WAR AND RELIGION

 Would the World Be Safer Without Religion?

     If religion makes people want to murder each other, maybe religion is bad for the world. Killing in the name of God or religious belief, which shames every religion, ought to give the person of faith pause.

 But should it cause us to abandon faith? Would the world be better off if religion disappeared? 

Some people would say yes, and since it’s impossible to conduct this experiment, as faith is definitely not going away, we can’t be sure. But when we observe the horror of religiously motivated violence or hatred, maybe the correct question is, "without religion would it be even worse"? 

What is really underlying many “religious” disputes is ethnicity, money, and national distinctions, factors that would exist regardless of whether anyone had ever heard the word “God.” 

The fighting in Israel today, for example, is not primarily about religion–Jews, Muslims and Christians have coexisted fairly peacefully in that area for most of the last 1,300 years. Until recently, the Holy Land fighting was mainly about land, and whom it’s been promised to. Palestinians hated Israelis because they viewed them as oppressors, not because they were Jews–although that hatred has turned lately to anti-Semitism. Israelis hated Palestinians because they viewed them as terrorists, not because they were Muslims–although, lately the hatred has turned anti-Muslim. If the land dispute could be resolved, the religious dispute would rapidly fade to secondary or tertiary status.

 Similarly, the tension between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland has a religious component, but its essence is class-based and nationalist. Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to be well-off and Anglophile; Catholics, to be working class and to want the Brits out. Suppose religion vanished tomorrow morning, and these two groups divided themselves by arbitrary labels that had nothing to do with faith. 

Let’s say one position was arbitrarily designated “Orange’ and the other “Green.” Do you think the conflict would instantly end? No, it would continue as before, if not worsen, since Christianity–both Catholicism and Protestantism–would no longer be present to urge each side to love its neighbor. Similarly, ethnic, class, and nationalistic disputes underlie pretty much every fight that looks on the surface to be about religion. 

Suppose the Christian and Islamic faiths had vanished. Sept.11 disaster might still have happened. Within the Arab world, where many resent the West, violent fanatics might have vowed to kill themselves solely on secular grounds. Indeed, it can be argued that since the mass murderers of Sept. 11 openly violated the Quranic prohibition against killing the innocent, they weren’t true Muslims anyway. What they were was terrorist fanatics. And a certain number of people like this would exist in the world whether religious faith existed or not. 

    Men and women of all faiths must feel deeply chastened about the continuing violence in the name of religion. We ought to feel the very worst about violence, or hatred, perpetrated by those who say they believe what we believe. But this does not mean we should give up those beliefs; rather, we must work to make belief more sincere and concrete.  

    We could look at the governmental regimes that have fought against religions, such as the Russian Communists, Chinese Communists and German Nazis. Did they reign without war, without violence?

It is written that if we take the big three (and there are others), Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, we must recognize that regimes without religion, in a single century, have killed more than a hundred billion people.

The religions that have inspired murders don't even come close to that number.

I do not think that the violence will ever stop; we will never get rid of evil in this world. However, if our religious beliefs are not just "beliefs" but a way of living, the violence and evil will be kept at a minimum in our life and society.