Is Religion an Obstacle to Peace?
A.C. Grayling (from left), Matthew Chapman, Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D'Souza faced off on the notion "The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion."
A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher and a scholar recently teamed up at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to debate this motion: “The world would be better off without religion.” The live studio audience was polled before and after the debate and a winner was declared. Before I tell you the numbers, what do you think? Would the world be better off without religion?
Even more relevant – what do you think of the question? I had a hard time taking it seriously, especially after I started listening to the debate. I had hoped that before they jumped into arguing for or against the motion they would define what they meant by “religion”. They did not. For the sake of clarity, I hoped they also might have defined what “better off” meant since it requires a comparison to an imaginary world in which religion doesn’t or never did exist. They did not do that either. Those arguing for the motion said the things you would expect – we’d be better off without religion because it is the cause of war, provides justification for violence, and is indicative of faulty reasoning. People who believe in God are irrational, hypocritical and violent. Those arguing against the motion said that more wars and genocides had been committed in the name of atheism than God, that religion is an organized system that encourages people to be better and to work for a better world. They made the counteraccusation that those who said we’d be better off without religion were the ones guilty of faulty reasoning. Nothing either side said changed my opinion that the motion itself was flawed.
What the two opposing teams had in common was more telling than their so-called differences. For example, they both clearly got that there was a strong connection between religion and violence. One side thought religion made the world more violent and the other side thought less, but “less violent” was clearly what they meant by “better off”. What both sides failed to see, however, was that it isn’t the presence of religion in the world that’s the problem or the solution, but rather how successful religion is at any time or in any place at doing its job. In other words, the problem is not religion but violence itself. The job of religion is to respond to the problem of violence. Anyone familiar with anthropology knows that wherever human culture is found so is religion. The one does not exist without the other. A key idea of mimetic theory, which is the study of the connection between religion and violence, is that religion solved the problem of human violence, thus making human culture possible. Religion can be thought of as the mechanism that made the proto-human world less violent, putting the side arguing against the motion on the right side of the issue.
But to say that religion makes the world less violent misses a crucial point: If it was religion that controlled violence in the proto-human world, how did it do it? Ancient or archaic religion was a religion of sacrifice and it used violence to control violence. It involved rituals, prohibitions, myth and sacrifice: violence was controlled through sacrificial means, temple rituals in which humans and animals were killed often after ritual reenactments of wars or wild times in which all prohibitions were relaxed, kind of like Mardi Gras. The community discharged all its angers, resentments, little built up hurts and grudges in a ritual frenzy ending in the shedding of blood. Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto captured the pre-sacrificial frenzy and the calming effect of the sacrifice really well. A little bit of violence in a controlled (ritual) setting kept the violence outside of the community and life could flourish.
We no longer have ritual sacrifice per se, but archaic religion survives in a more subtle form. Anywhere violence is justified as a way to bring peace by invoking God’s name – or in the name of any supreme good like ethnic, racial, tribal or national identity – you have archaic or sacrificial religion. Today’s revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are the biggies) are still engaged with the problem of violence just as they were when they were revealed. The presence of violent passages in the sacred texts of these religions does not mean that they are advocating violence, but that solving the problem of violence is their main function. To think that those texts are the cause of violence would be like concluding that hospitals cause people to become sick and die. Violence is in the texts for the same reason sick people are in hospitals: everyone is looking for a cure. Revealed religions, though, offer a different cure than archaic religions. Rather than using violence to control violence, they aim at building peaceful communities through practices of love, mercy and forgiveness. This is the non-sacrificial solution but not all their adherents get the message. Religious and non-religious people too easily revert to ancient sacrificial practices: we find all kinds of excuses for using violence, including invoking God’s name, despite the efforts of revealed religions. When Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or any religious group claims God to be on their side, they are caught up in an old and dying paradigm. The long trajectory of human history is a religious journey away from the use of sacrificial violence toward a new way of achieving peace by peaceful means.
Here are the results of the audience survey: Before the debate 52 percent of the live audience thought the world would be better off without religion and 26 percent disagreed, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, those in favor of a world without religion jumped to 59 percent and those against the idea rose to 31 percent — making the side arguing for a world without religion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided, maybe because they sensed the debate had been about the wrong question. The better motion would have been: The world would be better off without the justification of violence by anyone for any reason. Revealed religions are in favor of that motion. Which side are you on?