THOSE Neanderthals Have An Ideology. I’m Glad I Don’t

Posted on by metroupe

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It seems obvious when “extremists” kill or coerce in the name of their ideology. It looks crazy to us because we believe differently. But to the extremist, their ideology is reality.  Their view of the world is not a belief system. They see the world as it is.  One of the reasons they are dangerous is that they are blind to the fact that they even have an ideology.

And this isn’t just the obvious extremists (like say radical Islam), this is the U.S.A. too, right? Don’t we have an ideology that we push? And I don’t just mean conservatives.

It is easy to dismiss the idea of “belief” and “ideology” as dangerous.

John Mayer’s song “Belief” sings this. Belief is what makes for irrational wars. Belief is what puts 100,000 children in the sand. Belief is what kills, and we can never win if “belief is what we’re fighting for.” I actually like the song a lot. But not the message. It’s hypocritical. It’s blind. “Those people have an ideology. Glad I don’t.”

It’s dangerous (and arrogant) when you don’t see your own ideology.  But everyone has a philosophy, a belief, a value system that we use to interpret the world. And it is dangerous when we accuse “them” of living for their beliefs, but are blind to our own.

The real struggle is not between those with beliefs and those without them.  The struggle in our world is a conflict of ideas.

The real struggle is not between those with beliefs and those without them.  The struggle in our world is a conflict of ideas. Of truth, of facts, of reason, of coherency, of wisdom.  And as long as we acknowledge this, there is room for discussion. But when we refuse to acknowledge our own assumptions (“ideology”) we write “them” off for their beliefs. THEY are wrong by definition because they are following an ideology. Not me. I just see the facts. At this point civil dialogue is no longer possible.   Isn’t it ironic that the one who laughs at all the blind men groping around the elephant doesn’t question his own eyesight.

One of the marks of an extremist (or bully, or fool) in the making is that they don’t see or acknowledge that their view of the world is an ideology.  If you try to reason with them, they will dismiss what YOU say. They might attack YOU with words (or worse) for being a blind zealot.

People that acknowledge their own world view,  are in a position to appreciate it and reason with others.

Photo by a2gemma, used by permission. Some rights reserved.

Religion Is Not to Blame for All the Bloodiest Wars | The New Republic

Posted on by metroupe

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Religion Is Not to Blame for All the Bloodiest Wars | The New Republic.

At the New Republic John Gray reviews “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” by Karen Armstrong

In this write up there is not so much a defense of religion per se but an attempt to challenge a common notion. It has been spoken as incontrovertible fact that “religion is responsible for more wars than anything else.”  To question this “truth” you must be a moron. And the current violence brought about by radical Islam adds to our suspicions. This sometimes leads secular atheists to lump all religions together.  Some have even compared Christians to radical jihadists.  The answer? If we could just use reason and get rid of religious superstition, the world would finally be a safe place.

Gray takes this notion to task. The whole article is worth reading. But here are a few paragraphs worth quoting.

Some have offered that humanistic rationalists are the champions of equality, while religious folks are the source of imperialist oppression. Gray writes:

“The Renaissance is just one of several secular icons that Armstrong demolishes. Nothing is more commonplace than to read that Renaissance thinkers introduced a novel understanding of universal humanity. But Renaissance humanists were actually less sympathetic to the plight of indigenous peoples such as the Mesoamericans who had been violently subjugated than churchmen such as the Dominicans, who condemned the predatory behavior of the conquistadores. “The philosophy of human rights,” Armstrong notes, “did not apply to all human beings.” In some ways, modern conceptions of rights were more inhuman than medieval religion. One of the founders of liberalism, John Locke, found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry.” Involved in his own right in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke “argued that the native ‘kings’ of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land.”

People often highlight several points in the history of the Christian church as events which reveal its true colors.  The Salem witch trials, the Inquisition, bombed-out abortion clinics, etc.  While I agree these things are horrible, and really no defense can be made to try to justify or dismiss them, two things can be said about these kinds of events. First,  It is not accurate to say that these represent either the mainstream of the Christian faith, or an accurate representation of the teaching of the New Testament.

But Gray (quoting Armstrong) brings up another point.  If we are just doing a body count, we should be far more worried about secularism than we are about religion when it comes to violence and oppression.  He says:

“The Spanish Inquisition is a notorious example of the violence of religion. There can be no doubt that it entailed hideous cruelty, not least to Jews who had converted to Christianity, often in order to save their lives, but who were suspected of secretly practising their faith and consequently, in some cases, burnt. Yet in strictly quantitative terms, the Inquisition pales in comparison to later frenzies of secular violence. Recent estimates of the numbers who were executed during the first 20 years of the Inquisition—“the most violent period in its long history,” according to Armstrong—range from 1,500 to 2,000 people. By contrast, about a quarter of a million people were killed in the Vendée (out of a population of roughly 800,000) when a peasant rebellion against the French Revolution was put down by republican armies in 1794. And some 17,000 men, women, and children were guillotined in the purge that ended in July that year, including the man who had designed the new revolutionary calendar. It is indisputable that this mass slaughter had a religious dimension. In 1793 a Goddess of Reason was enthroned on the high altar at Notre Dame Cathedral; revolutionary leaders made great use of terms such as “credo,” “sacrament,” and “sermon” in their speeches. As Armstrong puts it, “No sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another.”

Read the whole thing here.

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to touch on the 262 million people killed by their own governments- which were mostly acting on their politicized atheist beliefs. Read more on “democide” from the university of Hawaii site here.

Photo used by permission Andrew Kitzmiller.  Some rights reserved