"Religion" oftengets blamed for our wars. Well in the world in which we live blame flies aboutin search of victims thicker than bullets in an Al Qaida ambush. But blame andguilt are different things. Is Religion guilty as charged?
One often hears the lazy argument that "Religion" isresponsible for Man's wars, the implication being that if we got rid ofreligion, all would be peace and harmony. Presumably then, if all men abandonedthe notion that they are spirits inhabiting a material body and conceived ofthemselves as mere animals fashioned by chance from mud our troubles would beover and we'd all be a lot happier. This is of course untrue and does notcorrespond with an observation of history, nor of present reality.
It also displays a degree of fogginess about what one means by the word"religion" Religions vary considerably. There are pantheisms (thebelief in many gods) monotheisms (the belief in one God who created all) andreligions that worship no gods at all, such as Buddhism or modern Scientology.
At the far end of the spectrum there are even religions that do not conceiveman to be an immortal soul even while life is considered to be neverthelessspiritual in essence.
Some religions such as Christianity stress faith, while faith has no placeat all in others -Scientology and Buddhism being cases in point.
One should note too, while one is discussing paradigms based on Faith, thatmaterialism remains unable to produce conclusive evidence for its basicassumption. That spirituality does not exist is a matter of belief, not evidence.One can of course produce evidence that the material universe exists and onecan establish and prove its laws but this is not proof that that the materialuniverse is all there is. The assertion that the material universe is all thereis is neither scientific nor logical and is actually a statement of faith.
Alright, so this vague undefined variable known as "religion" or"faith" is responsible for Man's wars. Is it true?
Well, I can think of a few recent conflicts or humanitarian cataclysms whosedriving force was anything but religious.
Hitler's massacre of ethnic minorities, for instance: religions were oftenthe victim of Nazi psychosis but they were not responsible for it. In fact itis now a matter of record that the drive behind Nazi mass slaughter came fromGerman Psychiatry, the arch-champion of the man-is-mud hypothesis.
The drive behind the Russian revolution and the Stalinist slaughter thatfollowed it was anything but religious, deriving again from the materialism ofcommunism and psychiatry.
Ditto the civil war and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. Ditto the ethniccleansing in Kosovo, with materialistic psychiatry the hidden motivator again.
The Chinese invasion of Koreain1950 and the Korean War that followed also had little or nothing to do withreligious issues. One had materialistic communist China on the one hand and thelargely atheistic commercial imperialism of western nations on the other.
The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraqwere commerce-driven regardless of what justifications are concocted for it,while in the war in Vietnam,religion figured neither in the motivation nor rhetoric of either side.
Not all war therefore is "caused" by "religion."Religious groups are however often the victim or target of it but not exclusivelyand not always. There is no evidence that by "getting rid ofreligion" one would "get rid of war" any more than there isevidence that by outlawing atheism or abandoning commerce there would be peaceon Earth.
Nor is there any evidence that an abandonment of spirituality would makesociety happier. On the contrary, our western society has become unhappier andmore demoralized as it has become materialistic. You will probably find thatthe epidemic spread of drug abuse and crime on the one hand and the decline inman's spirituality and even his sense of right and wrong follow commensuratecurves. In the midst of material abundance, which theoretically should havemade Man happier, we live out our days in an increasingly miserable Gomorrah of lost souls.
Of course "religion" is a factor in the war in the Middle East and in justifications for their actions putforward by terrorist groups. And religion has been a factor in many a humanconflict. It is true too that religious societies have not necessarily beenhappy ones either.
In fact, a look at human history tells one that whether spiritual in outlookor materialistic in outlook, Man tends to have a hard time. From this one canconclude that humanity is still evolving its social forms and does not yet haveall the answers. This is no reason to get apathetic about the whole thing andto abandon the effort to reason in favour of generalized, unworkable slogans.Indeed, we have every incentive to go on trying to get better at these thingscalled society and civilization, if only through a sense of responsibility toour children who will inherit whatever dog's breakfast we bequeath them.
Getting better at managing human affairs requires that we knock offsubscribing to broad, untrue, generalities such as "religion is the causeof war" or some such nonsense.
Let's look this thing over more carefully and see if we can get a bit moreaccurate about what exactly is getting us into trouble.
Perhaps, if we do, we might as a species manage to comport ourselves withmore dignity and kick the habit of following every psycho who seeks to persuadeus to burn the skin off the children of people we have never met.
I will continue this effort to apply reason to the matter of religion andwar in the next essay in this series.
