I’m afraid history has shown time and time again the “organized” religion is far more harmful than helpful.
There can NEVER BE PEACE with RELIGIONS!!!!!
- Facebook posts
There is a bit of rhetoric that has been slagging away at professed Christians and suggesting that they are possessed by a particular proclivity for violence, and often hypocrisy. One such piece, easily found on the web, is supposedly articulated by the great Indigenous statesman, Tecumseh that goes:
When Jesus Christ came upon the Earth, you killed Him. The son of your own God. And only after He was dead did you worship Him and start killing those who would not.
It is a very popular quote, and there is no denying the latter section. It is often seen on Facebook or in letters to the editor. It is typically used when a person wants to have a go at the, pretty often well-known, hypocrisy of a goodly number of Christians, (e.g., the fundamentalist gangs that are so keen on the obviously immoral D.J. Trump, the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and the USA which, while professing all manner of moral precepts, covered up the crimes of pedophiles and in Canada where it has refused to come clean on the involvement of some of its priests and nuns in the residential school horrors.
But getting back to the quote and leaving aside whether Tecumseh ever actually said those exact words, it us a tenuous way to make a case against the Christian religion. I’m not a particularly “religious” person these days tending to see a kind of “reverent agnosticism”1 as a more logical belief system. However, I do find all the harping on the evils of Christians as a bit unfair and frankly not very useful for coming to grips with the nature of the range of bad behaviours demonstrated among homo sapiens. And the particular quote above is downright ill informed.
First, the record seems to be pretty clear that Jesus was a Jew, there were no Christians around in his time. And if there is a record of him ever talking about Christianity or suggesting he wanted to form a new religion, I haven’t heard about it. Second, he was not killed by Christians (there were none to kill him) but by soldiers of the Roman Empire (which were pretty free and easy about beliefs of others. The crucifixion, it is generally agreed, was at the behest of the local Jewish authorities. You can look it up. Thirdly, Christianity evolved out of the teachings of Jesus, the Jew, and they were written down by another bunch of Jews2. While there may be/is, and is a fair amount of hypocrisy among the believers, it is hard to make any case that they are a particularly hypocritical group.
“Man’s” inhumanity to “man” seems a pretty much universal problem and I, frankly, would be very surprised to find any grouping of human beings on any continent, in any age, with whatever sets of beliefs, that has not been the perpetrators of some pretty raw behaviour against their neighbours. Let’s look at the major bringer of doom and despair to large populations; that would of course be war. War has immense, far reaching and terrible consequence, including, death, injury, sexual violence, malnutrition, illness (physical and mental), and disability (Chapin, 2020). According to the Encyclopedia of Wars (Philips &Axelrod, 2004) however, out of all 1,763 known/recorded historical conflicts, only 123, or 6.98%, had religion as their primary cause. That doesn’t let religion, and specifically Christianity, entirely off the hook for fomenting violence, but it buttresses Rabbi Alan Lurie (2012) in his position that that history simply does not sustain the idea that religion has been a major cause of conflict. Wars in the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. They tended to be for territorial conquest, border control, to secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In reality, the ancient conquerors, like Egypt, Babylon, Persia, or Rome, tended to welcome other religious beliefs, and often added the new gods to their own list.
But speaking of lists, some of the new Atheist folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, as well as the wonderful George Carlin, who tend to preach their gospel that religion is the major cause of violence, rarely seem to note the mayhem wrecked by anti-theist characters like Pol Pot, Mao Tso Tung, Stalin and Hitler, for example. And as a Marxist I cannot fail to note the wide range of misery inflicted by imperial powers over the centuries which, while in a few we might see the fig leaf of religion waved occasionally, were for the most part related to economic gain, profit, to be squeezed out of subject peoples. The USA is well known in this regard but let us not forget Japan and Germany in WWII. And prior to that we have the Rogues gallery of leaders like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and Belgium’s King Leopold. Perhaps the granddaddy of them all, in terms of modern history, the British Empire which pillaged a great deal of the world from Asia and South Asia to North America. The blame for the chaos and wretchedness in all these cases was driven by economics, not religious belief.
Having duly noted that we as a species have a record of inflicting misery and brutality, at the same time, I think it is clear that we have shown wonderful, compassionate, loving, altruistic, selfless treatment of our fellows. Many countries have banned the death penalty, we have not forgotten, indeed we continue to warn ourselves about, the holocaust. The great majority of the world has outlawed slavery and while we need to do much more, significant amounts of aide money is provided to refugees. The outpouring of shame and support for Indigenous people about the finding of the evidence of unmarked graves on the cites of residential schools is too late, but it is not nothing. We can find lots more examples if we are interested. But, one of the interesting characteristics of we humans is that we are able to find the kind of evidence that we are looking for to structure our judgements about the folks who we want to laud or those we want to criticize.
In conclusion, I don’t mean this as an attempt to try to get Christians off the hook for the horrors that have been done in the name of their particular religious slant. The horrors from the Inquisition to residential “schools” are real and we need to understand and do everything we can
to see justice done. There are vague rumblings of this possibility in the reaction to the recent uncovering of the large number of unmarked graves on sites where Church run (particularly Roman Catholic Church run) residential “schools” existed. Rather, I think it more useful to add the real, concrete motivations for the disgusting actions in which Christianity, or Judaism, or the Muslim religion, or atheism, for that matter, have been implicated. In this way we have a chance of not repeating the sins of the past and building a better future.
Resources:
Chapin, C. (2020). “What are the negative and positive effects of war?” History General. Questions and Answers. https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778. December 21. Lurie, A. (2012). “Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?” HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766. June 10. Phillips, C. & Axelrod, A. (2004) Encyclopedia of Wars. Facts On File.
1 I owe the term to Charles Templeton, a Canadian media figure/commentator and a former Christian evangelist, of times gone by. He used it to characterize his “religious” position. Essentially, for me, it means that I find myself unable to believe the claims for the existence of a deity but neither do I find the position of atheism convincing. The more I read of either position, the more difficult it I find it to sign on as an adherent. I simply find the word too mysterious a place. I do respect the positions of each side, only wishing they would cease the self-righteous sniping at each other and proselytizing to people like me. 2 Probably quite some time after Jesus walked the earth
It is a very popular quote, and there is no denying the latter section. It is often seen on Facebook or in letters to the editor. It is typically used when a person wants to have a go at the, pretty often well-known, hypocrisy of a goodly number of Christians, (e.g., the fundamentalist gangs that are so keen on the obviously immoral D.J. Trump, the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and the USA which, while professing all manner of moral precepts, covered up the crimes of pedophiles and in Canada where it has refused to come clean on the involvement of some of its priests and nuns in the residential school horrors.
But getting back to the quote and leaving aside whether Tecumseh ever actually said those exact words, it us a tenuous way to make a case against the Christian religion. I’m not a particularly “religious” person these days tending to see a kind of “reverent agnosticism”1 as a more logical belief system. However, I do find all the harping on the evils of Christians as a bit unfair and frankly not very useful for coming to grips with the nature of the range of bad behaviours demonstrated among homo sapiens. And the particular quote above is downright ill informed.
First, the record seems to be pretty clear that Jesus was a Jew, there were no Christians around in his time. And if there is a record of him ever talking about Christianity or suggesting he wanted to form a new religion, I haven’t heard about it. Second, he was not killed by Christians (there were none to kill him) but by soldiers of the Roman Empire (which were pretty free and easy about beliefs of others. The crucifixion, it is generally agreed, was at the behest of the local Jewish authorities. You can look it up. Thirdly, Christianity evolved out of the teachings of Jesus, the Jew, and they were written down by another bunch of Jews2. While there may be/is, and is a fair amount of hypocrisy among the believers, it is hard to make any case that they are a particularly hypocritical group.
“Man’s” inhumanity to “man” seems a pretty much universal problem and I, frankly, would be very surprised to find any grouping of human beings on any continent, in any age, with whatever sets of beliefs, that has not been the perpetrators of some pretty raw behaviour against their neighbours. Let’s look at the major bringer of doom and despair to large populations; that would of course be war. War has immense, far reaching and terrible consequence, including, death, injury, sexual violence, malnutrition, illness (physical and mental), and disability (Chapin, 2020). According to the Encyclopedia of Wars (Philips &Axelrod, 2004) however, out of all 1,763 known/recorded historical conflicts, only 123, or 6.98%, had religion as their primary cause. That doesn’t let religion, and specifically Christianity, entirely off the hook for fomenting violence, but it buttresses Rabbi Alan Lurie (2012) in his position that that history simply does not sustain the idea that religion has been a major cause of conflict. Wars in the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. They tended to be for territorial conquest, border control, to secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In reality, the ancient conquerors, like Egypt, Babylon, Persia, or Rome, tended to welcome other religious beliefs, and often added the new gods to their own list.
But speaking of lists, some of the new Atheist folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, as well as the wonderful George Carlin, who tend to preach their gospel that religion is the major cause of violence, rarely seem to note the mayhem wrecked by anti-theist characters like Pol Pot, Mao Tso Tung, Stalin and Hitler, for example. And as a Marxist I cannot fail to note the wide range of misery inflicted by imperial powers over the centuries which, while in a few we might see the fig leaf of religion waved occasionally, were for the most part related to economic gain, profit, to be squeezed out of subject peoples. The USA is well known in this regard but let us not forget Japan and Germany in WWII. And prior to that we have the Rogues gallery of leaders like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and Belgium’s King Leopold. Perhaps the granddaddy of them all, in terms of modern history, the British Empire which pillaged a great deal of the world from Asia and South Asia to North America. The blame for the chaos and wretchedness in all these cases was driven by economics, not religious belief.
Having duly noted that we as a species have a record of inflicting misery and brutality, at the same time, I think it is clear that we have shown wonderful, compassionate, loving, altruistic, selfless treatment of our fellows. Many countries have banned the death penalty, we have not forgotten, indeed we continue to warn ourselves about, the holocaust. The great majority of the world has outlawed slavery and while we need to do much more, significant amounts of aide money is provided to refugees. The outpouring of shame and support for Indigenous people about the finding of the evidence of unmarked graves on the cites of residential schools is too late, but it is not nothing. We can find lots more examples if we are interested. But, one of the interesting characteristics of we humans is that we are able to find the kind of evidence that we are looking for to structure our judgements about the folks who we want to laud or those we want to criticize.
In conclusion, I don’t mean this as an attempt to try to get Christians off the hook for the horrors that have been done in the name of their particular religious slant. The horrors from the Inquisition to residential “schools” are real and we need to understand and do everything we can
to see justice done. There are vague rumblings of this possibility in the reaction to the recent uncovering of the large number of unmarked graves on sites where Church run (particularly Roman Catholic Church run) residential “schools” existed. Rather, I think it more useful to add the real, concrete motivations for the disgusting actions in which Christianity, or Judaism, or the Muslim religion, or atheism, for that matter, have been implicated. In this way we have a chance of not repeating the sins of the past and building a better future.
Resources:
Chapin, C. (2020). “What are the negative and positive effects of war?” History General. Questions and Answers. https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778. December 21. Lurie, A. (2012). “Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?” HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766. June 10. Phillips, C. & Axelrod, A. (2004) Encyclopedia of Wars. Facts On File.
1 I owe the term to Charles Templeton, a Canadian media figure/commentator and a former Christian evangelist, of times gone by. He used it to characterize his “religious” position. Essentially, for me, it means that I find myself unable to believe the claims for the existence of a deity but neither do I find the position of atheism convincing. The more I read of either position, the more difficult it I find it to sign on as an adherent. I simply find the word too mysterious a place. I do respect the positions of each side, only wishing they would cease the self-righteous sniping at each other and proselytizing to people like me. 2 Probably quite some time after Jesus walked the earth
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