acknowledge an argument from more than a few believers: Perhaps science and religion alike would not exist without inspiration and/or revelation from deity. But as with other belief claims, we will leave the Ultimate Truth of this question to the theologians and examine the role of humans in religion and science alike. The origins of religion, science, philosophy, art, and many other bodies of knowledge may have stemmed from deity. Yet it seems beyond question that humans have been primarily responsible for their operation and development. So we will approach this topic from that standpoint and examine science and religion alike as largely human-operated phenomena. 2 Taking a look at known history, we see a great deal of religious involvement with the processes of societal development and knowledge. The Greeks and Romans both had very well-developed religious mythologies. (Please note that I use the term “mythology” in the sense of a story considered sacred by a group of people, past or present, not in the sense of a known fiction or deliberate falsehood.) Greco-Roman mythology has since been passed down to us today, most recognizably in the form of narratives and memorable characters. This may be particularly true for those of us who have picked up any books in the Percy Jackson series, though that’s just a few crystals on the tip of the iceberg. Also influential were Egyptian and Norse mythologies, as well as the Semitic traditions that produced the Judeo-Christian religious accounts, all of which likewise influenced world history and literature alike. Hinduism and later Buddhism also profoundly influenced Asia, though the influence of these religions remained largely in that area for centuries. As we know, all of these but monotheistic Judeo-Christianity and non-theistic Buddhism were polytheistic societies, assigning various valued attributes to a pantheon of deities. The Egyptians had a multitude of traditions that continually changed, so that different attributes were ascribed to different deities at different times—hence, the somewhat confusing and contradictory nature of the mythology we’ve inherited from the Egyptians. Interestingly, the Egyptian experience even featured a brief monotheistic experiment under Akhenaten. The Nordic cultures attributed various qualities, events, and circumstances to the gods of Valhalla, who rarely intervened in mortal affairs. The ancient Hebrews, often in defiance of their polytheistic neighbors, located all positive attributes in a single all-powerful God, who was very much involved in earthly and human matters, though at times more subtly than others. The Greeks and Romans in particular developed similar religious systems that originated from a common source, though the Romans also adapted a fair amount of Greek mythology. Parenthetically, post-Biblical Christianity also borrowed a great deal from Greco-Roman cultural heritage (in part because many early Christian converts were Greek and Roman!), though these contributions aren’t usually as well-noted. In any case, the Greeks and Romans each saw in their deities that which they valued most: wisdom, love, and power for the Greeks in Athena, Aphrodite, and Zeus; protective power, social stability, intelligence, and warlike power in Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Mars. All these mythologies have had an inestimably profound influence on our modern world, particularly in terms of folklore. Nordic legends gave us giants, dragons, trolls, and dwarves (and even magic rings, Tolkien fans!), while Egypt contributed an early form of the divine right of kings, Pharaoh, Biblical influence, and mummies. The JudeoChristian context also 3 including military strategy as a The Greek goddess Athena governed wisdom, counterbalance to the angry passion of Ares, god of war. The city of Athens not only bore her name but produced many of the Greek philosophers that are still widely admired today. Image from ishareimage.com. became important in the post-Biblical period, but the ideas of the Greeks and the Romans may have been the most deeply embedded in European-influenced culture for the longest period of time. Philosophy, art, politics and governance, humanism, science, biology, war strategy, plumbing, and architecture all have components directly traceable back to Athens and Rome. It can be fairly said that America as we know it today wouldn’t exist without either influence. After the power of the Greeks and Romans subsided (but not the influence of their heritage), Judeo-Christianity rose in prominence as a world religion, particularly after the life of Jesus Christ and Constantine’s religious wars that were fought nearly three centuries later to expand the Christian beliefs of the time. The founding of Islam in the 7th century A.D. furthered the rise of monotheism. Semi-sequestered Asian polytheistic and non-theistic traditions continued, but monotheism had spread to much of the rest of the known world by the 8th and 9th centuries. Areas little known to the Middle-Ages European and Asian power centers such as the interior of the African continent as well as modern-day Russia—not to mention virtually unknown areas at that time, such as the Americas and Australia—practiced various tribal religions that were often polytheistic. But as far as the powers that then ruled the European world were concerned, JudeoChristianity now ruled the globe (that is, the known world). This set the stage for the development of the world as we know it today. This historical episode is not often recognized, but when the Umayyad Islamic caliphate conquered a substantial chunk of land in southern Spain, ostensibly from its Visigoth occupiers, around 720 A.D., a key interchange of knowledge between the Christian and Muslim worlds had been established. In Andalucia for nearly the next 800 years, the Islamic population brought its knowledge and intelligence with them, not only building cities but commercial centers, libraries, and universities. This was not Utopia; it was definitely Muslim territory under Muslim rule. Yet Christians and Jews were welcome as long as they respected Islamic control and accepted a sort of second-class citizenship. Though unthinkable by today’s political standards, this social arrangement was almost certainly the most peaceful and tolerant of any mixed-social-group context during the Middle Ages; there were few if any forced conversions, and scholars of all three religions collaborated at the universities that kept the knowledge of the Greeks alive and helped produce philosophy, literature, mathematics (especially algebra, a.k.a. al-Gebra), astronomy, medicine, and perhaps most notably, navigation techniques and travel methods, including shipbuilding! As time went on, a religiouspolitical rivalry developed between Christianity— particularly the Catholic 4 12th The Third Crusade in the late century featured something of an effort to recapture Andalucia, but most of the focus of these battles between Christian and Muslim armies was over control of Jerusalem. Map from pantherfile.uwm.edu. Church—and Islam, as seen in the Crusades. These battles for control over Jerusalem and modern-day Israel started in the late 11th century and continued well into the 13th. During the Crusades, Christian rulers in Europe became nervous about the Muslim presence in Andalucia. They vowed to retake the territory, though the complexity of doing so without provoking all-out warfare with the Ottoman Empire proved daunting. Rather than a full-bore military offensive to conquer Spain, Muslims (and Jews!) were gradually forced out of Andalucia. By the 15th century, the first Spanish Inquisition helped expel the remaining Muslims and Jews alike, accomplishing the Reconquista even as Columbus sailed from Palos (in Andalucia), with its knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation. This knowledge soon proved critical to further voyages and exploration, first from Spanish explorers searching for gold and then spreading to other nations. Some early heretics had already been suppressed by the 1450s, but the printing press had been invented and the Bible was beginning to publicly circulate. European Protestantism arose in earnest with the rise of Martin Luther in the early 1500s and King Henry VIII’s split with the Catholic Church in 1534. The Renaissance began to take root in Europe. This rebirth of the ideas and knowledge of the Greeks and Romans in a Christian-influenced (yet somewhat humanistic) context led to a number of different developments. Art, culture, education, and technology arose in Europe, but so did a number of other much less savory social issues, including corruption, religious persecution, and starting in the mid-15th century, the Atlantic slave trade of forcibly seized Africans. As the Renaissance led to the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, vehement debate and warfare over the “rights of man” primarily considered the rights of already privileged men. While the same rights were later extended, at least on paper, to men and women beyond the privileged classes, it took further warfare to reach that point. What was the role of religion in all this? It depended. Sometimes it offered a handy rationale, such as the abominably self-serving Christian notion that the Africans were the “seed of Cain” and thereby deserving of sub-human treatment. Sometimes it provided a social setting or power structure for the larger changes in society to take place, such as decades of papal corruption leading to the Catholic Church’s permission to drive natives off their homelands in the interest of building wealth. Sometimes it provided the backdrop, such as the highly influential Medici family’s generous support of education and the arts in the interest of achieving power in the church and building a more or less positive name for themselves, unlike the infamous Borgia family and Pope Alexander VI. And sometimes 5 The Medicis In Florence, Italy, the Medicis were a powerful Catholic family. They rose from humble beginnings as traders in the 12th century to become arguably European history’s most influential clan. By the Renaissance, the family was backing Florentine art, literature, and science. They supported Galileo as well as artists, philosophers, and educators. They influenced politics and Catholicism alike; Giovanni de Medici was elected Pope Leo X in 1513. See this link from The Galileo Project for more on the Medicis. it provided the inspiration, as in countless religious-themed Renaissance paintings and sculptures as well as the American and French patriotic convictions that they had been granted God-given inalienable rights. But the enactment of those rights differed starkly, as the Americans drove the British army out of the colonies while the French commoners exacted their revenge against the nobility. But we can leave history aside here. With all due respect to Richard Dawkins (2003), he has missed an all-important point in his withering critique of religion: Not only Western civilization, but world history as a whole, would be starkly different had religion not played a key role in shaping it. The Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, and the like were rather sore spots in religious history. But it is all part of our human experience, nonetheless. We wouldn’t recognize the world today without religion. Would we even be here having this discussion without its influence? Humans were involved in all these movements, all throughout recorded history. For better or worse, humans did what humans do and have always done. Sometimes they used religion—or greed—or desire for power—or some combination of all of these, and other factors—to justify their actions. Sometimes their beliefs led them to question existing religious practices, as with Martin Luther and the Catholic sale of indulgences, and form new sects. And sometimes their creeds inspired them to perform better actions. The evidence suggests a “rational actor” approach is the best fit for this scenario. Humans used religion for all these purposes and more; contrary to what Dawkins (Ibid.) strongly suggests, religion did not use humans. But we will come back to Dawkins. Let’s first consider in what ways religion has helped society, as well as how it can benefit us individually. In doing so, I’m aware that some people have not had this experience. Religion can also certainly be used and abused in ways that harm people, and we will also discuss that. Meanwhile, what positives can come from religion? As we’ve seen, religion in several different forms preserved the proverbial “wisdom of the ages.” As also suggested in its history, religion also helped preserve society and social order. Religion also encourages positive social values—honesty, respect for others, obedience to law, ideas about right and wrong, love for other people, and so forth. As we know from previous readings in the course, religion also gives meaning to life and answers questions about the meaning of existence, humanity’s ultimate purpose, why hard-to-understand Social Consequences of Religion life events occur, and so forth. We can argue about how well religion does all of this or whether we really need The Good: Preserving Knowledge, religion to do all of this, but the fact of the matter is that Social order, Values, Health, Social religion has done all of this for millennia—and we have Support never tried living in a world where it hasn’t. So on that The Bad: Violence, Slavery, “good” aspect, religion carries a number of crucial Corruption, Delusionary Beliefs large-scale and long-term social benefits. The Ugly: Death Cults, Abuse, Terrorism Idler (2008) further identifies several relatively shortterm tangible positives for individuals. These include 6 providing an opportunity to make friends, promoting a relatively healthy diet, avoiding risky behavior and health risk factors (and parallel expectation of high life expectancy), and contributing to a sense of spiritual development as well as rest and solitude. Religion also offers an alternative perspective on life and way of understanding other people. The most far-reaching of Idler’s conclusions are 1) the long-term health benefits that can be expected from healthy dietary and lifestyle practices and 2) the provision of support networks, which are critical in helping cope with and/or overcome life challenges as well as accomplish life goals. Both factors help explain a higher rate of life satisfaction seen among religious people. So these are the upsides of how rational actors can use religion for the better in their lives. But on the downside, as Dawkins (2003) points out, religion has a way of seemingly bringing out the worst in people. For instance, as we saw in the case of the Crusades and Reconquista, religious conflict is recurrent throughout history. We live in another era of conflict. Despite the relative tolerance of our modern American society, as underscored in American Grace (2010), there is plenty of distrust of Muslims, Mormons, and several other religious groups. Some of the conflict in our past over religious differences has not only continued in the present but has escalated. Moreover, in the European-American context, humans used religion to justify slavery, which has come at a tremendous human cost. As humans used the rationale to seize and sell other humans, even while the discourse of human rights and liberty were advancing, it set the stage to identity some humans who deserved rights and others that didn’t. Religion both helped and hindered the development of society in this way. On an equally serious and more recent note of collective self-justification, see the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, in which pedophiles among Catholic priests took advantage of their privileged positions and the church’s trust to carry out crimes against the innocent. Though only a tiny fraction of all priests were implicated, this violation of religious trust came at a heavy price in the public eye. Furthermore, corruption within established religions has contributed to the mixing of religious and political concerns, notably in power plays such as the Spanish Inquisition but at other times have had even more far-reaching consequences. Take, for instance, Rodrigo Borgia, who as Pope Alexander VI may have been (arguably) history’s most corrupt leader of the Catholic Church. Borgia was from Spain—a Castilian, as were King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He was elected August 1492, the same year that many historians consider the Spanish Reconquista of Andalucia complete, but later in the month after Columbus sailed from Palos. Borgia established the parameters for the Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the Americas. His papal Bull following the Treaty of Tordesillas established the territory that Spain and Portugal would be able to hold. It was also under his watch and guidance that Columbus and the Spanish settled and conquered Hispaniola. Without Borgia’s (corrupt) influence, our modern world would be unrecognizable. Still, all this speaks less to the nature of religion per se and more to the nature of humans who used it for their own evil purposes. 7 As Dawkins (Ibid.) also points out, humans have experienced delusions and self-defeating behavior in connection with religion. Dawkins, writing as a “true believer” in Darwinism and atheism, rather curiously deals with religion as a pathology and uses these as his Exhibit A of sorts. This strikes me as something of an overgeneralization. In any case, as said elsewhere, we generally set aside truth claims when dealing with individual experiences with religion. Yet there are some claims that just cannot be true, such as the end-of-the-world claims from pastor Harold Camping. He first predicted May 21, 2011 as the world’s end; when that date passed, the next end of the world was set for October 21, 2011. Though a few voices among Camping’s followers then claimed the predicted year was wrong and the world’s end would happen on October 21, 2012 instead, even fewer people were still listening. We all still seem to be here, Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple, preaching. Image regardless. from jonestown.sdsu.edu. However, some of these delusions go far beyond the sadly mistaken. Religion has also had its fair share of outright ugly episodes, particularly in more recent years. These have included fatal delusions, abuse, and terrorism. Though long ago, many of us are still reasonably familiar with the People’s Temple atrocity perpetrated by Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. Jones, preaching a curious mix of separatism and egalitarianism, managed to manipulate more than 900 believers into killing themselves. In the mid-‘80s, another charismatic leader, David Koresh, took control of a Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, turning it into his own personality cult over several years. In 1993, after investigating allegations of sexual abuse by Koresh—including of underage girls—and other offenses, the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the sect’s compound, during which 76 members died. As a footnote, outraged anti-government crusader Timothy McVeigh observed the raid and planned a bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City two years later. In another tragic incident, charismatic leader Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 Heaven's Gate followers to kill themselves in 1997. Other episodes have not involved mass suicide but have been ugly in their own right—not because they have resulted in the deaths of followers, but because the followers have used the religion to justify atrocities against others. We have seen such abuses not only in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, under the leadership of the highly corrupt Alexander VI and several others who followed, but also in World War II. Then, a renewed emphasis on Shinto in Japan led many soldiers to be willing to give their lives for the head of their religion, the 8 Image from abc.net.au Japanese emperor, and their country. This produced not only the notorious kamikaze pilots but also millions of dedicated soldiers and motivated citizenry. Terrorism, in which religion becomes a weapon against non-believers, also surfaced late in the 20th century in the Japanese cult of Aum Shinrikyo, which planned a mustard gas attack in the Tokyo subway system. But we know terrorism even more directly today in the case of Islamic extremists. They have not only launched murderous attacks against critics, persecuted Christians and other religious minorities (particularly Jews), and destabilized their home countries, but they have launched all-out war against America and much of the rest of the world. Islamic terrorists have brought us everything today from the 1972 Munich Olympics bombings to 9/11. We know the terrorists best today as al-Qaeda and the fundamentalist soldiers of the Islamic State, but there are many other lesser-known cells and groups. Religion can be justified to incite many forms of violence and overall strange behavior. Consider the case of the Cliven Bundy family, who were engaged in a well-publicized standoff beginning in March 2014 in Nevada over cattle grazing rights. The Bureau of Land Management declared a vast swath of land off-limits to grazing; Bundy insisted the federal government had no authority to make this decision. (Here is the Washington Post’s timeline and background.) Furthermore, Bundy cited Mormon beliefs in defending his decision to take his stand. This led to a tense armed standoff in April for about two weeks between the BLM, which had obtained a court order to seize Bundy’s cows, and the Bundy family and a sizeable group of armed paramilitary supporters. The standoff ended when the BLM decided not to enforce the court order. Nearly two years later, in January 2016, Bundy’s son Ammon helped lead an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The younger Bundy not only cited anti-federal sentiment but declared he was doing so because God had commanded him. This statement drew an immediate rebuke from the LDS Church. All of this brings to mind Monica Duffy Toft’s conclusion (2006) in our Lesson 4 readings: “When religious belief is used to justify violence, in other words, wars may (a) last longer, (b) be harder to stop, and (c) be more destructive than wars in which the central issue does not involve religious practice or identity.” OK, let’s wrap up. Overall, the positives of religion—especially seen through a historical lens— outweigh the negatives. I wouldn’t be teaching this class in good conscience if that were not the case, and certainly not in this way. But there are downsides, and significant ones, as seen— especially when religion is used to harm others. However, given the mixed results over long periods of time—particularly the many largely positive outcomes that contribute to social order and stability as opposed to the few that undermine them—there seems to be no good reason to fear that religion itself is some mysterious mind-poisoning force that brainwashes people into doing horrible things. Instead, history is full of human beings using religious beliefs for the better and worse alike. Whether good, bad, or ugly, or all of these at once, we have used religion to make us exactly what we are. 9