IS RELIGION DIVISIVE ?
15th August1999
This question - which was debated in all seriousness by four learned persons
in a BBC broadcast of August 13th 1999 - seems to be globally speaking,
quite superfluous. The answer, based on experience, is clearly YES.
On the eve of the Apprentice Boys march in (London)derry .... it seems that
the programme planners (who decided to stage the debate on that day) were
either insensitive or trying their hands at sick humour.
These Protestant marches, every summer, in the Six Counties of NE Ireland
are not only divisive in principle but divisive by intent; they are designed
to intimidate Catholics; Protestant marchers act precisely in order to
assert to their Catholic neighbours ..... This is OUR country, NOT YOURS,
and don't you forget it! We live in a divided world and must forever do so.
The perfectly predictable, and presumably intended, counter-demonstration by
some hundreds of Catholics, resulted in arson, looting and many injuries. It
is thanks only to the police that no deaths occurred. Both the intimidatory
marching and the retaliatory rioting were inspired - if that is the word -
by religious feelings. The Catholics hold that the Pope is the legitimate
successor of (Saint) Peter while the Protestants hold that the Pope is none
other than the anti-Christ ... a creature of the Devil.
We have similar examples throughout history, up to and including the present
time, of religion-based hostility by one faction towards another. This
applies to religions generally and to factions within religions perhaps most
of all; pious wrath is especially severe when vented upon heretics while
infidels are often treated slightly less cruelly.
Religion is very often the prime cause of wickedness of commission -
deliberate acts of wickedness tending to create and to reinforce divisions
among the population at large.
Of course there are non-religious reasons for mass cruelty and injustice
being inflicted upon people by people. The appalling mutual persecutions
practised by different factions of professed atheists in, say the former
Communist countries, exemplify this. You don't have to be religious to hate
and ill-use your fellow human beings - but religion helps people to do so -
and seems often to take pride in so doing.
The radio debate was fatuous in its content and maladroit in its timing.
Why does religious influence - more than most influences - set one person
against another?
To try to answer this we have to consider the three main claims that
religion (of almost any sort) makes:
1) religious claims are made as to the way the natural universe came into
being (assuming that it has not always existed in one form or another and so
necessarily had a beginning).
2) religious claims are made as to how we ought, and more prominently, ought
not to behave (using ought in its ethically prescriptive sense).
3) religious claims are made that people need, above all else, a sense of
certainty and security in what is very often a perplexing and frightening
world.
Much is made of 1) and 2) - especially by more or less secure,
sophisticated, virtuous persons and claims under these heads are therefore
the subject of learned discussion among the discussing minority of the human
species. But most of what is proclaimed under 1) and 2) can be more or less
ignored without great loss to one's intellectual and moral well-being.
Various different creation stories - some of them bizarre, some grotesque
and none supported by any sufficiency of evidence - are on offer. They
contribute little to the answering of the practical questions of where we're
at (irrespective of from whence we came to be here) and what to do about it.
Likewise, the ethical teachings of the various religions ........ in so far
as they are not common sense based upon the values that members of a social
species like ours necessarily share in principle ........ do not help much
because religious people differ so very widely upon many practical ethical
issues that we need to resolve. There are sincerely religious advocates on
both sides of almost any ethical controversy you care to mention .....
pacifism versus just war; capital punishment or not; the ethical
acceptability, or not, of such practices as contraception, abortion,
euthanasia, divorce; our impact upon other species ..... and so on.
It is 3) that matters most and, in particular, it is from within this area
of religious truth-claims that the divisiveness of religion arises - of
necessity. The point is that to feel secure, in a world that presses you to
feel insecure, you need perceptions of comforting certainty. Among the more
fatuous exponents of religion, in a world in which religion is increasingly
challenged, is the claim that you must believe in SOMETHING ... not that the
something has to be demonstrably true or even highly probable - the
something merely has to be believed in.
The trouble is that the different religions press upon us different, often
incompatible, somethings to believe in.
So if two lots of people believe, as matters of certainty, two incompatible
things about the Pope (say) then there is nothing they can do except either
grow out of their certainties or fight it out. Those of us who have grown up
and who, to that extent, can cope intelligently with uncertainty, employ
policemen and policewomen to get hurt, on our behalf, to keep the religious
fighting from wrecking society.
Whether there is a force able to stop fighting between a rabidly Christian
nuclear armed USA and a nuclear armed Islamic Coalition - over the question
of whether it is Jesus or The Prophet who brings us the true Word of God -
remains to be seen. Religion does divide many people; it may yet unite
almost all people - in mutually assured death.
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