Why religion is not the root of all evil
The reason it persists is because it offers morality, a sense of right and wrong.
I have always been amused by the aunt or uncle who, no matter what the issue being discussed was, would say, "Of course, our religion has the answer." These days, though, such aunts and uncles have been joined by a vociferous gang of people who will immediately say, "Of course, religion is the problem."
People will object, and suggest that the religious have a far bloodier history than the anti-religious. This is true, but it is only so because the religious have a longer history than the anti-religious.
The history of the USSR, of the Chinese Communist Party and the Khmer Rouge, all of whom targeted (the CCP still often targets) religious people, using means of persecution from imprisonment to torture to straight out murder, leaves me unconvinced that humanity without religion is much better than humanity with religion.
Certainly the horrors of the last few generations, including both the World Wars and the Cold War, were driven by non-religious goals. The great dictators, whether Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin or Mao, did not need religion as an excuse for mass murder, although in some cases religious organisations were complicit in their crimes.
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| Hitler, Stalin or Mao, did not need religion as an excuse for mass murder. |
All of which is to say that I find the idea unconvincing that religion is the root of all evil, and if we were to banish it, mankind would suddenly burst into songs of universal brotherhood or sisterhood.
But it is no real argument to say something is no less bad than another, the real question is, "What good is religion?"
For a lot of people the answer is, "Nothing at all." Both secularists who believe in some form of, "Everybody has their own belief and they should be kept private," to those firmly against all religion, the role of faith is either negative, or unimportant. This flies in the face of logic.
If religions had no useful function, or if they had only negative outcomes, why would they last? Religions seem to be among the most resilient of human activities. Among the earliest things crafted by human hands were religious figurines. Although storytelling (cave paintings) and conflict (tools of murder/war) seem to predate them.
It seems to be a dubious proposition that something with no good qualities lasted so long. Of course, there is another point of view, one which suggests that humans are on an upward path, and that we understand better now than our ancestors ever did. This line of thought is for the illiterate.
Anybody who has picked up a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or read Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War, knows that intelligence did not emerge in the last century, or even the last millennium. Considering we have a crass idiot like Donald Trump in competition for the post of the most powerful position on earth, it could be argued that intelligence has actually declined.
Jokes apart, those that do not assign any value to religion, have no real explanation for its resilience, except possibly, the gullibility of humans. Certainly New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins seem to believe that if they point at the sky and yell loudly, "There’s no guy with a beard up there," the poor religious fools will snap out of their idiocy.
No, the reason that religion persists is because it offers something of value, and that something is called morality, a sense of right and wrong. A number of atheists will take offence at this, and will assert that one can be perfectly moral without being religious. They are wrong. A morality is based on principles of behaviour that are not obvious, and may not have any physical meaning.
The great Terry Pratchett narrated a conversation in one of his books, Hogfather, that captures this precisely. It is between a character called Susan and Death (whose voice is written in all caps):
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"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET — Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY."
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The belief in ideals such as justice and mercy is not natural. We do not find these things in the wild. They cannot be isolated from the world, nor will any experiment reveal them. They are, though, necessary for us to have a society. Religions, at their core, are a way to transmit these values across generations, of ways of being, and ways to create meaning in a life, which, prima facie, has no meaning at all.
We are born, we live and we die. It is not possible to deduce a moral code from that. There is no logic to life, or to consciousness, or to death. These are not things that thinking has helped us to resolve, because they are unresolvable. So we tell stories, and with those stories we create meaning. The community of people that believe in the truths embedded in such stories is called a religion. These stories are modified, added to, adapted, and sometimes shaved off.
Individuals can break off, can create stories of their own, and a complex moral framework, but this requires skill, thought, imagination and will – not attributes that are commonly available. Just flip on the TV and take a look at the purple-faced men (and the occasional woman) yelling at each other. Do you think they have the capacity of creating a moral framework, or even abiding by one?
Those that have formed a moral framework outside of religion are rare. Most others will go along with what they are told.
This point, actually, is what makes religion incredibly important. Many people are under the false impression that being a law-abiding citizen makes one a moral one. Such belief ignores the fact that most of the great crimes have been legal ones. Whether it was colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, the vast murders conducted by Stalin or Mao, or the South African apartheid regime – these were all "legal".
The people who went along with them were not "criminals", in fact it was the small moral minority who resisted, who were branded as criminals and are now considered heroes.
It is no coincidence that Hitler won the least number of votes from Catholic regions, where a strong church network – despite the complicity of the then Pope – managed to push back against the state’s criminality. It is no coincidence that the Chinese state cannot abide the Dalai Lama. Where the state itself is engaged in criminality, a moral order is repugnant to it.
None of this, of course, makes religions above criticism, or the religious naturally moral. The content of faith, and the conduct of the faithful, have to be open to debate. At the end of the day, all religions promise to make a believer a better person. If they do not, if the result of some beliefs are obviously harmful, these are on their own terms open for debate.
But those who can see no value in religion at all are unlikely to convince somebody of religious bent to take their criticism seriously. Like the above-mentioned uncle or aunt, and our phalanx of New Atheists, they are likely to be yelling past each other, both saying things that the other finds preposterous, and managing only to convince the other is evil, or foolish, or both.