Talk by Will Fridy
The Anathema of Religious Violence
Will Fridy
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
August 7, 2005
Throughout the world many maintain that belief in a “God” is a very positive and even necessary practice. The problem comes when various Religions give different and conflicting absolutist names to their actually unknown and speculative God-Idea and create, or more often plagiarize, unsubstantiated myths about it and then condemn all others who do not believe exactly as they do, condemning them to the point that they even insist that their God-Idea commands them to carry out murder and violence upon any who dare to think otherwise and also believe those others are condemned to a cruel mythic “Hell” of everlasting agony. The man-invented symbols and texts of each of the major Religions–except for the teachings of The Buddha--contain a plethora of violent commands that contradict not only their texts’ benevolent passages but reason and common-sense as well. Such patterns of Religious violence have also negatively infected politics and economics, two other one-answer systems. Therefore, as history has proven again and again, until radical change is made, violence will continue to bring out the worst side of humanity rather than allow it to fulfill its potential for grandeur. As Dante said: “Oh human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”
Although human beings often do positive things in the names of Religion, politics, & economics, each of these create worlds of illusion in their myths to their own advantage necessitating that humanity ever be on guard to ensure that their good impulses prevail and their violence is curtailed. For, as Joyce Carol Oates has noted, homo sapiens is a species that “invents its symbols . . . and then forgets that symbols are inventions.” Terrible violence has been and is committed upon humanity in the name of that trinity Church, State, and Economy, and the fact that our money says “In God We Trust,” is no accident. Pope Leo X’s declaration: “What profit has not the fable of Christ brought us!” set the tone, but it is not a worthy one (Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity 152).
Religions’ illogical and unverifiable yet blindly believed myths spawned in primitive uncritical and irrational ages, have caused problems in all ages, and Religious violence is continually inflicted upon innocent peoples who dare to think otherwise. This on-going Religion-inspired violence is a continuation of the practice of an archaic blood sacrifice committed in the names of ever-silent “God-Ideas” which are denigrated in mankind’s limited symbolic languages. Ironically the violent deities of Religions are also called Gods of love, mercy, peace, and compassion. So, unless humanity moves away from all unverifiable formulaic violent answers and actions of each blind faith, shameful violence will continue to be committed by those under the influence of the intoxicating wines of blind faith.
It is imperative that we rethink all one-answer systems, because each, by commission and omission, commits various forms of cruel violence upon its own people as well as on others. For infidels, heretics, homosexuals, abortion clinic participants, the poor, needy, and weak, and thinkers were and are oppressed and murdered by the fundamentalists of many faiths. And racism, sexual oppression, denigration of women, war and terrorism, indifference to human need, and ignorance–each initiated and inspired by Religious myth-–have consistently retarded the evolution of the human species and this regression is on the rise in the US and its impact is felt throughout the civilized world.
Therefore, we must learn from those sad beliefs and practices of the past which have instigated violence again and again. But learning and advancement are never achieved by trying to walk forward while our head is twisted backward and our so-called progress is composed of repeating the obvious errors of the past over and over again in the name of any unverifiable myths whether Religious, political, or economic. To improve, we must think, we must reassess, and, most importantly, we must act with reason and compassion, for only that will enable us to rise above the many quagmires of violence resulting from blind faith. We must, that is, begin practicing the life-enhancing truths we have long known.
We can turn this around if we have the courage to be rational, honest, and loving and stop bowing down to those obsolete idols of all Religious, political, and economic blind faiths and one-answer systems which ever distract our attention away from truth and reality towards some “axis of evil” or some fearful threat that may happen. Unfortunately, as Golda Meir once noted: “It is always much easier . . . to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.” And, even more troubling, as Bertrand Russell said: “People would rather die than think, and many do.” Cunningly, those ever-recurring acts of violence are always concealed beneath a patina of lofty sounding words and ideals that disguise what is really going on while unthinking, selfish, uncritical believers march in lock step and commit unthinkable deeds which they have been brainwashed and programmed to do.
Killing for Religion, killing for war, killing for greed are only different forms of murder. And, when we fail to think, when we replace rational, human virtue with the dictates of any one-answer system, we support their acts of violence. As Joan Baez, in Daybreak, lamented: “There’s a consensus out that its OK to kill when your government decides to kill.” And Aldous Huxley points to a less realized support of violence when he writes: “The church allows people to believe that they can be good Christians and yet draw dividends from armament factories, can be good Christians and yet imperil the well-being of their fellows by speculating in stocks and shares, can be good Christians and yet be imperialists and participate in war” (“Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, 1937 ). And Bishop Desmond Tutu illustrated another brand of Religious linked economic violence when he said: “When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said: ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land” (Observer, 16 Dec. 1984–British paper).
And, what is most abominable, on each of these altars of violence, we not only sacrifice ourselves, but our children, their children, and the children of the world, as well as multitudes of innocent bystanders, the poor, and our environment. A reasoned analysis of all myths, creeds and propaganda must replace the blind faith in their contradictory, unverifiable, cruel, and illogical teachings if our species hopes to evolve and survive, and our actions must start speaking louder than our words. “The Anathema of Religious Violence” is not a pleasant talk. It is a consideration of the dark side of antique patriarchal Religions and the thoughtless, cruel actions of their believers. That is what A. H. Maslow calls: Religion with a capital R--“the institutionalized, conventional, organized Religions,” those which he says promote “a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which . . . [become] legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, anti-religious. . . . [and] major enemies of the religious experience and the religious experiencer” (Cf. Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, viii). This kind of Religion is the source of fundamentalist Religious absolutism and violence and it is the extreme opposite of what Maslow calls ”religion with a small r. . . the subjective and naturalistic religious experience and attitude” which is free and open to all. . . . a religion with surprise, joy, wonder, love, acceptance, sharing, and caring for all, for everything. It is the religion of peace and it abhors violence in all its forms. Although Religious violence is most often done in the name of this or that God-Idea, and claim to be according to “His” will, the Gods are ever silent and absent in tragic occasions where any humane person would appear and help had he or she the power. Nevertheless, this positive religion with lower case r is most often buried under the ruins of the power Religions–those Religions with the capital R: those corporate, institutional, wealthy ones which ever prosper in the shadow of poverty and need, as do the political and economic giants of the world who cause wars but always remain in safe hiding. We need new, more compassionate, ideas and actions or the past and present violence will be with us till the end of humanity.
Likewise, the violence of each secular absolutist system as personal violence is all anathema, because such behavior contradicts the positive knowledge we do know. For nations to continually war for peace, or for people to pray for peace but do war, or for corporations to violently lie and steal, for individuals to murder, steal, rape and abuse others– is all anathema. But the pattern is ingrained. We see it in political leaders that intentionally mislead and lie causing unnecessary wars while invoking God’s name, we see it in our many corporate evangelists, like Ken Lay, who promised the credulous certain mythic castles in the economic sky–castles that he knew did not exist–and the Enron faithful who followed his myths in blind faith over the cliff to financial destruction. All should remember that actions speak louder than words, that the lofty proclamations of each one-answer power structure deconstruct when their hypocrisy is revealed. Yet, in spite of an abundance of evidence, as Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck said around 1912: “On every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a 1000 men appointed to guard the past.” So it continues to be even today as Religious retardation is once again gaining power, as the US is presently creating more atomic weapons, and, as the Daily News recently said: “there is a growing Religiosity in America today”, and that “evangelical chaplains are on the increase in the military”, and the Religious Right are increasingly preaching the immanence of that demented mythic fear bomb, Armageddon. Fear is the mother of ignorance and violence, and cruel men are always exploiting her for ignorant and selfish ends.
But wiser heads tell the truth. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn aptly noted in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech that: “Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with the lie.” And, Edward Kennedy said: “Violence is an admission that one’s ideas cannot prevail on their own merits.” And, humanity’s continual history of violence, war, abuse, and arrogance stifles its positive capabilities, endangers everyone, and never has nor will solve the problems all should wish to solve. For just as Religious, national, and corporate wars breed war again, all forms of violence do the same. General Eisenhower, who knew war, said: “War is stupid,” and he warned against the dangers of the Industrial Military Complex, two truths we have chosen to ignore. The US and its allies spend well over $724 billion per year on the military while the “Axis of Evil” spends $7 billion. And we are going ever deeper into debt practicing our violence while people here and abroad go hungry and lack needed medical care and economic necessities and thousands of innocents die, all of which inspires terrorism, the violence of the weak. We are good, but they are evil. We see them beheading while our vast destruction and killings of innocents are ignored in our propaganda. The ancients conjured up myths to get the unthinking to do their bidding and modern myth makers still do the same.
Many who live in what some erroneously call “this Christian nation” believe that Religious violence is found only in other Religions, but not in Christianity. Yet, the record shows that Christianity has been the most violent of all Religions with its soldiers ever “marching as to war,” and crusading–a term our President likes--against multitudes of peoples. Yet, although Christianity has historically been the star in the arena of Religious violence, and the violence committed in the names of Judaism and Islam–and surprisingly even in the name of Buddhism--is shameful, what is most deplorable is the lack of knowledge in the US about the violent history of Christianity, and about the often omitted details and distorted accounts of our own history, in spite of the availability of many studies and books correcting many fictions long taken as fact. But, in regard to Religious violence, please do not rely on my word alone. Study and observe for yourself the public record compiled by historians with no axe to grind–no pun intended--except discovery of the truth, a quality consistently ignored by blind faith, thoughtless patriotism, and greedy economics. “Propaganda”, which originated in the phrase propaganda de fide, (propaganda of faith), is a practice of all one-answer systems.
For a quick overview of Christian violence look into some of the following: A&E’s: Christianity: the First Thousand Years, a 4 volume visual presentation of the early Church’s merciless violence. Read Kenneth Davis’ Don’t Know Much About the Bible and his Don’t Know Much About History. Read Tim C. Leedom’s The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read; and Acharya S’s The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, and Charles Kimball’s When Religion Becomes Evil. Read James A. Haught’s Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (Prometheus Books, 1990). Read Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. And read Helen Ellerbe’s The Dark Side of Christian History , for a documented and detailed focus upon the violence present in Christianity. And, by all means, study the exceptionally violent history of the formation of the Christian Canon and its various differing competing forms.
Read Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone’s Out of the Flames a current book-length treatment of Michael Servetus a study of how John Calvin lured Servetus with lies in order to burn him at the stake as a heretic because he did not believe in the trinity, an idea that isn’t in the Bible and was only made a part of dogma over 300 years after the death of Jesus–or actually “Joshua,” which was his real name. “Jesus” is a Greek translation of “Joshua” first used in the LXX and adopted by early Christianity. Servetus called the dogma inspired concept of the trinity, which was derived from the Triple Goddess concept, “polytheism”, and so Servetus was called a “heretic” which is a word that means “able to choose”–a right, one would think, open to all and most often is except in all one-answer systems. Servetus was a liberal theologian and a man of science–a thinker. He discovered the human circulatory system long before William Harvey was said to have. What a senseless waste to murder him and so many others of ability and promise.
The following quote from Erasmus’s The Complaint of Peace (d. 1536) illustrates Christian violence before and during his time: “They fight endlessly and without measure, nation against nation, city against city, one faction against another, prince against prince, continually destroying one another. . . I need not recall the tragedies of antiquity: Look at the last ten years. . . . The cruelty of Christians surpasses that of heathens and beasts. . . . Beasts do not fight collectively. ..Yet how often do 20,000 armed Christians fight 20,000 armed Christians?... What has the bible to do with the sword? How can one reconcile a salutation of peace with an exhortation to war? How reconcile peace in one’s mouth and war in one’s deeds? Do you praise war with the same mouth that you preach peace and Christ?” Ex. 15:3 does say “The Lord is a man of war.” Karen Armstrong tells us that such “wholesale destruction . . . is rooted in buried anxiety and fear” (Buddhism 54). And fear is the fuel of one-answer systems that leads to on-going violence.
Humanity must begin to think and doubt all of its violent myths. Bertrand Russell did when he said: “There’s a bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire–poison and antidote” (Interview, 1971). And Mark Twain did when he said: “It ain’t those parts in the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand” (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain). Although most Christians probably find such comments blasphemous, they, as well as all who seek the truth, should study Kenneth C. Davis’s Don’t Know Much About the Bible so they can understand why Russell and Twain said what I just quoted. God is said to have sanctioned “Ethnic Cleansing” in the conquest of the “Promised Land,” a practice used again when our Bible-inspired Christian Pilgrim and Puritan forefathers violently murdered the American Indians to take the “New Israel,” or what is now called the USA, in emulation of that OT methodology.
Scalping was first done by the white man, not the Indians. And Kenneth Davis tells us that “the European destruction of the Indians . . .[killed] off 90 percent of the native population it found, all in the name of progress, civilization, and Christianity” (Don’t Know Much About History 9). And he adds: “these noble-minded pioneers slaughtered Indians with little remorse, kept servants and slaves, and treated women no differently from cattle” (20), an echo of Numbers 32 and is similar to the treatment of slaves–another Bible authorized practice-- and of “witches,” and women, which all patriarchal Religions have denigrated. The first Bible translated into an Indian language was into that of the Massachusetts tribe, and then they were all murdered, men, women, and children! Read Kenneth Davis’ Don’t Know Much About the Bible, & his Don’t Know Much About History; because we don’t know much about Religion, history, politics, or economics except for their propaganda often a pattern of omissions, slanted reporting , and downright fiction. Our species is too easily mesmerized by a story while simultaneously walking past reality without ever even seeing it. This must change.
Early Christian leaders declared it illegal to disagree with the Church, claiming that only they and their dogma-inspired Bible was God’s literally inspired word, and that they were doing God’s will in carrying out the death penalty on all who dared to think and disagree, calling them “demented and insane,” “evil” and ‘heretics.” “Satan” etymologically means “adversary”, and all of Religion’s became objects of violence, for although “Heresy,” or “choice,” was anathema to the Church Fathers, violence was their modus operandi. And they used all means of violent action to suppress and discourage acts of choice, thinking, and dissent, declaring that the Bible the literal Word of God in spite of the fact that they shaped that word out of preexisting myths and reshaped its meaning to fit their dogmas and in spite of its plethora of inconsistencies, contradictions, and grammatical errors. The Church–as Joyce Carol Oates said of homo sapiens in general–“invents its symbols . . . and then forgets that symbols are inventions.”.
Pope Leo XIII, arguing that the ends justify the means, pontificated: “if there be no other remedy for saving . . . people [the Church] can and must put these wicked men to death” (Ellerbe, 38). This is an echo of Deuteronomy 13:1-11:”If your brother or your son follows other Gods ‘kill him’ . . you shall not listen to him nor pity him.“ As Daniel Boorstin writes of the Christian Church in The Discoverers: “What was demanded was not criticism but credulity” (572). And Ellerbe notes: “Blind faith replaced the spirit of historical investigation” (45) found in the Greek and Latin classics and elsewhere. To put it bluntly, prior to the Renaissance Christian behavior was often a mirror-image of the Taliban and violent Islamic jihad. In the OT, there are over 230 references to “war” and about the same number pertaining to killing. By playing the fear card and by violence the Church prevailed. An African proverb properly warns that: “Evil is a hill we climb up on to see someone else’s evil.” And, I must point out, the evil of others is much easier to declare when we ignore our own involvement in causing many of our self-proclaimed “evils” either by our actions or by our turning a blind eye to causes, often a standard procedure of Religious, national, and economic policies.
The early Church distorted actual history, burned the library of Alexandria which contained many of their plagiarized sources and other knowledge, killed people who dared think, lied, and confiscated the property of others, and did much more that it claimed to suppress. Run like a police state, says Ellerbe (57), the early Church had other characteristics restricting human freedoms in the names of its dogmas and fears. And, when some change came via Martin Luther, violence met violence head-on and peace, love, and acceptance remained in hiding–awaiting Thomas Jefferson and other free-thinkers–who were Deists, not “Christians” as many believe today. That group advocated the separation of Church and state, a provision we too often take for granted, and one in great danger today due to the present faith-pandering US administration, the Religious Right, and our on-going abuses of the term, “patriotism.” But it is the devastating and ongoing belief of Luther that “faith is the enemy of all reason, common-sense, and understanding,” which is the most reprehensible, the most damaging, yet one that is regaining acceptance again, and that is not a good omen for an end to perpetual violence.
Although what I have said only scratches the surface of what has been and is done in the spirit of Religious violence, I want to close out by citing a few more applicable quotations from my favorite “bible”, those statements of honest thinkers who have for a long time accurately assessed the most basic issues humanity needs to address.
J. William Fullbright said in 1966: “Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor.”
Bertrand Russell, in Why I Am Not A Christian: writes: “religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war . . . : due in part from its “old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment” (47).
In Practical Piety in 1811, Hannah More, English social reformer, wrote: “We continue to make revenge itself look like religion. We call down thunder on many a head under pretense, that those on whom we invoke it are God’s enemies, when perhaps we invoke it because they are ours.”
French philosopher Montesquieu in 1721 said: “Religion is less a matter of holiness than an excuse for dispute.” (Persian Letters).
George Christopher Lightenberg (d. 1799) said: “Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?”
Thomas Hardy, satirized Religion’s role in war in his poem, Christmas 1924: “‘Peace on earth!’ was said. We sing it,/ And pay a million priests to bring it./ After 2000 years of mass/ We’ve got as far as poison gas.
Laurens van der Post, in The Lost World of the Kalahari, in1958 wrote: “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”
Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” (Human, All Too Human, 483, 1878). John F. Kennedy said: “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
Mark Twain, in his, The Mysterious Stranger (pub. 1916, 6 yrs. after his death in 1910), wrote: “Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian--not to acquire his religion, but his guns.” Does this describe our present surreal world or not?
If we hope to survive, we must seek new a priori, new ways of seeing others, honest assessment of true causes of violence, and we must seek new ways of solving problems--ways other than violence, war, exploitation, and genocide. We need to stop praying for peace. We need to DO peace and declare all Religious and secular forms of violence anathema, for as Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, said in 1877: “There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.” Remember: people–not God--are the heart of the problem. The gods are always silent. Have you ever wondered why? We need new wineskins filled with new wine. We need to love and cherish one another--and our planet--in our actions rather than only in our prayers. Until we do, much taught in Religions will represent the worst side of humanity rather than fulfill its potentials for grandeur. As Dante said: “O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?” THE END