|
In describing religion as a "sham and a crutch for weak-minded people," the
governor of Minnesota has drawn criticism. But he has also attracted
enthusiastic defenders who turn the attention to faith's checkered history.
Callers to my national radio show solemnly intoned the same hackneyed
charge. "Religion has started most of the wars in history!" they declared.
The only trouble is that the idea that organized faith provokes most of
humanity's wars is utterly untrue.
The twentieth century provides little or no evidence to support the
contention that religion causes most human conflict. The greatest and
costliest struggles of the uniquely blood-soaked hundred year epic which
just concluded-World War I, World War II, the many "hot" conflicts of the
Cold War-could scarcely be defined as religious disputes. Even Hitler's
targeting of the Jews for annihilation bore little connection to faith-based
concerns or hatreds. The Nazis killed according to ethnicity; they spared
neither Jewish atheists nor Jewish converts to Christianity.
Relatively minor wars of the last hundred years (the Arab-Israeli conflicts,
the struggle in Northern Ireland, the fighting in the Balkans) may contain
unmistakable religious elements. But these struggles claimed only a fraction
of the victims of horrific battles between co-religionists (the unspeakably
bloody Iran-Iraq war), or genocidal tribal conflicts (in Rwanda and
elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa).
Is there any evidence that before the advent of the world's great and
enduring religions, human beings behaved in a less warlike or murderous
manner? Looking at the warring empires of the ancient world, where did
religious imperatives play a key role in their struggles? Egyptians and
Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians, Athenians and Spartans, made little
effort to force their rival powers to accept their distinctive gods-but this
didn't keep them from slaughtering one another over the course of thousands
of years.
Of course, it's easy to find disgusting examples of brutal butchery
committed in the name of a loving God. The Crusaders, for instance,
massacred Moslems and Jews (and, in fact, other Christians when they sacked
Constantinople) all in the name of some holy purpose. Following the
Protestant Reformation, The Thirty Years War brought about a bloodbath in
the heart of Europe-with an estimated one-third of the German population
slaughtered by the contending armies. But even such struggles conducted in
the name of faith contained elements of power politics and greed-with
Catholic France, for instance, incongruously allied with the Protestant side
in the Thirty Years War.
Describing wars in simplistic terms as "religious conflicts" inevitably
leads to confusion and misstatements. If some clergyman tried to convince
the public that religion through the ages has been a force solely for good,
with no history of cruelty or hypocrisy, thoughtful people would rightly
dismiss his arguments. The statement that "religion causes most wars in
history" is similarly one-sided, ludicrous, extreme and ignorant.
By Michael Medved, Jewish World Review
|