Is God for cavemen?
(By cavemen
I mean ignorant, primitive folks with a fondness for ridiculous but comforting superstitions and a primordial disposition for violence. Apologies in advance to the Geico caveguy.)
The answers may vary. If you have a firm grasp of history and a basic understanding of the world's religious traditions, you would say No. If your understanding of the issue is composed of a turgid mixture of smug condescension and talking points from the SparkNotes guide to the historical record, the answer might be Yes.
There is a certain kind of secular humanist who gives the large corps of thoughtful atheists a bad name. This is the sort of unbeliever who, quite literally, looks upon God-botherers as dim-witted Neanderthals. To him, believers are the members of the species whom evolution forgot. Their drooling makes the scriptures they mindlessly recite difficult to understand. Their intellectual dialogue is confined to vague grunting. Before sitting down to a meal, they must pause to wipe the blood of free-thinkers from their fangs. Etcetera, etcetera.
This attitude didn't develop in a vacuum. If one is seeking to prove that religion is the pursuit of barbarians, one has a lot of ammunition to work with. The pagans in the West had Huitzilopochtli, the bloodthirsty god who demanded human sacrifice. The pagans in the East had their amusements with Christians and lions. The Christians themselves own a long list of atrocities; digressions during the Crusades resulted in the slaughter of Jews here, the calculated sacking of Christian cities there. We associate Buddhism with Zen and Richard Gere ' benign forces, indeed. But one need only look at Sri Lanka to find Buddhists engaged in violent political struggles and the persecution of minority religions. Gandhi was Hindu, but so are the terrorists in India who pour fuel on the region's centuries-old conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The one thing these disparate groups of people have in common is a commitment to the spiritual life.
Against this, the minority of self-satisfied atheists presents its own views as the only way out for the beleaguered human race. Referring to themselves as brights they smugly insist that only an idiot could possibly conceive an interest in religion. Faith, they say, is a cancer on the world; the midwife of death and the mother of violence. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, not a few such commentators opined that the cause of terrorism was religion ' not just Islam, but all belief systems. If the world were composed entirely of brights human society would hum along like daddy's John Deere mower.
Luckily, most nonbelievers do not take such an uneducated position; their understanding of the various spiritual traditions goes further than a cursory glance at history's headlines. They know that certain aspects of religions are frequently distorted. The concept of jihad does exist in Islam, for instance, but Muhammad himself said the most important jihad was the believer's internal struggle against his own weaknesses. They know that the Spanish Inquisition ' an episode frequently used to castigate the Catholic Church ' was a tool of the state, which proceeded with its business over the objections of Pope Sixtus IV.
They also know that the record shows no improvement in human affairs when impiety rules the day. The philosophers of the French Revolution adhered to Enlightenment principles of rationality and despised the church; during the French Revolution, the more radical free thinkers invaded Notre Dame Cathedral, desecrated the altar and turned it into a temple of Reason. In a move that would have made the Taliban proud, they smashed statues and destroyed a number of other treasures; this tragedy was followed by the famous bloodbath of the Reign of Terror. It's safe to say that the only thing humming during this period was Madame Guillotine.
It would be unfair to claim that this disaster was the natural result of anti-religious ideas. But it's equally unfair to blame religion for similar fiascoes. The reality is that all humans, while having the best of intentions, are ultimately subject to the tendency to embrace wickedness. In the Christian tradition, this is commonly referred to as original sin. The secular tradition doesn't quite have an equivalent term.
Let's just say that everybody has a little Neanderthal in them.
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Maggie Kostendt
