sábado, 15 de enero de 2011

About Christianity and Paganism

About Christianity and Paganism

Odin and all his names: to me, the new Roman religion is little different from the old Roman religion. The names of the gods have changes from, oh, Jove and Rhea to, say, Jesus and Maria With some Judaic aspects tossed in. You have to investigate the ancients as I have and draw your own conclusions. Your noble religion is built upon a foundation that is equal parts Judaic and pagan.

Murgis: Well, yes and no, the pagan elements of Christianity are merely material, say like a means of propagation or a bridge, while the meaning of transcendence is light years ahead from Paganism because of the particular Christian value of the individual soul, among others.

Christian ritual developed when, in the third century, the Church left the Catacombs. Many forms of self-expression must need to be identical, in varying times, places, cults, as long as human nature is the same. Water, oil, light, incense, singing, procession, prostration, decoration of altars, vestments of priests, are naturally at the service of universal religious instinct. Little enough, however, was directly borrowed by the Church — nothing, without being "baptized", as was the Pantheon. In all these things, the spirit is the essential: the Church assimilates to herself what she takes, or, if she cannot adapt, she rejects it. The cult of saints and relics is based on natural instinct and sanctioned by the lives, death, and tombs (in the first instance) of martyrs, and by the dogma of the Communion of Saints; it is not developed from definite instances of hero-worship as a general rule, though often a local martyr-cult was purposely instituted to defeat (e.g.) an oracle tenacious of pagan life.

Odin and all his names: emperor Alexander Severus had icons of Jesus, Moses, Apollonius, Apollo, Jove, etc. in his private sanctum and he was a swarthy emperor (Phoenician). 

Murgis: Yes, but not out of an allegedly natural Pagan tolerance but a marked Christian influence ( in spite of these signs of imperial goodwill, the Christians continued to suffer, even in this mild reign).

His education had been carefully conducted by Mammaea at Antioch, whither she invited, some time between 218 and 228, the great Christian teacher, Origen. Eurebius relates that she was "a very religious woman", and that Origenremained some time with her, instructing her in all that could serve to glorify the Lord and confirm His Divine teachings. It does not, however, follow that she was a Christian. Her son Alexander was certainly very favorable to the Christians. His historian, Lampridius, tells us several interesting details concerning this emperor's respect for the new religion. He placed in his private oratory (lararium) images of Abraham and Christ before those of other renowned persons, like Orpheus and Apollonius of Tyana (Vita Alex., xxix); he tolerated the free exercise of the Christian Faith ("Christianos esse passus est"); he recommended in the appointment of imperial governors the prudence and solicitude of the Christians in the selection of their bishops; he caused to be adjudged to them  a building site at Rome that the tavern-keepers (cauponarii) claimed, on the principle that it was better that: "And as you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner" to be engraved on the walls of the palace of the Caesars; he even cherished the idea of building a temple to Our Lord, but refrained when it was said to him that very soon all the other divinities would cease to be honored. should be in some way honored there than that the site should revert to such uses; he caused the famous words of Christ in spite of these signs of imperial goodwill, the  Christians continued to suffer, even in this mild reign. Some writers think that it was then that St. Cecilia died for the Christian faith. His principal jurisconsult, Ulpian, is said by Lactantius  to have codified, in his work on the duties of a proconsul (De officio proconsulis), all anti-Christian imperial legislation (rescripta principum), in order that the magistrates might more easily apply the common law (ut doceret quibus oportet eos paenis affici qui se cultores Dei confiterentur). Fragments of this cruel code, from the seventh of the (ten) lost books of Ulpian on the proconsular office may yet be seen in the "Digests" (I, tit. xvi, xvii, tit. II, 3; xvliii, tit. IV, 1, and tit. xiii, 6). The surname "Severus",  no less than the manner in which both he and Mammaea met their death, indicate the temper of his administration. He sought to establish at Rome  good order and moral decency in public and private life, and made some use of his power as censor morum by nominating twelve officials (curatores urbis) for the execution of his wise dispositions. He seems to have been a disciple of the prevailing "religious syncretism" or eclecticism, established at Rome by his predecessor Elagabalus as the peculiar contribution of this remarkable Syro-Roman family to the slow but certain transformation of the great pagan Empire into a mighty instrument of Divine Providence for the healing of the moral ills that were then reaching fullness. All historians agree as to his life, and the moral elevation of his public and private principles; Christian historians are usually of opinion that these elements of virtue were owing to the education he received under the direction of Origen.

Odin and all his names: Apostates Like Julian.  When all Julian wanted to do was bring the Christians back into line; he didn't deny Christ per se, but he was a follower of the paganism. 

Murgis: False! The suspicious Emperor Constantius sent Julian later to the castle of Macellum in Cappadocia. Julian received a Christian training, but the recollection of the murder of his relatives sowed in him a bitter resentment against the authors of that massacre, and he extended this hatred to the Christian in general. 

Odin and all his names: Christians ran amok in Julian's empire. When the grand empire was already dying, Julian didn't want to supress Christians. He just wanted to give pagans back their rights that were taken away by Constantine and the sons of Constantine (i.e. freedom of religion).  

Murgis: False again! The neo-Platonist, Maximus of Ephesus, dazzled him by his fantastic teachings and prophesied his destined task, the restoration of paganism. When, at the close of 354, Constantius recalled Gallus Caesar to Italy, and had him beheaded for his manifold cruelties, Julian was taken a state prisoner to Milan, but, gaining the sympathy of the Empress Eusebia, secured permission to visit in 355 the schools of Athens, where Greek philosophy and rhetoric were enjoying their last period of prosperity. Julian now went over completely to the so-called Hellenism, and was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. With Julian the dynasty of Constantine came to an end. He was rather a philosophical littérateur of a somewhat visionary character, than a great ruler whose actions were the dictates of strong will and principles. The good beginnings of a just government which he showed in Gaul were not maintained when he was sole ruler. 

Odin and all his names: read his own words.

Murgis: Although his personal life was unostentatious, he was passionate, arbitrary, vain, and prejudiced, blindly submissive to the rhetoricians and magicians. Some of Julian's many controversial writings, orations, and letters have been preserved, showing his discordant, subjective character.

Odin and all his names: not all pagans are igorant shits.

Murgis: we only need turn to the great works of pagan antiquity to see that the best among the pagans were sincere lovers of truth and that their contributions are remarkable even though they were inevitably incomplete. They did not benefit from Christian revelation, but their works prove that there is a natural law inscribed in man\\'s heart, and that men of good will can easily read its dictates. Plato was such a man.
Plato devoted most of his writings to education. His two major works, The Republic and The Laws, are dedicated to this all-important topic. This article aims partly at etching the accomplishments of this great pagan. But the best among the pagans were open to the light, and made contributions that keep their full value. But there is an abyss between not knowing the light and rejecting it. The latter case applies to many in our society: Having received the plenitude of revealed truth, they do not find it palatable. This is why the world in which we live is threatened by dissolution. It has betrayed the unique heritage that it has received. Being an apostate is much worse than being a pagan. The pagans were ante lucem (before the light). Today, some leading educators try to extinguish what is left of the light of the Gospel.

The elaborate schemes of Aristotle and Plato are subordinated to state interest. Though based upon "sacred" books, education in ancient times, when organized, found these highly mythological, as in Greece or Rome, or rationalized, as in Confucian spheres of influence. Both Greeks and Romans attached great importance to a complete education, supported it with state patronage (the Ptolemies) state initiative and direction (the Antonines), and conceived for it high ideals (the "turning of the soul's eye towards the light", Plato, "Republic", 515 b); yet, failing to appreciate the value of the individual soul, they made education in fact merely utilitarian, the formation of a citizen being barely more complete than under the narrow and rigid systems of Sparta and Crete. The restriction, in classical Greece, of education among women to the Hetairai is a fact significant of false ideal and disastrous in results (J. B. Mahaffy, "Old Gk. Educ.", London, 1881; S. S. Laurie, "Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Educ.", London, 1900; L. Grasberger, "Erziehung u. Unterricht im klass. Alterum", , , "L'instruct. publique dans l'empire romain." in "Rev. de Deux Mondes", March, 1884; 3. P. Rossignol, "De l'educ. des hommes et des femmes chez les anciens", Paris, 1888). Rome deifies herself and her governors, and the emperor-cult dominates army and province, and welds together aristocracy and the masses. It is hard to judge of the practical effects; obviously autocracy profited, the development of obedience, loyalty, courage in the governed (Rome; Japan) being undoubted. Yet the system reposed upon a lie. The scandals of the court, the familiarities of the camp, the inevitable accidents of human life, dulled the halo of the god-king. Far more stable were the organizations resulting from the subtle polities devised by Greek experiment and speculation, and embodied in Roman law. Aristotle's political philosophy, almost designed — as Plato's frankly was — for the city state, was carried on through the Stoic vision of the City of Zeus, of world-empire, into the concrete majesty of Rome, which was itself to pass, when confronted in Christianity with that individual conscience it would not recognize, into the Civitas Dei of an Augustine.

(To be continued)

viernes, 14 de enero de 2011

The Scholars and the Goddess

The Scholars and the Goddess



Historically speaking, the "ancient" rituals of the Goddess movement are almost certainly bunk
WICCA, sometimes known as the Goddess movement, Goddess spirituality, or the Craft, appears to be the fastest-growing religion in America. Thirty years ago only a handful of Wiccans existed. One scholar has estimated that there are now more than 200,000 adherents of Wicca and related "neopagan" faiths in the United States, the country where neopaganism, like many formal religions, is most flourishing. Wiccans -- who may also call themselves Witches (the capital W is meant to distance them from the word's negative connotations, because Wiccans neither worship Satan nor practice the sort of malicious magic traditionally associated with witches) or just plain pagans (often with a capital P) -- tend to be white, middle-class, highly educated, and politically involved in liberal and environmental causes. About a third of them are men. Wiccan services have been held on at least fifteen U.S. military bases and ships.

Many come to Wicca after reading The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a best-selling introduction to Wiccan teachings and rituals written by Starhawk (née Miriam Simos), a Witch (the term she prefers) from California. Starhawk offers a vivid summary of the history of the faith, explaining that witchcraft is "perhaps the oldest religion extant in the West" and that it began "more than thirty-five thousand years ago," during the last Ice Age. The religion's earliest adherents worshipped two deities, one of each sex: "the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life," and the "Horned God," a male hunter who died and was resurrected each year. Male shamans "dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds," but priestesses "presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess." All over prehistoric Europe people made images of the Goddess, sometimes showing her giving birth to the "Divine Child -- her consort, son, and seed." They knew her as a "triple Goddess" -- practitioners today usually refer to her as maiden, mother, crone -- but fundamentally they saw her as one deity. Each year these prehistoric worshippers celebrated the seasonal cycles, which led to the "eight feasts of the Wheel": the solstices, the equinoxes, and four festivals -- Imbolc (February 2, now coinciding with the Christian feast of Candlemas), Beltane (May Day), Lammas or Lughnasad (in early August), and Samhain (our Halloween).

This nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and egalitarian culture prevailed in what is now Western Europe for thousands of years, Starhawk wrote, until Indo-European invaders swept across the region, introducing warrior gods, weapons designed for killing human beings, and patriarchal civilization. Then came Christianity, which eventually insinuated itself among Europe's ruling elite. Still, the "Old Religion" lived, often in the guise of Christian practices.

Starting in the fourteenth century, Starhawk argued, religious and secular authorities began a 400-year campaign to eradicate the Old Religion by exterminating suspected adherents, whom they accused of being in league with the devil. Most of the persecuted were women, generally those outside the social norm -- not only the elderly and mentally ill but also midwives, herbal healers, and natural leaders, those women whose independent ways were seen as a threat. During "the Burning Times," Starhawk wrote, some nine million were executed. The Old Religion went more deeply underground, its traditions passed down secretly in families and among trusted friends, until it resurfaced in the twentieth century. Like their ancient forebears, Wiccans revere the Goddess, practice shamanistic magic of a harmless variety, and celebrate the eight feasts, or sabbats, sometimes in the nude.

Subject to slight variations, this story is the basis of many hugely popular Goddess handbooks. It also informs the writings of numerous secular feminists -- Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French, Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English -- to whom the ascendancy of "the patriarchy" or the systematic terrorization of strong, independent women by means of witchcraft trials are historical givens. Moreover, elements of the story suffuse a broad swath of the intellectual and literary fabric of the past hundred years, from James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the novels of D. H. Lawrence, from the writings of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot to Jungian psychology and the widely viewed 1988 public-television series The Power of Myth.
 
In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess -- a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief.

IN the past few years two well-respected scholars have independently advanced essentially the same theory about Wicca's founding. In 1998 Philip G. Davis, a professor of religion at the University of Prince Edward Island, published Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, which argued that Wicca was the creation of an English civil servant and amateur anthropologist named Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964). Davis wrote that the origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among the German and French Romantics -- mostly men -- in natural forces, especially those linked with women. Gardner admired the Romantics and belonged to a Rosicrucian society called the Fellowship of Crotona -- a group that was influenced by several late-nineteenth-century occultist groups, which in turn were influenced by Freemasonry. In the 1950s Gardner introduced a religion he called (and spelled) Wica. Although Gardner claimed to have learned Wiccan lore from a centuries-old coven of witches who also belonged to the Fellowship of Crotona, Davis wrote that no one had been able to locate the coven and that Gardner had invented the rites he trumpeted, borrowing from rituals created early in the twentieth century by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley, among others. Wiccans today, by their own admission, have freely adapted and embellished Gardner's rites.


In 1999 Ronald Hutton, a well-known historian of pagan British religion who teaches at the University of Bristol, published The Triumph of the Moon. Hutton had conducted detailed research into the known pagan practices of prehistory, had read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts, and had interviewed many of Gardner's surviving contemporaries. Hutton, like Davis, could find no conclusive evidence of the coven from which Gardner said he had learned the Craft, and argued that the "ancient" religion Gardner claimed to have discovered was a mélange of material from relatively modern sources. Gardner seems to have drawn on the work of two people: Charles Godfrey Leland, a nineteenth-century amateur American folklorist who professed to have found a surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany, and Margaret Alice Murray, a British Egyptologist who herself drew on Leland's ideas and, beginning in the 1920s, created a detailed framework of ritual and belief. From his own experience Gardner included such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and "degrees" of priesthood. He incorporated various Tarot-like paraphernalia, including wands, chalices, and the five-pointed star, which, enclosed in a circle, is the Wiccan equivalent of the cross. Gardner also wove in some personal idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis," "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical." Another was a taste for nudism: Gardner had belonged to a nudist colony in the 1930s, and he prescribed that many Wiccan rituals be carried out "skyclad." This was a rarity even among occultists: no ancient pagan religion is known, or was thought in Gardner's time, to have regularly called for its rites to be conducted in the nude. Some Gardnerian innovations have sexual and even bondage-and-discipline overtones. Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the liturgy for Beltane and other feasts (although most participants simulated the act with a dagger -- another of Gardner's penchants -- and a chalice). Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" (according to one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone), breasts, and lips.

Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices -- much less the veneration of pagan gods -- have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century. There is now widespread consensus among historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions, and even charms and spells. The idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation.

Hutton has also pointed out a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan liturgy. "The equinoxes seem to have no native pagan festivals behind them and became significant only to occultists in the nineteenth century," Hutton told me. "There is still no proven pagan feast that stood as ancestor to Easter" -- a festival that modern pagans celebrate as Ostara, the vernal equinox.

Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited -- nine million executed over four centuries -- derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel (Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times"). Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40,000. The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors (1996), by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, 1550 to 1630, and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation. The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens (often other women), not clerical or secular authorities. In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion.

If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale. Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the 1990s, with the appearance of Davis's book and then of Hutton's, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival. "We don't do what Witches did a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago," Starhawk told me. "We're not an unbroken tradition like the Native Americans." In fact, many Wiccans now describe those who take certain elements of the movement's narrative literally as "Wiccan fundamentalists."

AN even more controversial strand of the challenge to the Wiccan narrative concerns the very existence of ancient Goddess worship. One problem with the theory of Goddess worship, scholars say, is that the ancients were genuine polytheists. They did not believe that the many gods and goddesses they worshipped merely represented different aspects of single deities. In that respect they were like animistic peoples of today, whose cosmologies are crowded with discrete spirits. "Polytheism was an accepted reality," says Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College. "Everywhere you went, there were shrines to different gods." The gods and goddesses had specific domains of power over human activity: Aphrodite/Venus presided over love, Artemis/Diana over hunting and childbirth, Ares/Mars over war, and so forth. Not until the second century, with the work of the Roman writer Apuleius, was one goddess, Isis, identified with all the various goddesses and forces of nature.

As Christianity spread, the classical deities ceased to be the objects of religious cults, but they continued their reign in Western literature and art. Starting about 1800 they began to be associated with semi-mystical natural forces, rather than with specific human activities. In the writings of the Romantics, for example (John Keats's "Endymion" comes to mind), Diana presided generally over the woodlands and the moon. "Mother Earth" became a popular literary deity. In 1849 the German classicist Eduard Gerhard made the assertion, for the first time in modern Western history, that all the ancient goddesses derived from a single prehistoric mother goddess. In 1861 the Swiss jurist and writer Johann Jakob Bachofen postulated that the earliest human civilizations were matriarchies. Bachofen's theory influenced a wide range of thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, a generation of British intellectuals, and probably Carl Jung.
By the early 1900s scholars generally agreed that the great goddess and earth mother had reigned supreme in ancient Mediterranean religions, and was toppled only when ethnic groups devoted to father gods conquered her devotees. In 1901 the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans excavated the Minoan palace at Knossos, on Crete, uncovering colorful frescoes of bull dancers and figurines of bare-breasted women carrying snakes. From this scant evidence Evans concluded that the Minoans, who preceded the Zeus-venerating Greeks by several centuries, had worshipped the great goddess in her virgin and mother aspects, along with a subordinate male god who was her son and consort. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s archaeologists excavating Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in Europe and even Pueblo Indian settlements in Arizona almost reflexively proclaimed the female figurines they found to be images of the great goddess.

The archaeologists drew on the work of late-nineteenth-century anthropologists. A belief that Stone Age peoples (and their "primitive" modern counterparts) did not realize that men played a role in human procreation was popular among many early British and American anthropologists. Female fertility was an awesome mystery, and women, as the sole sources of procreation, were highly honored. This notion -- that hunter-gatherer societies couldn't figure out the birds and the bees -- has since been discredited, but "it was very intriguing to people mired in Victorianism," according to Cynthia Eller, a professor of religious studies at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, who is writing a book on the subject. "They wanted to find a blissful sexual communism, a society in which chastity and monogamy were not important," Eller says. It was the same general impulse that led Margaret Mead to conclude in the 1920s that Samoan adolescents indulged in guilt-free promiscuity before marriage.

Archaeological expeditions even in the latter half of the century bolstered the notion of a single goddess figure from antiquity. In 1958 a British archaeologist named James Mellaart made a major find: a 9,000-year-old agricultural settlement that once housed up to 10,000 people at Çatalhöyük, one of the largest of several mounds near the modern-day town of Konya, in southern Turkey. Mellaart unearthed a number of female figurines that he deemed to be representations of the mother goddess. One was a headless female nude sitting on what appears to be a throne and flanked by leopards, with a protuberant belly that could be interpreted as a sign of pregnancy. The Çatalhöyük settlement contained no fortifications, and its houses were nearly all the same size, seemingly implying just the sort of nonviolent, egalitarian social system that Goddess-worshippers believe prevailed. Çatalhöyük became the Santiago de Compostela of the Goddess movement, with hundreds of pilgrims visiting the settlement annually. The enthroned nude is a revered Goddess-movement object. Mellaart's conclusions were bolstered by the work of the late Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-born archaeologist who taught at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1989. Gimbutas specialized in the Neolithic Balkans. Like Mellaart, she tended to attach religious meaning to the objects she uncovered; the results of her Balkan digs were published in 1974 under the title The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. In 1982 Gimbutas reissued her book as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, and she began seeing representations of the Goddess, and of female reproductive apparatus (wombs, Fallopian tubes, amniotic fluid), in a huge array of Stone Age artifacts, even in abstractions such as spirals and dots.

In 1993 Ian Hodder, a Stanford University archaeologist, began re-excavating Çatalhöyük, using up-to-date techniques including isotopic analysis of the skeletons found in the graves. "Your bones reflect what you eat, even if you died nine thousand years ago," Hodder says. "And we found that men and women had different diets. The men ate more meat, and the women ate more plant food. You can interpret that in many ways. A rich protein diet is helpful for physical activity, so you could say that the men ate better -- but you could also argue that the women preferred plant food. What it does suggest is that there was a division of labor and activity" -- not necessarily the egalitarian utopia that Goddess worshippers have assumed.
Hodder's team also discovered numerous human figurines of the male or an indeterminate sex, and found that the favorite Çatalhöyük representation was not women but animals. None of the art the team uncovered conclusively depicts copulation or childbirth. Hodder, along with most archaeologists of his generation, endeavors to assess objects in the context of where they were unearthed -- a dramatic change from the school of archaeology that was in vogue at the time of Mellaart's and Gimbutas's excavations. He points out that almost all the female figurines at Çatalhöyük came from rubbish heaps; the enthroned nude woman was found in a grain bin. "Very little in the context of the find suggests that they were religious objects," Hodder says. "They were maybe more like talismans, something to do with daily life." Furthermore, excavations of sites in Turkey, Greece, and Southeastern Europe that were roughly contemporaneous with the Çatalhöyük settlement have yielded evidence -- fortifications, maces, bones bearing dagger marks -- that Stone Age Europe, contrary to the Goddess narrative, probably saw plenty of violence.

Lynn Meskell, an archaeologist at Columbia University who has published detailed critiques of Gimbutas's work, complains that Gimbutas and her devotees have promoted a romanticized "essentialist" view of women, defining them primarily in terms of fecundity and maternal gentleness. "You have people saying that Çatalhöyük was this peaceful, vegetarian society," says Meskell. "It's ludicrous. Neolithic settlements were not utopias in any sense at all."

The research of archaeologists like Hodder and Meskell has sparked heated rebuttals from Goddess theorists. "We know that even in the West most of art is religious art," says Riane Eisler, the author of the best seller The Chalice and the Blade (1987). "Don't tell me that suddenly these are dolls. Give me a break! You have a woman at Çatalhöyük sitting on a throne giving birth, and you want to call it a doll?" In her introduction to a new edition of The Spiral Dance, Starhawk -- who is working on a film about Gimbutas -- complains about "biased and inaccurate" academic scholarship aimed at discrediting her movement. Perhaps the most painful attack, as far as many Wiccans are concerned, came last June, with the publication of Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. In 1993 Eller had published a sympathetic sociological study of feminist spirituality, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, which many in the movement put on their required-reading lists. Her recent work thus carries a tinge of betrayal, inasmuch as it puts her firmly in Hodder and Meskell's camp. Eller points out that almost no serious archaeologist working today believes that these ancient cultures were necessarily matriarchal or even woman-focused, and most do not interpret any of the things unearthed by Mellaart and Gimbutas as necessarily depicting goddesses or genitalia. Despite their ire, both Starhawk and Eisler, along with many of their adherents, seem to be moving toward a position that accommodates, without exactly accepting, the new Goddess scholarship, much as they have done with respect to the new research about their movement's beginnings. If the ancients did not literally worship a mother goddess, perhaps they worshipped her in a metaphoric way, by recognizing the special female capacity for bearing and nourishing new life -- a capacity to which we might attach the word "goddess" even if prehistoric peoples did not. "Most of us look at the archaeological artifacts and images as a source of art, or beauty, or something to speculate about, because the images fit with our theory that the earth is sacred, and that there is a cycle of birth and growth and regeneration," Starhawk told me. "I believe that there was an Old Religion that focused on the female, and that the culture was roughly egalitarian."

SUCH faith may explain why Wicca is thriving despite all the things about it that look like hokum: it gives its practitioners a sense of connection to the natural world and of access to the sacred and beautiful within their own bodies. I am hardly the first to notice that Wicca bears a striking resemblance to another religion -- one that also tells of a dying and rising god, that venerates a figure who is both virgin and mother, that keeps, in its own way, the seasonal "feasts of the Wheel," that uses chalices and candles and sacred poetry in its rituals. Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity. "It has the advantages of both Catholicism and Unitarianism," observes Allen Stairs, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in religion and magic. "Wicca allows one to wear one's beliefs lightly but also to have a rich and imaginative religious life."

"Diotima Mantineia," age forty-eight, is the associate editor of the Web site The Witches' Voice, found at witchvox.com (she would not divulge her real name, partly because she lives in a southern town that she believes is unfriendly to neopagans). She summed up her feelings on the debunking of the official Wiccan narrative this way: "It doesn't matter to me how old Wicca is, because when I connect with Deity as Lady and Lord, I know that I am connecting with something much larger and vaster than I can fully comprehend. The Creator of this universe has been manifesting to us for all time, in the forms of gods and goddesses that we can relate to. This personal connection with Deity is what is meaningful. For me, Wicca works to facilitate that connection, and that is what really matters."



Charlotte Allen is the senior editor of Crisis magazine and is a contributing writer for Lingua Franca. She is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998).

viernes, 12 de noviembre de 2010

Does Religion Cause Violence

Everyone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote
violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western
societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from
limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in
the Middle East.



Tonight I am going to challenge that conventional wisdom, but not in the ways it is usually challenged by people who identify themselves as religious. Such people will sometimes argue that the real motivation behind so-called religious violence is in fact economic and political, not religious. Others will argue that people who do violence are, by definition, not religious. The Crusader is not really a Christian, for example, because he doesn’t really understand the meaning of Christianity. I don’t think that either of these arguments works. In the first place, it is impossible to separate out religious from economic and political motives in such a way that religious motives are innocent of violence. How could one, for example, separate religion from politics in Islam, when Muslims themselves make no such separation? In the second place, it may be the case that the Crusader has misappropriated the true message of Christ, but one cannot therefore excuse Christianity of all responsibility. Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the empirically observable actions of Christians. So I have no intention of excusing Christianity or Islam or any other faith system from careful analysis. Given certain conditions, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths can and do contribute to violence.

But what is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge tonight. I will do so in two steps.

First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality. Everyone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East.

INTRODUCTION



THE INCOHERENCE OF THE ARGUMENT

The English-speaking academic world has been inundated – especially since September 11, 2001 – by books and articles attempting to explain why religion has a peculiar tendency toward violence. They come from authors in many different fields –sociology, political science, religious studies, history, theology. I don’t have time tonight to analyze each argument in depth, but I will examine a variety of examples – taken from some of the most prominent books on the subject – of what they all have in common: an inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence.

Charles Kimball’s book When Religion Becomes Evil begins with the following claim: “It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.” Kimball apparently considers this claim too trite to need proving, for he makes no attempt to reinforce it with evidence. If one were to try to prove it, one would need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of history. Kimball does not identify those rival institutional forces, but an obvious contender might be political institutions: tribes, empires, kingdoms, fiefs, states, and so on. The problem is that religion was not considered something separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then primarily in the West. What sense could be made of separating out Egyptian or Roman “religion” from the Egyptian or Roman “state”? Is Aztec “politics” to blame for their bloody human sacrifices, or is Aztec “religion” to blame? As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark 1962 book The Meaning and End of Religion, “religion” as a discrete category of human activity separable from “culture,” “politics,” and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West. In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept “religion,” Smith was compelled to conclude that in premodern Europe there was no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as “religion,” and furthermore there is no “closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern West.” Since Smith’s book, Russell McCutcheon, Richard King, Derek Peterson, and a host of other scholars have demonstrated how European colonial bureaucrats invented the concept of religion in the course of categorizing non-Western colonized cultures as irrational and antimodern. Now that we do have a separate concept of “religion,” though, is the concept a coherent one? Jonathan Z. Smith writes “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study... Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” Brian C. Wilson says that the inability to define religion is “almost an article of methodological dogma” in the field of religious studies. Timothy Fitzgerald argues that there is no coherent concept of religion; the term should be regarded as a form of mystification and scrapped. We have one group of scholars convinced that religion causes violence, and another group of scholars who do not think that there is such a thing as “religion,” except as an intellectual construct of highly dubious value.

The former group carries on as if the latter did not exist. Kimball is one of the few who acknowledges the problem, but he dismisses it as merely semantic. Describing how flustered his students become when he asks them to write a definition of “religion,” Kimball asserts “Clearly these bright students know what religion is”; they just have trouble defining it. After all, Kimball assures us, “Religion is a central feature of human life. We all see many indications of it every day, and we all know it when we see it.” When an academic says such a thing, you should react as you would when a used car salesman says “Everybody knows this is a good car.” The fact is that we don’t all know it when we see it. A survey of religious studies literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, free market ideology, and a hostof other institutions and practices treated under the rubric “religion.” If one tries to limit the definition of religion to belief in God or gods, then certain belief systems that are usually called “religions” are eliminated, such as Theravada Buddhism and Confucianism. If the definition is expanded to include such belief systems, then all sorts of practices, including many that are usually labeled “secular,” fall under the definition of religion. Many institutions and ideologies that do not explicitly refer to God or gods function in the same way as those that do. The case for nationalism as a religion, for example, has been made repeatedly from Carlton Hayes’ 1960 classic Nationalism:

A Religion to more recent works by Peter van der Veer, Talal Asad, Carolyn Marvin, and others. Carolyn Marvin argues that “nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.”



At this point I can imagine an objection being raised that goes like this: “So the concept of religion has some fuzzy edges. So does every concept. We might not be able to nail down, once and for all and in all cases, what a ‘culture’ is, or what qualifies as ‘politics,’ for example, but nevertheless the concepts remain useful. All may not agree on the periphery of these concepts, but sufficient agreement on the center of such concepts makes them practical and functional. Most people know that ‘religion’ includes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the major ‘world religions.’ Whether or not Buddhism or Confucianism fits is a boundary dispute best left up to scholars who make their living splitting hairs.”

This appears to be a common sense response, but it misses the point rather completely. In the first place, when some scholars question whether the category of religion is useful at all, it is more than a boundary dispute. There are some who do not believe there is a center. In the second place, and much more significantly, the problem with the “religion and violence” arguments is not that their working definitions of religion are too fuzzy. The problem is precisely the opposite. Their implicit definitions of religion are unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as a religion. Certain belief systems, like Islam, are condemned, while certain others, like nationalism, are arbitrarily ignored.

This becomes most apparent when the authors in question attempt to explain why religion is so prone to violence. Although theories vary, we can sort them into three categories: religion is absolutist, religion is divisive, and religion is irrational. Many authors appeal to more than one of these arguments. In the face of evidence that so-called “secular” ideologies and institutions can be just as absolutist, divisive, or irrational, these authors tend to erect an arbitrary barrier between “secular” and “religious” ideologies and institutions, and ignore the former.

Consider the case of the preeminent historian Martin Marty. In a book on public religion, Marty argues that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent. When it comes to defining what “religion” means, however, Marty lists seventeen different definitions of religion, then begs off giving his own definition, since, he says, “[s]cholars will never agree on the definition of religion.” Instead Marty gives a list of five “features” that mark a religion. He then proceeds to show how “politics” displays all five of the same features. Religion focuses our ultimate concern, and so does politics. Religion builds community, and so does politics. Religion appeals to myth and symbol, and politics “mimics” this appeal in devotion to the flag, war memorials, and so on. Religion uses rites and ceremonies such as circumcision and baptism, and “[p]olitics also depends on rites and ceremonies,” even in avowedly secular nations. Religions require followers to behave in certain ways, and “[p]olitics and governments also demand certain behaviors.”Marty offers five defining features of “religion,” and shows how “politics” fits all five. He is trying to show how closely intertwined religion and politics are, but he ends up demolishing any theoretical basis for separating the two. Nevertheless, he continues on to warn of the dangers of religion, while ignoring the violent tendencies of supposedly “secular” politics. For example, Marty cites the many cases of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were attacked, beaten, tarred, castrated, and imprisoned in the U.S. in the 1940s because they believed that followers of Jesus Christ should not salute a flag. One would think that he would draw the obvious conclusion that zealous nationalism can cause violence.

Instead, Marty concludes “it became obvious that religion, which can pose ‘us’ versus ‘them’... carries risks and can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena.” For Marty, “religion” refers not to the ritual vowing of allegiance to a flag, but only to the Jehovah’s Witnesses refusal to do so.

As you can see, we need not rely only on McCutcheon, Smith, King, Fitzgerald and the rest to show us that the religious/secular dichotomy is incoherent. Religion-and-violence theorists inevitably undermine their own distinctions. Take for example sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer’s book Terror in the Mind of God, perhaps the most widely influential academic book on religion and violence. According to Juergensmeyer, religion exacerbates the tendency to divide people into friends and enemies, good and evil, us and them, by ratcheting divisions up to a cosmic level. “What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless” is that it puts worldly conflicts in a “larger than life” context of “cosmic war.”Secular political conflicts – that is, “more rational” conflicts such as those over land– are of a fundamentally different character than those in which the stakes have been raised by religious absolutism to cosmic proportions. Religious violence differs from secular
violence in that it is symbolic, absolutist, and unrestrained by historical time.



However, keeping the notion of cosmic war separate from secular political war is impossible on Juergensmeyer’s own terms. Juergensmeyer undermines this distinction in the course of his own analysis. For example, what he says about cosmic war is virtually indistinguishable from what he says about war in general:

Looking closely at the notion of war, one is confronted with the idea of dichotomous opposition on an absolute scale... War suggests an all-or-nothing struggle against an enemy whom one assumes to be determined to destroy. No compromise is deemed possible. The very existence of the opponent is a threat, and until the enemy is either crushed or contained, one’s own existence cannot be secure. What is striking about a martial attitude is the certainty of one’s position and the willingness to defend it, or impose it on others, to the end.

Such certitude on the part of one side may be regarded as noble by those whose sympathies lie with it and dangerous by those who do not. But either way it is not rational. War provides an excuse not to compromise. In other words, “War provides a reason to be violent. This is true even if the worldly issues at heart in the dispute do not seem to warrant such a ferocious position.” The division between mundane secular war and cosmic war vanishes as fast as it was constructed. According to Juergensmeyer, war itself is a “worldview”; indeed, “The concept of war provides cosmology, history, and eschatology and offers the reins of political control.”“Like the rituals provided by religious traditions, warfare is a participatory drama that exemplifies – and thus explains – the most profound aspects of life.” Here war itself is a kind of religious practice.

At times, Juergensmeyer admits the difficulty of separating religious violence from mere political violence. “Much of what I have said about religious terrorism in this book may be applied to other forms of political violence – especially those that are ideological and ethnic in nature.”In Juergensmeyer’s earlier book The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, he writes “Secular nationalism, like religion, embraces what one scholar calls ‘a doctrine of destiny.’

One can take this way of looking at secular nationalism a step further and state flatly... that secular nationalism is ‘a religion.’ ”These are important concessions. If true, however, they subvert the entire basis of his argument, which is the sharp divide between religious and secular violence. Other theorists of religion and violence make similar admissions. Kimball, for example, says in passing that “blind religious zealotry is similar to unfettered nationalism,” and indeed nationalism would seem to fit – at times – all five of Kimball’s “warning signs” for when religion turns evil: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishment of ideal times, ends justifying means, and the declaration of holy war. The last one would seem to preclude secular ideologies, but as Kimball himself points out, the United States regularly invokes a “cosmic dualism” in its war on terror. Political theorist Bikhu Parekh similarly undermines his own point in his article on religious violence. According to Parekh:

Although religion can make a valuable contribution to political life, it can also be a pernicious influence, as liberals rightly highlight. It is often absolutist, self-righteous, arrogant, dogmatic, and impatient of compromise. It arouses powerful and sometimes irrational impulses and can easily destabilize society, cause political havoc, and create a veritable hell on earth... It often breeds intolerance of other religions as well as of internal dissent, and has a propensity towards violence.Parekh does not define religion, but assumes the validity of the religious/secular distinction.

Nevertheless, he admits that “several secular ideologies, such as some varieties of Marxism, conservatism, and even liberalism have a quasi-religious orientation and form, and conversely formally religious languages sometimes have a secular content, so that the dividing line between a secular and a religious language is sometimes difficult to draw.” If this is true, where does it leave his searing indictment of the dangers peculiarly inherent to religion? Powerful irrational impulses are popping up all over, including in liberalism itself, forcing the creation of the category “quasireligious” to try somehow to corral them all back under the heading of “religion.” But if liberalism – which is based on the distinction between religion and the secular – is itself a kind of religion, then the religious/secular distinction crumbles into a heap of contradictions.






For some religion-and-violence theorists, the contradictions are resolved by openly expanding the definition of “religion” to include ideologies and practices that are usually called “secular.” In his book Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion, religious studies scholar Richard Wentz blames violence on absolutism. People create absolutes out of fear of their own limitations. Absolutes are projections of a fictional limited self, and people react with violence when others do not accept them. Religion has a peculiar tendency toward absolutism, says Wentz, but he casts a very wide net when considering religion. Wentz believes that religiousness is an inescapable universal human characteristic displayed even by those who reject what is called “organized religion.” Faith in technology, secular humanism, consumerism, football fanaticism and a host of other worldviews can be counted as religions too. Wentz is compelled to conclude, rather lamely, “Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of ) religion.” Wentz should be commended for his consistency in not trying to erect an artificial division between “religious” and “secular” types of absolutism. The price of consistency, however, is that he evacuates his own argument of explanatory force or usefulness. The word “religion” in the title of his book – Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion – ends up meaning anything people do that gives their lives order and meaning. A more economical title for his book would have been Why People Do Bad Things. The term “religion” is so broad that it serves no useful analytical purpose.

At this point, the religion-and-violence theorist might try to salvage the argument by saying something like this: “surely secular ideologies such as nationalism can get out of hand, but religion has a much greater tendency toward fanaticism because the object of its truth claims is absolute in ways that secular claims are not. The capitalist knows that money is just a human creation, the liberal democrat is modest about what can be known beyond human experience, the nationalist knows that a country is made of land and mortal people, but the religious believer puts faith in a god or gods or at least a transcendent reality that lays claim to absolute validity. It is this absolutism that makes obedience blind and causes the believer to subjugate all means to a transcendent end.”

The problem with this argument is that what counts as “absolute” is decided a priori and is immune to empirical testing. It is based on theological descriptions of beliefs and not on observation of the believers’ behavior. Of course Christian orthodoxy would make the theological claim that God is absolute in a way that nothing else is. The problem is that humans are constantly tempted to idolatry, to putting what is merely relative in the place of God. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that worship of God is absolutist. The real question is, what god is actually being worshipped? But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their “gods” – that is just a metaphor. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in obsessive pursuit of profit in the bond market, then what is “absolute” in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.

Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. “Absolute” is itself a vague term, but in the “religion and violence” arguments it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. The most relevant empirically testable definition of “absolute,” then, would be “that for which one is willing to kill.” This test has the advantage of covering behavior, and not simply what one claims to believe. Now let us ask the following two questions: What percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians’ behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state is subject to far more absolutist fervor than Christianity. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most endorse organized slaughter on behalf of the nation as sometimes necessary and often laudable. In other countries or other traditions the results of this test might be very different. The point is that such empirical testing is of far more usefulness than general theories about the violence of “religion.”

We must conclude that there is no coherent way to isolate “religious” ideologies with a peculiar tendency toward violence from their tamer “secular” counterparts. So-called “secular” ideologies and institutions like nationalism and liberalism can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as so-called “religion.” People kill for all sorts of things. An adequate approach to the problem would be resolutely empirical: under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices – jihad, the “invisible hand” of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the role of the United States as worldwide liberator – turn violent? The point is not simply that “secular” violence should be given equal attention to “religious” violence. The point is that the distinction between “secular” and “religious” violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and should be avoided altogether.

WHAT IS THE ARGUMENT FOR?



If the conventional wisdom that religion causes violence is so incoherent, why is it so prevalent? I believe it is because we in the West find it useful. In domestic politics, it serves to silence representatives of certain kinds of faiths in the public sphere. The story is told repeatedly that the liberal state has learned to tame the dangerous divisiveness of contending religious beliefs by reducing them to essentially private affairs. In foreign
policy, the conventional wisdom helps reinforce and justify Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, especially Muslims, whose primary point of difference with the West is their stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere. “We in the West long ago learned the sobering lessons of religious warfare and have moved toward secularization. The liberal nation-state is essentially a peacemaker. Now we only seek to share the blessings of peace with the Muslim world. Regrettably, because of their stubborn fanaticism, it is sometimes necessary to bomb them into liberal democracy.” In other words, the myth of religious violence establishes a reassuring dichotomy between their violence – which is absolutist, divisive, and irrational – and our violence, which is modest, unitive, and rational.

The myth of religious violence marks the “clash of civilizations” worldview that attributes Muslims’ animosity toward the West to their inability to learn the lessons of history and remove the baneful influence of religion from politics. Mark Juergensmeyer, for example, sets up a “new Cold War” pitting the “resurgence of parochial identities” over against “the secular West.” “Like the old Cold War, the confrontation between these new forms of culture-based politics and the secular state is global in its scope, binary in its opposition, occasionally violent, and essentially a difference of ideologies.” Although he tries to avoid demonizing “religious nationalists,” Juergensmeyer sees them as essentially “anti-modern.” The particular ferocity of religious nationalism comes from the “special relationship between religion and violence.” The question then becomes “whether religious nationalism can be made compatible with secular nationalism’s great virtues: tolerance, respect for human rights, and freedom of expression.” Given the war between “reason and religion,” however, Juergensmeyer is not optimistic; “there is ultimately no satisfactory compromise on an ideological level between religious and secular nationalism.” Despite its incoherence, the idea that religion is prone to violence thus enforces a binary opposition between “the secular West” and a religious Other who is essentially irrational and violent. The conflict becomes explicable in terms of the essential qualities of the two opponents, not in terms of actual historical encounters. So, for example, Juergensmeyer attempts to explain the animosity of the religious Other toward America.

Why is America the enemy? This question is hard for observers of international politics to answer, and harder still for ordinary Americans to fathom. Many have watched with horror as their compatriots and symbols of their country have been destroyed by people whom they do not know, from cultures they can scarcely identify on a global atlas, and for reasons that do not seem readily apparent.

I I . WHAT IS THE ARGUMENT FOR?
Trading partner and political ally, America has a vested interest in shoring up the stability of regimes around the world. This has often put the United States in the unhappy position of being a defender and promoter of secular governments regarded by their religious opponents as primary foes.”Juergensmeyer cites as an example the case of Iran, where “America was tarred by its association with the shah.” The second reason often given is that America is the main source of “modern culture,” which includes cultural products that others regard as immoral. Third, corporations that trade internationally tend to be based in the U.S. Fourth and finally, the fear of globalization has led to a “paranoid vision of American leaders’ global designs.”Juergensmeyer acknowledges that “Like all stereotypes, each of these characterizations holds a certain amount of truth.” The fall of the Soviet Union has left the United States as the only military superpower, and therefore “an easy target for blame when people have felt that their lives were going askew or were being controlled by forces they could not readily see. Yet to dislike America is one thing; to regard it as a cosmic enemy is quite another.” The main problem, according to Juergensmeyer, is “satanization,” that is, taking a simple opponent and casting it as a superhuman enemy in a cosmic war. Osama bin Laden, for example, had inflated America into a “mythic monster.”The problem with Juergensmeyer’s analysis is not just its sanitized account of colonial history, where America just happens to find itself associated with bad people. The problem is that history is subordinated to an essentialist account of “religion” in which the religious Others cannot seem to deal rationally with world events. They employ guilt by association. They have paranoid visions of globalization. They stereotype, and blame easy targets when their lives are disrupted by forces they do not understand. They blow simple oppositions up into cosmic proportions. Understanding Muslim hostility toward America therefore does not require careful scrutiny of America’s historical dealings with the Muslim world. Rather, Juergensmeyer turns our attention to the tendency of such “religious” actors to misunderstand such historical events, to blow them out of proportion. Understanding Iranian Shiite militancy does not seem to require careful examination of U.S. support for overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and for the Shah’s 26-year reign of terror that was to follow. Instead, Juergensmeyer puzzles over why “religious” actors project such mundane things as torture and coups and oil trading into factors in a cosmic war. Juergensmeyer’s analysis is comforting for us in the West because it creates a blind spot regarding our own history of violence. It calls attention to anti-colonial violence, labeled “religious,” and calls attention away
from colonial violence, labeled “secular.”

The argument that religion is prone to violence is a significant component in the construction of an opposition between “the West and the rest,” as Samuel Huntington puts it. Huntington’s famous thesis about the “clash of civilizations” was first put forward by Bernard Lewis in an article entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage”: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reactions of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.” As in Juergensmeyer, actual historical issues and policies and events are transcended by a consideration of the irrationality of the Muslim response to the West. The West
is a monolithic reality representing modernity, which necessarily includes secularity and rationality, while the Muslim world is an equally monolithic reality which is ancient, that is, lagging behind modernity, because of its essentially religious and irrational character. This opposition of rational and irrational, secular and religious, Western and Muslim is not simply descriptive, but helps to create the opposition that it purports to describe. As Roxanne Euben writes in her study of Islamic fundamentalism, this opposition is part of a larger Enlightenment narrative in which defining reason requires its irrational other.



“[E]mbedded in the Enlightenment’s (re-)definition and elevation of reason is the creation and subjection of an irrational counterpart: along with the emergence of reason as both the instrument and essence of human achievement, the irrational came to be defined primarily in opposition to what such thinkers saw as the truths of their own distinctive historical epoch. If they were the voices of modernity, freedom, liberation, happiness, reason, nobility, and even natural passion, the irrational was all that came before: tyranny, servility to dogma, self-abnegation, superstition, and false religion. Thus the irrational came to mean the domination of religion in the historical period that preceded it.” The problem with grafting Islamic fundamentalism into this narrative, according to Euben, is that it is incapable of understanding the appeal of fundamentalism on its own terms. It dismisses rather than explains. It also exacerbates the enmity that it purports to describe. As Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells put it, “Those who proclaim such a clash of civilizations, speaking for the West or for Islam, exhibit the characteristics of fundamentalism: the assumption of a static essence, knowable immediately, of each civilization, the ability to ignore history and tradition, and the desire to lead the ideological battle on behalf of one of the clashing civilizations.” In other words, the opposition of “religious” violence to “secular” peaceableness can lend itself to the justification of violence. In his book Terror and Liberalism, The New Republic contributing editor Paul Berman’s call for a “liberal war of liberation” to be “fought around the world” is based on the contrast between liberalism and what he calls the “mad” ideology of Islamism. Similarly, Andrew Sullivan, in a New York Times Magazine article entitled “This Is a Religious War,” justifies war against radical Islam on epistemological grounds. He labels it a “religious war,” but not in the sense of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. It is rather radical Islam versus Western-style “individual faith and pluralism.” The problem with the Islamic world seems to be too much public faith, a loyalty to an absolute that excludes accommodation to other realities. “If faith is that strong, and it dictates a choice between action or eternal damnation, then violence can easily be justified.”

At root, the problem is epistemological. According to Sullivan, it took Western Christians centuries of bloody “religious wars” to realize “the futility of fighting to the death over something beyond human understanding and so immune to any definitive resolution.”  The problem with religion is that authoritative truth is simply not available to us mortals in any form that will produce consensus rather than division. Locke, therefore, emerges as Sullivan’s hero, for it was Locke who recognized the limits of human understanding of revelation and enshrined those limits in a political theory. Locke and the founding fathers saved us from the curse of killing in the name of religion. “What the founders and Locke were saying was that the ultimate claims of religion should simply not be allowed to interfere with political and religious freedom.” In theory, we have the opposition of a cruel fanaticism with a modest and peaceloving tolerance.

However, Sullivan’s epistemological modesty applies only to the command of God and not to the absolute superiority of our political and cultural system over theirs. According to Sullivan, “We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution.” Universal knowledge is available to us after all, and it underwrites the “epic battle” we are currently waging against fundamentalisms of all kinds. Sullivan is willing to gird himself with the language of a warrior and underwrite U.S. military adventures in the Middle East in the name of his secular faith. Sullivan entitles his piece “This Is a Religious War,” though the irony seems to elude him. On the surface, the myth of religious violence establishes a dichotomy between our peaceloving secular reasonableness and their irrational religious fanaticism. Under the surface often lies an absolute “religious” devotion to the American vision of a hegemonic liberalism that underwrites the necessity of using violence to
impose this vision on the Muslim other.



Sam Harris’ book about the violence of religion dramatically illustrates this double standard. Harris condemns the irrational religious torture of witches, but provides his own argument for torturing terrorists. Harris’ book is charged with the conviction that the secular West cannot reason with Muslims, but must deal with them by force. In a chapter entitled “The Problem with Islam,” Harris writes “In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.” This is especially a problem if such people gain access to nuclear weapons. “There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons... In such
a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime – as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day – but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.” Muslims then would likely misinterpret this act of “self-defense” as a genocidal crusade, thus plunging the world into nuclear holocaust. “All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns.” In other words, if we have to slaughter millions through a nuclear first strike, it will be the fault of the Muslims and their crazy religious beliefs. Before we get to that point, Harris continues, we must encourage civil society in Islamic countries, but we cannot trust themto vote it in. “It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key – and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives.”

I I I . CONCLUSION

Harris’ book is a particularly blunt version of this type of justification for neo-colonial intervention, but he is by no means isolated. His book is enthusiastically endorsed by such academic superstars as Alan Dershowitz, Richard Dawkins, and Australia’s own Peter Singer. Indeed, Harris’ logic is little different in practice from the Bush Doctrine that America has access to liberal values that are “right and true for every person, in every society,” that we must use our power to promote such values “on every continent,” and that America will take preemptive military action if necessary to promote such values. Today the U.S. military – in coalition with Australia and other Western nations – is attempting, through the massive use of violence, to liberate Iraq from religious violence. It is an inherently contradictory effort, and its every failure will be attributed in part to the pernicious influence of religion and its tendency toward violence. If we really wish to understand its failure, however, we will need to question the very myth of religious violence on which such military adventures depend.

by William T. Cavanaugh

From http://www.catholicanarchy.org/cavanaugh/Cavanaugh%20-%20Does%20Religion%20Cause%20Violence.pdf

sábado, 23 de octubre de 2010

Protestantism


Back into the battle, great Mourchois!

http://wa5.www.artehistoria.jcyl.es/histesp/jpg/CDR10952.jpg



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Originally Posted by Wynfrith 
I really do think Protestantism is the route of a lot of "modern" problems, even aside from the fact that it divided western Christendom. For one thing, it promotes individualism (read: do what you please and how it pleases you) and is of course by it's very nature revolutionary. Protestantism was always going to have major damaging repercussions.

It is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty of conscience . . . but to grant it to others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did.

. . . Protestantism, because attacking the great institution, was almost inevitably virulent against the Catholics and at the same time optimistic that on the basis of Scripture a new reformed Church could be erected, unified within itself. When however this confidence was shaken by inner rifts, the initial reformers were even more disconcerted than by the blows from Rome. Luther stood at the very center of this development. His own course was a sign, a symptom and in part also a cause of the wider sequence.

No Protestant can deny an organic relationship to Luther, any more than a Catholic can disavow all ties to the historic papacy, the Crusades and Inquisition, etc. If the Catholic must be constantly subjected to taunts about the "baggage" and "skeletons in the closet" of Catholicism, then the Protestant must likewise face up to the unsavory and less-than-saintly elements in Protestant history. Both sides must have the courage to fairly acknowledge their own shortcomings and the other side's positive, godly attributes.
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Originally Posted by Asega 
Ooh yes. It makes me wonder why so many people fled to the protestant Republic of the United Netherlands then
Including a lot of your countrymen, my French ancestors.

Few historians of the Low Countries would deny that that at several critical junctures during the Revolt of the Netherlands the actions of militant Calvinists drove the revolt forward or destabilized the situation just when it appeared that a solution to the religio-political crisis besetting the region might be found. Dutch historiography depicts the Reformed as establishing their privileged position in the Northern Netherlands through a ‘revolutionary Reformation’ in which the Calvinists sought the eradication of Catholic worship, compulsory participation in the rituals of the Reformed Church, and a new moral and legal order, although they ultimately were only able partially to obtain these goals, since they comprised too small a fraction of the total population to impose their will entirely.

It is unquestionable . . . that the champions of Protestantism - Luther, Calvin, Beza, Knox, Cranmer and Ridley -- advocated the right of the civil authorities to punish the 'crime' of heresy . . . Rousseau says truly:

The Reformation was intolerant from its cradle, and its authors were universal persecutors . . .

The Protestants . . . were wrong-headed. They did not really think what they were doing; and this was chiefly because the real driving force behind them was the impatient insolence and avarice of new nobles and rebellious princes . . . The Reformers themselves . . . e.g., Luther, Beza, and especially Calvin, were as intolerant to dissentients as the Roman Catholic Church.

What makes, however, Protestant persecutions specially revolting is the fact that they were absolutely inconsistent with the primary doctrine of Protestantism -- the right of private judgment in matters of religious belief! Nothing can be more illogical than at one moment to assert that one may interpret the Bible to suit himself, and at the next to torture and kill him for having done so!
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Originally Posted by Asega 
Your propaganda doesn't work on me. Protestant England wasn't exactly Protestant or isn't exactly Protestant. The Anglican Church is a copy of Rome and cannot be compared to the Lutheran Church or to the Reformed Churches (from which there are many) and even what they combined did is not a fraction of the HELL Rome caused in Europe .


Here you are! Dissensions plagued Protestantism from the start, even though one would think that a religion stressing individualism and conscience would be free from such shortcomings and would promote mutual respect. The myth of Protestant magnanimity and peaceful coexistence (especially in its infancy) dies an unequivocal death once all the facts are brought out.
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And ooh: before you accuse me of being a Prot myself. Guess what religion I was raised ?

It's irrelevant. I am not accusing you though, I am just talking about theology/history.
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Originally Posted by Osweo 
Yawny yawny yawn. The Roman Church split Christianity itself LONG before Luther showed up in his attempt to clean up some of the mess.

There were indeed abuses but only after Protestantism, we had a NEVER-ENDING DIVISION AND MULTIPLICATION. There was to be not one Reformation but many, and all tended to split up into sects . . . Calvinism . . . proved itself incapable of disciplining the whole . . . possibly because the true genius of the Reformation lay in its conception of religion as a purely personal affair . . . The initial and lasting consequences of the Protestant Revolt are more than enough, I believe, to cause one to seriously question the premises of this upheaval within Christendom.

It is foolish to think that the Catholic Church was supposed to simply bow to Luther's novel ideas, rather than assert its own received Tradition and demand a retraction on his part. There were indeed abuses, and the Church dealt strongly with them -- to that extent we might be grateful to Luther, I suppose. But he wasn't content to deal just with abuses -- as true Catholic reformers all through the centuries had done. He had to "throw the baby out with the bath water," and so rejected indulgences altogether, along with many other received doctrines too numerous to mention.
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There is no going back to Rome for us in the West, she discredited herself far too much already, and still does. If it hadn't been for the arrogance of the Roman hierarchy, there would have been no Great Schism in 1054, no conquest of Constantinopolis, perhaps the Eastern Empire could even have held onto Palestine itself, and withstood the Arabs

Rome is still in the West. You would be surprised how alive and well it is in some sectors of Europe, not to mention outside Europe where it continues to be a strong, strong presence.


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arrogance of the Roman hierarchy, there would have been no Great Schism in 1054

Arrogance of Roman hierarchy? or a schism fomented by the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople and favoured by the Greek emperors? What's the difference?
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Far from our rallying champion in the battle against cultural and racial oblivion, the Roman Church plays more the role of some lowly jackal, scavenging for scraps. This Church and its supporters delight in crowing over the fall of its old rivals while a far greater enemy struts around our lands unopposed by these bitter myopic opportunists. What do we hear from them all the live long day? "I told you so!" Where is the more courageous and necessary cry to our rulers about the foul crimes they are committing against our nations? Nowhere. All we get is a few pathetic murmurs here and there, like that Cardinal a bit ago, later passed off as gaffs or unacceptable heresy by the hierarchy. The Church of Rome will do nothing for us.

Cut the crap and blame secularism. All governments have in the last fifty years accepted large numbers of Muslim immigrants, who naturally have had children and grandchildren. The governments all supposed that they would be able to integrate such immigrants easily, through one form or another of secularism. The fact is - secularism does not work. The foolish arrogance of thinking that religion does not shape culture, that religion in general is unimportant, now has to be paid for.
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Protestantism is the root of all this shit nowadays, is it? Well ask yourselves, Catholics; What is the root of Protestantism? A simple desire to protest against the foulest of abuses, political, spiritual, intellectual and even downright criminal.

It is indeed. What is the root of Protestantism? PLUNDER, the temptation to loot Church property, the property of convents and monasteries. The princes . . . could be spiritual as well as temporal lords, and all the wealth of the Church could be theirs . . .The greatest scholar and man of letters in Europe at this time, Erasmus, who looked with some favor upon the "Reformation" initially, but came to despise it as he saw its fruits, wrote on May 10, 1521, just a few weeks after the Diet of Worms, about those who "covet the wealth of the churchmen." :This certainly is a fine turn of affairs, if property is wickedly taken away from priests so that soldiers may make use of it in worse fashion; and the latter squander their own wealth, and sometimes that of others, so that no one benefits.
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Rome's only argument for the legitimacy of its universal domination, is that little comment Jesus made to Simon when he first called him 'Peter'.

St. Paul teaches us (Ephesians 2:20) that the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles, whom Christ Himself chose (John 6:70, Acts 1:2,13; cf. Matthew 16:18). In Mark 6:30 the twelve original disciples of Jesus are called apostles, and Matthew 10:1-5 and Revelation 21:14 speak of the twelve apostles.
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Well, that's not very convincing at all, and will never convince all of us. What an absurd arrogance.

There are a lot of things that convince people of the truth of Catholicism and not just a "little comment" (Which basically assumes Sola Scriptura). As far as it not being convincing, that's not an argument, just a declaration no more meaningful than "I like chocolate ice cream."

It's not arrogance, it's fact: Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church . . . the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by them.

Who is really arrogant anyway? I'll tell: secularist rhetoric founded
on belief in the supremacy of reason and absolute faith in science and progress, dogmas which arouse ridicule in serious academic and
intellectual circles nowadays.