by Valerie Tarico
January 21, 2015
from AlterNet Website
January 21, 2015
from AlterNet Website
These dubious concepts
advocate conflict, cruelty and
suffering.
Some of humanity's technological
innovations are things we would have been better off without:
...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 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 some Hindus (during
the Festival of Gadhimai, goddess of power) and some
Muslims (during
Eid al Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice) continue to ritually
slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.
Hindu scriptures including the Gita and
Puranas forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the
practice based on the principle of ahimsa, but it persists as
a residual of folk religion.
When our ancient ancestors slit the
throats of humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the
smoke of sacrifices heavenward, many believed they were literally
feeding supernatural beings.
In time, in most religions, the
rationale changed - the gods didn't need feeding so much as 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 karma
sanctifies 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 contraception while 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 naïve 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 naïve 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...
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