Originally Posted by
Stavros
I don't think this debate needs to delve too deeply into our personal situations, I would prefer to debate the broader issue which is the relationship between organized religion and society, not least because at the present juncture there is such a terribly real connection between organized religion and violence and intolerance.
Consider that 100 years ago, it was secular regimes that were attacking religious communities and with substantially greater violence than we have seen since 9/11. In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, millions of Christian Armenians and Greek Orthodox were either expelled from Anatolia or slaughtered by the Nationalist zealots of an emerging Turkish state which went on to abolish religious education in schools and promote atheism as a component of the secular state. As the Russian autocracy collapsed, it too led to an orgy of violence in which religious communities, notably the Jews and Christians were targeted by the Bolsheviks, just as a consolidation of Communist rule involved the demolition of churches across the USSR. A violent anti-clerical movement was a central feature of the Republic in Spain in the 1930s, just as the suppression of religion in China in the 1940s was extended in the 1950s to Tibet, while atheism became a key feature of the autocracy in Albania while the Catholic church was viewed with deep suspicion in Eastern European countries like Poland.
It may be that religion, if it has been resurgent as an organized force, as it has been in Poland (my earlier post drew attention to this phenomenon in Nigeria, Uganda and Russia), has found a new space in which to grow because of the failures of previous secular regimes to provide jobs, to cleanse the state of corruption, even to provide the 'people' with a sense of shared entitlement and belonging. This is a key theme in a short but fascinating book by Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation (Yale University Press, 2015) in which Walzer tries to understand how three states emerged from a 'national liberation' struggle to erect secular/socialist/humanitarian governments, only to be overtaken decades later by religious movements that appear to contradict what the founders of the state intended -the examples being Israel, Algeria and India.
It has been argued for some years now that political Islam grew in the Middle East as a response to the failures of Arab liberalism, socialism and nationalism, yet it is clear that if there has been a resurgence of Islam, it has been a fractured attempt to re-mould the state and on present evidence is a dismal failure. Even in the case of Saudi Arabia which has now lasted for the best part of a century, the Royal Family is still detested in the Hejaz and in the east, while the export of its horrible creed across the world has alienated Muslims from each other as much as the societies in which they live.
We have also seen how a militant Christianity in the USA in recent times may have emerged as a religious response to the fear of Communism, while modernization in the form of film, tv and now social media excited the 'moral majority' to campaign politically for reactionary policies, and on issues such as abortion -if not divorce and homosexuality- has earned some success, with the additional point that Presidential candidates appear to be obliged to make public their religious views as if it were not possible to be selected, let alone elected, if one does not proclaim a belief in the Christian God.
But tolerance to have any meaning must work both ways, and what I find dispiriting in these times, is an intolerance on the part of those who dismiss religion out of hand as a concoction of fables about a sky-fairy and some non-existent after-life, and on the other side an organized group who not only believe they are in exclusive possession of the truth, but also claim religious justification when they choose to murder. My generation inherited a world in which we were determined that mass murder -any murder- would no longer be justified for reasons of 'race' religion sexuality or ideology, and it appears we have failed, either because it is in human nature to be bad, or because bad things happen when we create the permissive environment in which it becomes possible to behave badly with impunity, even if there are occasional moments of hope, such as the conviction of Radovan Karadzic.
What worries me most is this 'permissive environment' in which the state allows bad things to happen, because once the law is ignored on one aspect of social relations, it encourages law-breaking elsewhere, and that is the road to perdition.