VIOLENCE AND RELIGION

Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("The Bhagavad-Gita has probably been more influential than any other Indian scripture. Yet both the Gita and the Mahabharata remind us that there are no easy answers to the problem of war and peace. True, Indian mythology and ritual often glorified greed and warfare but it also helped people to confront tragedy and even devised ways of extirpating aggression from the psyche, pioneering ways for people to live together without violence at all." Id. at 75-75. "In any traditional empire, the purpose of government was not to guide or provide services for the population but to tax them. It did not usually attempt to interfere with the social customs or religious beliefs of its subjects. Rather, a government was set up to take whatever it could from its peasants and prevent other aristocrats from getting their surplus, so warfare--to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base--was essential to these states. . . . But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on the expectation of constant innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics." Id. at 234-235. "We can learn a great deal about fundamentalism generally from a crisis in one of the first of the movements, which developed in the United States during and immediately after the First World War. The term itself was coned in the 1920a by American Protestants who resolved to return to the 'fundamentals' of Christianity. Their retreat form public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused in biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so their enemy was no longer social injustice buy the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems. For all the claims that fundamentalisms make of a return to basics, however, these movements are highly innovative. Before the sixteenth century, for instance, Christians had always been encouraged to read scripture allegorically; even Calvin did not believe that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life, and he took severely to task those 'frantic persons' who believed that it was. This new fundamentalist outlook now required a wholesale denial of glaring discrepancies in scripture.Closed to any alternative and coherent only in its own terms, biblical inerrancy created a shuttered mind-set born of great fear." Id. at 303-304. "We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high  moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands o civilians who die in our wars as 'collateral damage.' Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeline Albright's when she was still Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten. In 1996, on CBS's 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq as justified: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in Hiroshima. . . . Is the price worth it?' 'I think this is a very hard choice.' Albright replied, 'but the price, we think the price is worth it.'" Id. at 391-392. "Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then a laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people's misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, 'the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.' In his classic study of religion and violence, Rene Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith." Id. at 3. In short, we have used religion as an excuse for, or an explanation of, our use violence when, in fact, we have other motives and aims. Also see James Fallows, "Unholy Wars," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/14/2014. ).