Religion, ideology and the problem of evil
The Ugley Vicar has blog posted his thoughts on an article that appeared in the Independent yesterday entitled: Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil.
One commentator wrote on his blog:
Er … what wories me, John, is that you spend so much time on an article by a writer who (you seem to show) is biased/one sided, confused as to exact meanings of what he claims to espouse (“What exactly does he mean by ‘inherently’?”)
[.....]
Such writers are never going to change their stance anyway. I’m sure there are better things to do/write about.
Personally I disagree and deem it important to fisk the mainstream media when it’s called for. In this instance it is called for, because as Cranmer mused on Twitter yesterday in relation to this article:
Johann Hari on ‘the religious support for evil’ http://bit.ly/9hC6co Or is he just inciting religious hatred?
Cross-post Ugley Vicar
Religion, ideology and the problem of evil
I’ve just been reading Johann Hari’s online article The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil, and wondered at the juxtaposition of two somewhat contradictory attitudes. First, he poses his opening question:
What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon [...] ? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion.
So it is religion – specifically Islam in the case of the cartoons – which makes people behave badly. Moreover, he continues, Muslims have a thing or two to learn from Europeans, who have been mocking religion for centuries and now enjoy all the benefits. In fact, he suggests,
It will be a shining day for Muslims when they can do the same.
So three cheers for the Danish cartoons about the prophet! Well, actually no, just two cheers, because,
Some of the cartoons were witty. Some were stupid. One seemed to suggest Muslims are inherently violent – an obnoxious and false idea.
So, according to Hari, Muslims – that is to say, those who, as a result of the unreasonability of Islam, want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon and should instead take the European rationalist ‘chill pill’ – are not ‘inherently’ violent, just violent in their “tens of millions” when it comes to their religion.
Hari’s target is respect for religions – respect which he feels should be accorded to no idea or institution:
Nobody says I should “respect” conservatism or communism and keep my opposition to them to myself – but that’s exactly what is routinely said about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism. What’s the difference?
Now Hari is right about the fact that terrible things are done in the name of religion, but I have two questions. The first is why the exemption of Muslims from the very thing that you are writing an article to critique, namely the power of religion to motivate people to do bad things? Hari says Muslims are not ‘inherently’ violent. What exactly does he mean by ‘inherently’?
If he means ‘as human beings, rather than as Muslims’, then he is stating either a truism: “the human material from which Muslims are drawn is no worse than that for the rest of us,” or, on the face of it, a falsehood: “human beings are not inherently violent”.
If, however, he means by not ‘inherently’ that Islam does not, as a religious belief, incline people to violence, then surely he is stating a conscious falsehood (compare his opening paragraph) and, moreover, he is doing this out of ‘respect’ for Islam.
The other question is this: if all religion is false (which he clearly believes it is), then what would he blame for human violence?
In many cases, of course, it is the role of an ideology to move us to violence, but it is the human material which is surely the underlying problem. One may take, for example, the violence in Northern Ireland, carried out by ‘Catholics’ and ‘Protestants’, many of whom clearly had only the most tenuous adherence to Christianity (in evidence of which, note that the levels of churchgoing in Northern Ireland, whilst higher than in the rest of the UK, were never staggering during the recent ‘Troubles’). Indeed, in some cases it was the more openly ‘secularized’ (but ideologically highly motivated) personalities who were at the forefront of the ‘struggle’.
You can, it seems, take a number of different – and even contradictory – ideological positions and evoke the same violence in human beings. Animal liberationists, Green activists, hunt saboteurs, environmentalists are all, it would seem, capable of being people who are happy to create a spot of ‘bovver’ in the name of a ‘good cause’, despite the popular image of wearing sandals and living on tofu.
One thing is sure. When we have eliminated religion, we will not have eliminated the human factor, and the the truly inherent violence it entails. Indeed, since religion is, according to people like Hari, just a projection of the human imagination, it is we who have caused even all the violence done in the name of religion.
March 20th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Johann Hari – “He has won many of the biggest awards in British journalism. In 2008 he became the youngest person to ever win the George Orwell Prize, Britain’s leading award for political writing.”
Must have been for excelling in Newspeak and being unable to spell Jihad.
March 20th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Most of us have no difficulty agreeing that murder committed as a result of religious sensitivity is utterly wrong and unforgiveable. Equally we totally abhor child abuse.
Where I think Mr Hari oversteps the mark is to conflate religiously motivated murder with behaviour which though totally unacceptable is nonetheless very much NOT religiously motivated.
Child abuse will happen with or without religion. Murder will happen with or without religion. But wheras Islam may be held to account for providing men with an excuse to commit murder, Roman Catholicism patently does not condone child abuse.
March 21st, 2010 at 10:58 am
The original article seems very odd to me. Johann Hari starts with the Muslim cartoon controversy, points out that Europeans (and European Christians) accept religious satire, comparing attitudes
He then jumps across to the Catholic paedophile scandal. Having raised the subect of religion and child abuse he then fails to return to the Islamic record on the same topic – an even juicier story. This leaves – for this reader – a huge gap. It’s almost as if the writer’s deliberately averting his gaze.
Islam is a far more varied faith than Christianity. It’s as if Christianity had half a dozen Popes, all claiming to be the true church. And these different strains vary dramatically.
The nature of your belief and ethics as a Muslim depends very much on which spiritual leaders and haddith you follow. When you examine just how different the different variants are it becomes obvious why there’s such violent disagreement between groups.
Some Muslims see the caliphate as purely spiritual – an ideal, achieved without coercion. Others believe in world domination through conquest and totalitarian theocracy. Huge difference.
On the issue of child sex, the picture is very disturbing. There are *millions* of Muslims who believe child sex – even sex with babies – is morally OK as long as the child and her rapist are married. There are even guidelines on what is permissable and the damages due should penetration cause injury.
I can imagine how much this upsets all the other Muslims who see child sex in the same light as Europeans.
I strongly disapprove of the Catholic church but not even his worst enemy could claim the Pope has ever *approved* or recommended child sex, let alone issued instructions!