The God Series: Because Religion Is the Battleground of the 21st Century
#1 - WHY WE NEED TO STUDY GOD
"Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century."
-Tony Blair
Mumbai. 9/11. Chechnya. Sectarian violence in Iraq. Somalia. Afghanistan. Nigeria.
The man with the most military power in the history of the world is reported to have said, "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ...' And I did."
It was called a Crusade.
These are the defining events of the new century.
After a brief, semi-retirement of a few hundred years, religion has returned as the number one cause of violence, war and death.
So the fundamental national security questions of our time have to be about faith.
What is it about faith that makes people eager to commit suicide so long as it enables them to commit mass murder while they're at it?
What is it about faith that makes world leaders like George Bush and Tony Blair -- with armies, bombers, missiles, artillery, and navies -- ignore good advise, abandon good sense, and lead their countries to two of the stupidest wars in history?
And while they're at it, to radically change the moral positions that their countries adopted just sixty years ago and commit what were then called war crimes: initiating a war of aggression, torture, and the failure to provide for the populations of the countries they occupied?
What is it about faith that made it suddenly re-emerge as the driving force in American politics and in the politics of the Islamic countries?
It seems self-evident that God should have become our number one area of study during the last few years. Governments, universities and foundations should have all rushed forward with funds to create programs and recruit students to find out what this God thing is.
The war in Iraq ought to have taught us here in the West, two lessons.
We are very, very good at invading countries and smashing their armies. Even better than we thought we were.
But that doesn't stop suicide bombers. It only encourages them.
The nature of the people who attacked us, and the results of our response to them, make it obvious that understanding fanatical faith is at least as important as developing a reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle, more useful than developing new tactical nuclear weapons, and if we can find a way to reach or to undermine the faith of fanatics, it will be far more economical than invading a series of foreign countries.
But the opposite has happened: billions for bombs! Not a penny for thought! A smart bomb remains as dumb as a brick if the people firing it don't know who to hit or the right reasons to hit them.
God and religion should have become important to us, we, the just plain people. Whether or not our leaders are people of "faith," we really need them to balance their faith with good sense, so they make better decisions.
A serious conversation about faith and how it works, should have become one of the leading topics of our national conversation.
What we had was a public parade of politicians on television competing to prove how much faith each of them has. It was embraced by a universal assumption that religious faith is a good way to pick our leaders. Although the evidence before us -- George Bush, Tony Blair, Osama bin Laden - points the other way.
God, religion, faith, spirituality -- whichever face of the prism we are looking at - runs like a vertical pillar through all the levels of our lives.
Our international policies are fixed largely around this war on terror. Our most volatile domestic political issues -- regulating our sex lives, abortion, birth control, homosexuality, separation of church and state -- are rooted in our religious views. Our social circles, our family structures, our individual lives, our world views, how we live and die, our health and happiness, are organized around our spiritual views, or lack thereof.
All this, without a serious attempt to find out what religion really is.
That's why we need to examine God, faith, and religion.
This is the first in a series of essays. Others will include:
Looking at God: Belief, Agnosticism, Atheism
Belief & False Beliefs
Why We Believe in God
Why We Believe Enough to Kill & Die
What is Spirituality?
Morality: What is it? Where does it Come From? What is its Relation to Religion
The Competition Between Monotheisms, Polytheism, and Nontheistic Societies
A personal note: I recently wrote a novel, Salvation Boulevard, a mystery-thriller about religion. Narrative fiction has its own demands. It can only tolerate as much theory and philosophy as moves the story. It was always my intention to use the novel as a way to open the dialogue and explore it further in formats like this.
Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. All available at nationbooks.org
His new novel is: SALVATION BOULEVARD. Website: http://www.larrybeinhart.com
Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net, and, of course, posted here.
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I'm looking forward to Larry Beinhart's discussions, particularly this one:
Morality: What is it? Where does it Come From? What is its Relation to Religion?
The notion that morality could come from god(s) was thoroughly discredited by Plato's Euthyphro dialogue, some 400 years before the birth of Christ.
http://en.
The circus in Olympia sheds light on the domestic struggle, begging the question: who is the real tyrant? Medved's analysis is informative and brilliant:
http://all
There are a lot of good comments and questions.
For many of you, you may find this book very interesting. His work was heavily referenced in John Dean's 'Conservatives without Conscience'.
It's called 'The Authoritarians' by Bob Altemeyer. It just doesn't discuss the psychology of authoritarian leaders, but spends most of its time on the authoritarian followers. And in the vast majority of cases, it describes the core of the Republican Party: the Religious Right.
After you've read just the first two chapters, and recall how the Republican Party ran their campaign, you'll see precisely how it all fits together.
http://hom
And it's free to download.
Funny you mention this. I read Dean's book about a year-and-a-half ago, but just got it out to refresh my memory. Great book, but the way.
The Altemeyer book he referenced was "The Authoritarian Specter". Seems Dean's book got Altemeyer a lot of attention, so he posted a free less technical version.
Thanks for that link.
Check out Chris Rhoda's piece on our military "Crusaders".
http://www
Even if religiousity seems on the rise worldwide, the pressure is increasingly on religion not secularism this century. As science advances the theories about the age and origin of the universe, the geofysical properties of the world and the evolution and genetic make-up of life become more and more interconnected and corraborated. As these theories start to make sense to an ever increasing amount of (especially educated) people, religion as a source of answers and guiding wisdom loses its meaning.
The question is which narrative will survive this century?
- we are Homo Sapiens, the product of billions of years of evolution, living in a fragile habitat, on a tiny planet in one of the billions of solar systems of this universe? Or,
- we are Man, put on this planet by God, less then a 10,000 years ago, to honor him and spread his word, until he thinks it's been enough.
I am cautiously optimistic and I think our species' survival instinct will prevail and we will see a massive rejection of the religious narrative as we know it. For religion to survive this century they need to reject dogma and reconnect with the one thing that makes us humans special in the first place: our ability to reason.
"What is it about faith that makes people eager to commit suicide so long as it enables them to commit mass murder while they're at it?" Nothing.
Robert Pape's study established that suicide terrorism is driven by nationalism, not faith. Suicide terrorism was pioneered by the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group.
"What is it about faith that makes world leaders like George Bush and Tony Blair ... lead their countries to two of the stupidest wars in history?" Nothing.
Bush was motivated by neocon ideology aiming at American geopolitical dominance and control of resources. Blair followed the rule that's driven UK foreign policy since WWII: stick close to the yanks.
"What is it about faith that made it suddenly re-emerge as the driving force in American politics and in the politics of the Islamic countries?" Rather ask what is it about those countries.
As the civil rights movement progressed, Republicans, in a political move, used Christianity to tempt disaffected southern Democrats into their fold. The party became so dependent on them they could dictate their terms. In the Islamic world, clerics have been the voice of social justice against authoritarian leaders; as secular leaders failed and old religious authorities were compromised, some people turned to the new, self-appointed, authorities of Islamism as a last, desperate substitute. Islamism is strongest in those countries - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan - where secular leadership has most failed. These are facts of politics, not faith.
Faith's new significance is an illusion.
I think you're right. Religion is the clothing but not the body of the problem. Studying religion would only be a distraction.
google "Sign Petition for News Rating System"
google "Fix News Now" to review the ceasespin proposal for making news media more accountable to the public.
there is a petition that you can sign that will be sent to the FCC and other information pertaining to the news quality rating system
a strong democracy requires a strong and vigilant press
support this media reform and spread the word
I put that string in google, and it asked if I meant "FOX News Now"... lol.
In "The Irony of American History", In a context dealing with our own national myths vs communism, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "If only we could fully understand that the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruit of illusions which are similar to our own...". I think it applies equally religions.
The only religion necessary is the golden rule. Love, and altruism predated religion. It's time to put mythos back in it's place and let go of the dogma. I have no hope that this will ever happen in America, but I can dream.
Faith is quite simply the most powerful drug on Earth. Think about it: whatever else people want, what do they MOST want?
Answer: to know they are right. Not to suspect they are right, or to feel they are right, but to KNOW they are right. There is only one substance on Earth that can supply that level of surrety, and that's faith. Simply because every other level of assurance requires some sort of evidence to back it up; some basis for the conceit.
But not faith. Faith is magic, in that it exists without evidence, without reason. It exists simply and only by sheer assertion of belief. I said it's so, therefore it's so. No one can counter that assertion, because "proof" is simply not allowed into the discussion. What's more, once I decide something is so, then it's not permissible to say that I must be wrong, because now it's a "freedom of religion" issue, falling squarely under the PC exception to free speech.
B. S.
"Faith" is magical thinking on steroids, folks. When children think that deciding something makes it so, we gently (or not) talk them out of their nonsense. When adults follow the same muse, the only one they would listen to in opposition is Gawd Himself -- but they can't hear His voice, because they've already decided what he would say.
The biggest fear people have about studying God is finding out that there is no god. That fear is pretty much the reason we are so stupid when it comes to religion and what faith really is. The only constant of all religions is that each and every one of them demands that you become a hypocrit.
They can also provide an instant attitude of superiority. Kind of nice to be able to hold the idea over someone else's head that you will have eternal life, and they wont.
Hard to be humble when you're that special...
Whether people still consider themselves believers or not, I find that those who have actually left organized religion are generally interesting people precisely because they've actually wrestled with some of the questions mentioned by Mr. Beinhart.
This should be a hoot.
Whoopee!! Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin.
Lol. I'm going to go floss my gnashing tooth.
Well, this looks to be a very interesting series of essays. I have an intense interest in this subject as a non-believer who tries to take the long view of how religion has impacted our society, past, present and future. I'm looking forward to reading the next installment!
Ditto that!
Larry; Religion Kills..!
Simple as that...
TJ...
Darthdarcy; Athiesim kills too..!
Simple as that...
Great post. I'd welcome more discussion of ideas and their consequences on the Huff Post. "Ideas Have Consequences," was the title of a philosophical work by Richard M. Weaver and whether you agree with Weaver's ideas or not, the title tells the truth.
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