Religion and War

 

There is a popular conception that if religion could be abolished a primary cause of conflict and war would go with it. Current belligerence in the name of Islam is often cited, or the historical religious wars of Christianity, still with current echoes, are raised.

This, though, ducks the issue, which is human culpability. It’s along the lines of the childish excuse, “He made me do it”, to blame another, in this case God, and so shirk taking responsibility. Religion can be used to recruit the blindly faithful to the flag, but so can nationalism or a political cause.

Religion can be very effective in this as it purports to transmit the actual will of God, when in reality it is very much a human construct. Religious traditions develop and consolidate over many generations and can appear to be the timeless commands of God.

For instance, during a recent radio interview concerning extreme temperatures in Pakistan, a Moslem woman explained the difficulty this posed during Ramadan. From sunrise to sunset fasting requires abstinence from drinking even water.

While this is an impressive display of personal disciple it nonetheless remains a human originated stricture. Religious scriptures can no doubt be quoted, but they, Koran, Bible or Talmud, are of human authorship.

Deists would point out that the created universe works according to identifiable laws, with inherent mechanisms. On a hot day, thirst is the natural trigger to drink and doing so is not a sin or breaking some divine ordinance. Not imbibing a glass of water is a human choice not a divine one.

Similarly, perpetrating violence comes from motivations that are all too human. Newsreel footage from the First World War exists of priests showering paraded troops with holy water from essentially a bucket with a broad paintbrush. However, there can be little doubt that that conflict arose from political and economic causes, not by celestial direction.

Frederick the Great described himself as a philosopher, which in the 18^th century meant a declaration of atheism. He acquired the epithet “the Great” due to his embarking on military campaigns for the expansion of Prussia. Man requires no help or sanction from God to wage war.

There may be myriad reasons for, and causes of, war which might involve massive armies and prolonged fighting, or individual acts of violence. However, justifiable or otherwise those reasons and causes may be, perpetrators are responsible for them, not religion, not God.

It would be quite possible for deists to become instigators of war; after all, Frederick the Great regarded himself as a citizen of the Enlightenment who applied reason to his belligerent rule. This demonstrates deism or atheism are no guarantors of peace. The difference being neither can use God as an excuse.

Man must accept and bear the responsibility for his or her actions.

 

Deism: A Personal View

I started this Deism UK blog having come to the realisation that I am a Deist. Previously I had been a vague sort of none church going Christian, had dabbled a bit with Buddhism and, had I been challenged, would probably have described myself as an agnostic.

Atheism also had its appeal, but I always had an inchoate feeling of there being more to the universe than is dreamt of in any Man’s philosophy (to mangle the bard). My dad, a superb classical musician, insisted there are patterns to things, an organising principle.

Then I discovered a number of American Deist websites and I began to investigate. For the first time I had found a spiritual philosophy that made sense, to me at least. I no longer had to square some supernatural super-being called God with a rational outlook that naturally shied from such a concept.

When, as a Deist, I say that God is ineffable I actually mean it and it’s not an attempt to sidestep the issue. If humanity was truly able to understand God then we would have to be on a par with the divine.

This is a corollary with the atheist position of denying God: it’s insisting that something the human mind cannot conceive of cannot then exist. It really is arrogant in placing the human mind as the epitome of intelligence beyond which there is, and can be, nothing greater.

I might not be able to conceive what God is, but it is the flexible brilliance of the human mind that allows me intimations of divine being. That there is a universe and it is intelligible, not with standing creatures with consciousness enough to appreciate and investigate it, is at the very least suggestive of a greater Prime Cause of all subsequent effects.

Do I offer this as conclusive proof? Of course not! Deism makes no grandiose claims and certainly does not believe itself to be some sort of conduit for divine revelation. The onus is on each individual Deist to work out his or her “theology” (should that be “Deology”?) based on the only reliable scripture there is, the book of Nature.

Deism makes no promises of places in heaven, or threats of damnation to hell. Indeed, it has always seemed odd to me that a supposed omnipotent God requires bribery to secure adherents: “Praise me and I’ll let you through the pearly gates.”

I do not even know whether God is actually aware of my individual existence, but that does not prevent me meditating on what “God” means and my place in creation. I am also thankful to God for my span, however significant or insignificant, in the divine universe.

Deism is a concoction of the human mind, a way of viewing, incorporating a religious sensibility with a rational, scientific outlook. Undoubtedly, at some point in the future, Deism will be superseded by a better way of coming to terms with the wonder of existence. By then, it will have served its purpose of furthering human response to, and understanding of, being in creation.

Man Eating Fish: Deism and Christianity

In the 1960s BBC Radio regularly broadcast a panel game called “My Word”. Each week the final round had two of the panellists, comedy scriptwriters Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, delivering humorous monologues.

A conceit regularly employed by Norden was a pseudo-psychological condition he termed Literalism. The supposed sufferer took everything literally, with no sense of the idiomatic: “Man eating fish” would be a sea-borne terror rather than some chap enjoying his battered cod.

Literalism describes the consideration of religious texts as being infallible revelations of God’s truth. The gospel truth claims to be the narrative and teachings of Jesus, events initially orally transmitted.

In what was for most people a pre-literate time, the verbal passing on of a message does not indicate inaccuracy. It does, though, leave scope for elaboration. As the tale is being told from the lectern of a modern evangelical church the story has been born again many, many times.

Whatever Jesus said he said it in Aramaic, subsequently was filtered through Greek, Latin, the King James Bible and a succession of updates and revisions. The effect can be illustrated simply: when referring to God Jesus used the term “Abba” rendered in English bibles as the patriarchal “Father”.

A more accurate transliteration of “Abba”, though, is the more familiar“Daddy”. So, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” is not quite so formal as, “Our Daddy,…”

The sense of a phrase is contingent on idiomatic understanding. So, Jesus walking on the water sounds miraculous. However, no one considers supernatural agency for Newcastle upon Tyne or Stoke on Trent as neither of them is actually afloat on its river.

The point here is not to explain, or explain away, but demonstrate that reading the bible requires a deep appreciation of the linguistic processes the text has been through. The claim it is the word of God begs the question, in which language and at what time?

Authors of the four gospels were neither historians nor biographers in the modern sense, but purveyors of religious ideas.

Miraculous birth attended by celestial beings, precocious wisdom at an early age, the feeding of many from very little, curing the sick and raising the dead, death, resurrection and assumption by heaven are all memes common to many religions, not just the Abrahamic.

The apparent dichotomy between religion and science is misleading: religion has more in common with the Arts and there are few who would claim scientific advance has proved music to be false. A great work of fiction contains truths and ideas that enhance the reader’s comprehension of the world, of creation. It is not a book of falsehoods.

There has recently been the discovery of a planet a quarter of the galaxy away basking in the radiance of four suns. This has startled astronomers contradicting previous thinking about destructive gravitational effects of such an arrangement. Yet science fiction writers have often envisaged worlds with a multiplicity of suns.

Just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it a lie. One factor common to all religions is the reality of the divine; even Buddhists who formally reject God or Gods come as close as makes no difference to deifying the Buddha.

In Socratic Athens there was debate as to whether there were actual gods on Olympus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic Meditations raised the question as to the actual existence of gods. His conclusion was it didn’t matter; an individual’s responsibility was to live the good life anyway. Also he often opted for the less well-defined and definable Providence to indicate the divine principle.

Even the most ardent sceptical Darwinist’ insistence on natural selection alone poses a conundrum. Why does natural selection favour the favourable? Why isn’t the cosmos just a seething mass of contending forces incapable of creating anything?

The universe is intelligent and self aware because humans are an intelligence within the universe, aware not only of themselves but increasingly of the wider cosmos. How has humanity advanced? By naturally selecting in a conscious way what has favoured progress. It is hardly a leap to consider intelligence on a grander scale, beyond human limitations or comprehension.

Even if absolutely proven Jesus never existed, the gospels would still have a spiritual value. They would become parables, addressing the ineffable and a pervading sense of purpose within humanity.

A distressing and disastrous form of religious literalism concerns faith healing. On biblical pretexts parents deny children medical procedures in the belief that faith will be rewarded through divine intervention. Children suffer and die.

Humanity is blessed with God given reason, granting the miracle of medical science. Faith in reason enables the sick to seek and accept treatment with confidence. But healing is not just about surgery and medicine, love and attention aids and speeds recovery and in those tragic circumstances where there is no cure, then how much stronger love and attention need to be.

Born in the Enlightenment from which science emerged, Deism offers a religious perspective that does not contradict human progress and understanding. Religious cultures and traditions trying to remain fundamental bastions of revealed truth fall foul of unnecessary literalism.

Evolution is not just about the development of species; it also applies to ideas that, like everything else in the universe, are in constant flux. Christianity has patently changed through the two millennia of its existence and comes in a wide variety of forms.

How many Christians still subscribe unquestioningly to the fundamental literal “truth” of the Pauline version? A Deistic sensibility would mean the drama of its narrative and rituals could be preserved and dedicated to celebrating the universe, its nature and the God of reason whose conception it is.

Becoming a Christian Deist opens Christianity to new exploration and interpretation, just as it emerged from within Judaism. Man eating fish on the beach could be Jesus, preparing a fresh meal to share with the world.

Deism and Jesus

Deism is a natural religion in that it draws its principles and ideas from experience of nature and human reasoning. Emerging during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century from a Christian milieu, Deism subsequently declined, giving way to atheism on one side and Unitarianism, which incorporated many of its notions, on the other.

However, modern Deism does not favour any particular culture: indeed it is open for people from all cultures to contribute to its development. All religions, whatever their claims to divine revelation, are man-made. They are shaped by and reflect the material and spiritual needs of the cultures that spawn them.

Problematically, too many religions promote themselves as the exclusive conduit whereby God and humans interact. Therefore, each regards all other religions as false with often disastrous consequences such as persecution and violence, in stark contradiction of the creeds supposedly being propagated.

Deism has no such difficulties because it makes no claims for divine revelation, rather it denies their validity. God, for Deists, is truly ineffable, so while they are able to speak about the divine they do not pretend to speak with or for the divine.

Everyone is born into a religious culture, even atheists: a militant British born* non-believer is as much a product of Christendom as the most faithful Trinitarian. That different conclusions have been drawn does not invalidate the fact that the society of which they are a part was fashioned by Christianity.

Had the same two people been born in Saudi Arabia, then one would be a devout Muslim, the other a culturally Muslim atheist. Repeat for any significant historical religion. Atheists stop believing in God, or are brought up by their families not to, but they still observe the religiously generated mores of their societies.

So what can a “Christian” Deist make of the Jesus tradition. The narrative is broadly known and has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the two thousand years of its telling. It has been the spiritual support of fascist regimes and the inspiration of liberation theology; and that’s just the Roman Catholic branch.

It seems Jesus was part of a radical movement led initially by John the Baptist aimed at establishing the Kingdom of God on earth exclusively for the Jews. Jesus is quoted as instructing disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles…go rather to the house of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5-7)

However, in coming into contact with Gentiles of various stripes he discovered they had the same hopes and ambitions as Jews. Subsequently, he revised his teaching to include all who agreed to love God and their neighbour.

He also rejected violence as a way of securing God’s Kingdom in favour of repentance and forgiveness. Jesus was bent on wholesale reform of Judaism and that brought him into direct conflict with the authorities.

Over the next four centuries much of what Jesus strove for was subverted by the religion developed in his name. He became deified and, by an arithmetical sleight of hand, one facet of the Trinity making up one God.

Actually, much of the narrative predates Jesus: the miraculous birth, the raising the dead, the death and resurrection, the sharing of bread and wine (or beer in ancient Egypt). These and other elements can be found in pre-existing religious traditions throughout the world.

It appears the Gospel authors, somewhat after the event, made use of such narrative memes to construct the story of Jesus. It was this that enabled Christianity to arise as it was based on established religious foundations.

So, what of Jesus? He can be interpreted as a “Deist” as he taught that which he discovered through his own reason and experience. And this is what he claimed others should do. “Everyone will be taught by God..” (John 6:45) & “Whoever is willing to do what God wants will know whether what I teach comes from God or whether I speak on my own authority.” (John 7:17)

The implication is clear, Jesus was to be judged through people’s own experience and reasoning, not against some spurious claim to mysterious authority as most religions stipulate: reason, not faith.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas there is the following:
“Jesus said, ‘If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
“When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty.” (Logia 3, The Gospel of Thomas. Translated by Marvin Meyer, Harper, 1992)

There are those who style themselves Christian Deists who draw deeply from this tradition. Even those whose Christianity remains largely cultural can find inspiration in knowing they aren’t rejecting a tradition wholesale, but moving it forward and allowing that tradition to be a creative element of their Deism.

However, there is no special linkage between Deism and Christianity or any other religion. Modern Deism draws on the one common element of all religions, that there is a God. What that means is an open question to which any answers or speculations cannot run counter to scientific thinking

Deism is inspired by the natural, not the supernatural.

 

* This refers to those who come from a culturally Christian background. It is appreciated their are British citizens from a wide variety of religious backgrounds.