Some of humanity’s technological innovations
are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic
bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or
concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human
enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good.
I’ve previously highlighted some of humanity’s best
moral and spiritual concepts, our shared moral core. Here, by way of
contrast, are some of the worst. These twelve dubious concepts promote
conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace. To
paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, they belong in the dustbin of history just as
soon as we can get them there.
01:
Chosen People
The term “Chosen People” typically refers to
the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised
Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many
sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as
the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they
themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time.
Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the
afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were
thought to bedescended directly from gods (in
contrast to everyone else).
Religious sects are inherently tribal and
divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by
promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer.
“Gang symbols” like special haircuts, attire, hand signals and jargon
differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to
both that insiders are inherently superior.
02: Heretics
Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the
medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally
suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken
from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves. Those
who don’t believe in a god are corrupt, doers of abominable deeds. “There is
none [among them] who does good,” says the Psalmist.
Islam teaches the concept of “dhimmitude” and
provides special rules for the subjugation of religious minorities, with
monotheists getting better treatment than polytheists. Christianity blurs together the
concepts of unbeliever and evildoer. Ultimately, heretics are a threat that
needs to be neutralized by conversion, conquest, isolation, domination, or—in
worst cases—mass murder.
03: Holy War
If war can be holy, anything goes. The
medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of
extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France,
promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as
crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries.
The Hebrew scriptures recount battle after battle in which their war God,
Yahweh, helps them to not only defeat but also exterminate the shepherding
cultures that occupy their “Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, like the
modern rise of ISIS, divine sanction let them kill the elderly and children,
burn orchards, and take virgin females as sexual slaves—all while retaining a
sense of moral superiority.
04: Blasphemy
Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are
inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. By
definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this
emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not, but death-to-blasphemers became part of
Shariah during medieval times.
The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or
avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other
horrors. As I write, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging
in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in batches of 50—while his wife and children plead
from Canada for the international community to do something.
05: Glorified Suffering
Picture secret societies of monks flogging
their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s
novel, The Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of
Christianity is that righteous torture—if it’s just intense and prolonged
enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of
crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief. Shia Muslims beat themselves with lashes and
chains during Aashura, a form of sanctified suffering called Matam that
commemorates the death of the martyr Hussein. Self-denial in the form of
asceticism and fasting is a part of both Eastern and Western religions, not
only because deprivation induces altered states but also because people believe
suffering somehow brings us closer to divinity.
Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain
came unbidden, and people had very little power to control it. An aspirin or
heating pad would have been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran, or Gita.
Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was
to lean in or make meaning of it. The problem, of course is that glorifying
suffering—turning it into a spiritual good—has made people more willing to
inflict it on not only themselves and their enemies but also those who are
helpless, including the ill or dying (as in the case of Mother Teresa and the American Bishops) and children (as in the child beating Patriarchy movement).
06: Genital Mutilation
Primitive people have used scarification and
other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history
records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional
perks—if you want to call them that. Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a
sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment
of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit
his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the
men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)
In Islam, painful male circumcision serves as
a rite of passage into manhood, initiation into a powerful club. By contrast,
in some Muslim cultures cutting away or burning the female clitoris and labia
ritually establishes the submission of women by reducing sexual arousal and
agency. An estimated 2 million girlsannually are subjected to the
procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, infection, painful urination
and death.
07: Blood Sacrifice
In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is
the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only Hindus continue (during the Festival of Gadhimai, goddess of power) and
some Muslims (during Eid al Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice) to ritually hack
and slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.
When our ancient ancestors slit the throats on
humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices
heavenward, many believed that they were literally feeding supernatural beings.
In time, in most religions, the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding
so much as they needed signs of devotion and penance. The residual child
sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes it is there) typically has this function. Christianity’s
persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all
lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the
last iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.
08: Hell
Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons,
monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could
conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to
satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into
a tool for coercing behavior and belief.
Most Buddhists see hell as a metaphor, a
journey into the evil inside the self, but the descriptions
of torturing monsters and levels of hell can be quite explicit.
Likewise, many Muslims and Christians hasten to assure that it is a real place,
full of fire and the anguish of non-believers. Some Christians have gone so far
as to insist that the screams of the damned can be heard from the center of the
Earth or that observing their anguish from afar will be one of the pleasures of
paradise.
09: Karma
Like hell, the concept of karma offers a
selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has
enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity
in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma sanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the
victim. If what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or cancer
patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must have done
something in either this life or a past one to bring their position on
themselves.
10: Eternal Life
To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea
of gem encrusted walls, streets of gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity
of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may have seemed like sheer bliss. But
it doesn’t take much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would
become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because
how could they change if they were perfect).
The real reason that the notion of eternal
life is such a bad invention, though, is the degree to which it diminishes and
degrades existence on this earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward, we can’t
see the intricate beauty beneath our feet. Devout believers put their spiritual
energy into preparing for a world to come rather than cherishing and stewarding
the one wild and precious world we have been given.
11: Male Ownership of Female Fertility
The notion of women as brood mares or children
as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of
childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional
religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in
marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the
origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female
martyrs.
As we approach the limits of our planetary
life support system and stare dystopia in the face, defining women as breeders
and children as assets becomes ever more costly. We now know that resource
scarcity is a conflict trigger and that demand for water and arable land is
growing even as both resources decline. And yet, a pope who claims to care
about the desperate poor lectures them against contraceptionwhile Muslim
leaders ban vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their enemies.
12: Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship)
Preliterate people handed down their best
guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition, and they made objects
of stone and wood, idols, to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was
good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were
free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written
word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas
into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness
to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam forbid
idol worship, but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern
believers practice—essentially—book worship, also known as bibliolatry.
“Because the faith of Islam is perfect, it
does not allow for any innovations to the religion,” says one young Muslim explaining his faith online. His statement betrays
a naïve lack of information about the origins of his own dogmas. But more
broadly, it sums up the challenge all religions face moving forward. Imagine if
a physicist said, “Because our understanding of physics is perfect, it does not
allow for any innovations to the field.”
Adherents who think their faith is perfect,
are not just naïve or ill informed. They are developmentally arrested, and in
the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age, a
time ofviolence, slavery, desperation and early death.
Ironically, the mindset that our sacred texts
are perfect betrays the very quest that drove our ancestors to write those
texts. Each of the men who wrote part of the Bible, Quran, or Gita took his
received tradition, revised it, and offered his own best articulation of what
is good and real. We can honor the quest of our spiritual ancestors, or we can
honor their answers, but we cannot do both.
Religious apologists often try to deny,
minimize, or explain away the sins of scripture and the evils of religious
history. “It wasn’t really slavery.” “That’s just the Old Testament.” “He
didn’t mean it that way.” “You have to understand how bad their enemies were.”
“Those people who did harm in the name of God weren’t real [Christians/Jews/Muslims].”
Such platitudes may offer comfort, but denying problems doesn’t solve them.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Change comes with introspection and insight, a
willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our
strengths and potential for growth.
In a world that is teeming with humanity,
armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones, we don’t
need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as
that of the 16th Century and much, much broader. It is only by acknowledging
religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best.
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