Is Religion Dangerous?

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780745959498
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Many commentators today claim that religion is dangerous and harmful. In addressing this question, Keith Ward begins by defining what religion actually is and how most human harm has been caused. He then looks at why people say that religion is dangerous, focusing particularly on religious wars and conflicts and on specific attacks on religion, such as the claims that God is wrathful, that religion is intolerant, that religious morality is primitive and cruel. Keith Ward argues that religion produces great good - for example, in terms of hospitals, the abolition of slavery, great art and music, moral heroism, and philosophy and science. Religion, he concludes, is the best rational basis for morality.

Part One

Religion and violence

Chapter 1

The causes of violence

On avoiding naive ideas

It is clearly impossible in one book to consider all the varieties of religion that exist. So I am going to make a stipulative definition, and say that by ‘religion’ I will mean just what we might find in books about the ‘world religions’ – organised sets of institutions, which usually have professional spokespeople for setting out what they believe and for conducting various ritual practices involved in their beliefs. And I shall consider them in some of the variety of forms we find actually existing in the contemporary world. We need to remember that there are many other things usually called religions besides these, and I am not going to discuss them at all.

Even then, of course, the complexity of the whole thing is rather bewildering. If you set out to criticise modern Roman Catholicism, you will find many Protestants, many traditional Catholics, and many more radical Catholics, who will agree with you; and if you set out to criticise anything at all, you will find some member of the Church of England (my own church, so I am free to criticise it!) who will agree with you. So I am going to have to be a little more specific, and focus on some main institutions as key examples.

It is worth noting once more, before I leave this subject, how misleading the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definition of religion is. An educated contemporary Christian or Buddhist would be very unhappy with saying that they were primarily concerned with ‘a superhuman controlling power’. Buddhists generally deny that there is any such power, and Christians, who do think there is a God, would deplore the implication that God is an extra-terrestrial from Betelgeuse, who directs earthly affairs with the aid of his magic ray-gun.

I have every sympathy with the compilers of dictionaries, who have to try to get a very general definition that might fit every possible case – quite impossible, as has just been seen, in the case of religion. I guess that in this case the compiler just gave up, had a drink, and put in something to keep the editor happy. But this seems to be another case in which the most naive idea gets taken to be the definition of a whole range of differing and often extremely sophisticated concepts. Some (not all) Buddhists think there are enlightened human beings (Bodhisattvas) who, after their earthly deaths, help believers to achieve lives of mindfulness and compassion. These beings are superhuman, in the sense of having more than normal levels of human wisdom and compassion. But they do not control human lives, and reverence for them is in fact reverence for the values they are thought to embody.

Many contemporary Christians totally reject the idea of God as a superhuman controller. For theologian Paul Tillich, for example, God is not a particular being, but the power of Being itself, and the supreme moral ideal to be reverenced for its value, not its controlling power. Atheists may doubt whether such a notion makes sense. But at least they ought to be clear that it is not the idea of a superhuman and invisible person who makes the sun shine to order. They ought also to take some account of the fact that many major classical philosophers have been able to make sense of this idea – which may suggest that it is not simply stupid or thoughtless, at least.

It should be a basic principle of intelligent analysis that a serious attempt is made to understand the most intellectually sophisticated concepts of religious belief. Some philosophers, like Anthony Kenny, sometime President of the British Academy, do this and still disagree with many religious ideas. But they treat religious beliefs in their best intellectual forms with care and respect and careful analysis, and with due consideration for the many different interpretations that exist. That is what a truly scientific and rational approach to religion requires.

An example of religion – the Quakers

At last, having discussed and then side-stepped the almost insuperable difficulties in saying what a religion is, I can get around to the question of whether religion is dangerous.

I hope it is clear already that saying that religion is dangerous is vacuous, unless you have in mind some specific religious institution and you are accusing that of being dangerous, either because its beliefs or its practices are dangerous, or because the very existence of the institution itself is dangerous to society.

Let me illustrate this by taking some specific examples. First consider the Society of Friends, the Quakers. The Quakers are not usually seen as dangerous. They like sitting around in circles, often saying very little. They are apt to be found demonstrating against military violence and world poverty. Their beliefs are hard to pin down, but one of them involves thinking there is an ‘inner light’ that convicts them of various social injustices and impels them to act to remedy such injustices on occasion.

I find it hard to think of any organisation less dangerous to society than the Quakers. But you can see how they could be regarded as dangerous by someone who thought pacifism was morally wrong – that it might be a danger to the defence of the realm. There has, I believe, been one British Minister of Defence who was a Quaker. He did not last very long in the job.

In 1984 a group of Christians from the Mennonite, Quaker and Brethren Churches in Toronto and Chicago founded the Christian Peacemaker Teams. Their members travel to areas of war and terrorism to try to promote non-violence and reconciliation. In Baghdad at least two members, Tom Cox and Ken Bigley, have been killed, while a third, the hostage Norman Kember, was freed by the army to widespread publicity. There can be no doubt that the actions of these people, religiously motivated as they are, are heroic and self-sacrificing. It would be totally absurd to accuse them of wickedness, selfishness or moral cowardice.

Some, nevertheless, regard them as irrational and a nuisance. Dr Alan Billings of Lancaster University said that their visit to Iraq had been ‘self-indulgent’ and that it might have increased the danger of further kidnappings and brought the troops who tried to rescue them into needless danger. ‘These peaceniks are putting everyone in danger,’ said one anonymous commentator.

What this really shows is that there is genuine and conscientious disagreement on some important moral issues. All agree that possible goods and harms need to be seriously weighed. But when that has been done, people can still differ over the right thing to do. Some think it is worth taking great risks for the sake of witnessing against war. Others think that we must resort to violence in a just cause, and that pacifism undermines the defence of justice.

There is very little in morality that would be agreed upon by everybody. Mother Teresa is to many people a saint who cared for the dying in the slums of Calcutta when no one else would. But others regard her work, and that of her order of nuns, as possibly having a bad social effect on the Indian political system, and as a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere – particularly in view of her highly publicised opposition to artificial contraception.

I do not think there is any way in which Mother Teresa or the Christian Peacemaker Teams could be regarded as evil. They are pretty obviously morally heroic, going to lengths of self-sacrifice most of us come nowhere near. But they could still be regarded as morally mistaken or useless.

However, it would be a perverted mind that regarded such heroism as dangerous. If you agree with the stand taken by these moral heroes, you will think that this religious group is one of the best things humanity can produce. Even if you disagree with their stand, you will have to admire their courage and integrity. You will have to respect that religious group for moral commitment. They might be wrong, but they are morally admirable.

At least some religious groups, then, produce moral goodness of a very high order. Their members are deserving of our admiration, even if we disagree with their beliefs. Disagreement on moral beliefs is something we just have to live with as human beings, whether we are religious or not. And there is one thing to be said for the Quakers. However strongly we disagree with them, at least we know they are not going to kill us.

A second case – Al Qaida

But how far can moral disagreement go? Let me take another case; that of the Muslim terrorist group Al Qaida. It would be widely regarded in the West as very dangerous. It is dedicated to using indiscriminate violence to cause extreme terror in order to gain its ends. Yet obviously its members and sympathisers do not regard it as evil. They regard it as a force for justice in a radically unjust world, and a force for truth in the face of the atheism and nihilism of the West.

Good and harm do not stand as self-evident and agreed truths, so that we can all neutrally assess whether various acts do good or harm. Quakers and militant Islamists have different ideas of good and harm. Of course militant Islamists would agree that they kill people. But they would say that is good, because it will help to destroy the evil empire of the West. Before we rush to say that is absurd, remember that American bombs, which kill indiscriminately and in huge numbers causing almost indescribable pain and suffering, are not thought by most Americans to be evil. They do terrible things, but their use, it is claimed, was necessary to bring down the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

Now there is a difference between doing something terrible as part of a struggle for the sake of a greater good (something every soldier who kills in battle has to do) and doing something that you know to be evil. An example of pure evil would be torturing a child just because you enjoy it. You have no greater good in mind. You just get pleasure out of seeing children scream. That is evil, and it exists.

If religion were evil, it would aim at no good. Its devotees would act simply for the sake of pleasure or self-interest, or simply to destroy what makes for the happiness or well-being of others. That is malevolence. There may be malevolent religions – devil-worship or ‘black magic’, the worship of destructive power for its own sake, is perhaps one of them. Malevolence, however, is not usually associated with religious belief. Serial killers and rapists do not normally claim to be inspired by religion. Malevolence is more usually associated with a belief in the survival of the strong through total war, or just with hatred of life and the world in general.

It is when people feel that life is pointless, that there is no point in trying to be good, that existence itself is some sort of cruel joke or regrettable accident, that they surrender to sadistic and destructive impulses. In short, it is lack of faith in the value of existence and in the possibility of goodness that is likely to lead to pure evil. And if there is one thing that the world religions are united on, it is the insistence (in the Abrahamic faiths) that existence is good, or (in Buddhist traditions) that even if existence involves suffering, release is possible by practising compassion and renouncing possessive desire. Religion cannot be the source of all evil, for it systematically opposes the hatred of existence – and that is the source of pure evil, if anything is.

We have to say, however reluctantly, that Al Qaida is not purely evil in that sense. It aims at good, at obedience to God and passion for God’s truth, and it hates only God’s enemies. A parallel case might be the National Socialism of the German Third Reich. It aimed at the welfare of the German people, at what they thought would be a just and healthy society, and at the unity of Europe. Many ordinary Germans were devoted to the cause. They had suffered the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. They had endured near-starvation and the loss of pride and power. Now Hitler offered them pride again, and self-confidence and an ordered society.

The tragedy of Germany was that the Jews, the handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies and the mentally ill were being systematically exterminated. Large groups of humans were regarded as sub-human, and the whole economy was based on military might and the forced subjugation of other nations. How could anyone think that was good?

At the Nuremberg trials of war criminals, the prosecution argued that no one could sincerely have thought it was good. Either they must have ignored what was happening, to an extent that was culpable, or they must really have known that unrestricted exercise of the will to power and the elimination of the unfit were wrong.

So we might argue that members of Al Qaida must really know that God does not hate non-Muslims, that it is wrong to kill the innocent, and that hatred is always forbidden by a God of mercy and compassion. I would argue that, and so would the vast majority of Muslims. But the power of self-deception is strong. It is very easy for people to convince themselves that evil is good.

Self-deceit in morality and religion

I recently saw a white Afrikaaner, J. P. Botha, say on television that since all eight people in Noah’s ark were white, and all humans were descended from them, the blacks must be ‘animals of the Veldt’, and not human at all. This is such an extraordinary statement that it is almost impossible for a non-racist to understand how anyone could believe it. Yet the man’s wife burst into tears at the thought that the television interviewer could not share this belief, and so was presumably, she thought, excluded from eternal life.

What can you say about cases like that? The evidence is easily available for establishing the full humanity of blacks, browns, yellows and whites. Even if it were not, it is pretty clear that the mental capacities of blacks are such that they possess whatever intelligence and moral capacity are needed to be ‘made in the image of God’. Moreover, common human sympathy and compassion, not to mention rationality, would rule out reducing blacks to servant or slave status just because of their colour. And the Bible, for what that is worth, actually says nothing about the colour of Noah, whose family might well all have been black before some of them later turned white (with cold, perhaps, when they got to the Netherlands). ‘I am black and beautiful,’ says the Song of Solomon (Song of Songs 1:5), but J. P. Botha obviously has not noticed.

It all seems so obvious to most of us that we wonder how reasonable people could be blind to it. But before we condemn this viewpoint completely, we might do well to remember two things. First, that any national politician who did not promise to put the national interest first, before the interest of any other nation, would probably never get elected. We all seem to approve of national selfishness, though there is no reason why our nation or race should be privileged above others. And second, that even though we know many animals are conscious and feel pain, many humans would not hesitate to hunt or torture them just for fun. To cause pain to any sentient creature just for fun seems morally abominable. Yet often we simply do not think morally. We put the interest of humans, or of our own race, or of our own family, or sometimes even of ourselves, first – and we justify that by inventing ‘moral’ reasons for doing so.

For example, we justify putting our own families first because, we say, that shows the importance of ‘family values’, of loyalty and honour. We make these into virtues and say that we are being selflessly devoted to duty, for we put honour and loyalty before self-interest.

This, of course, is a half-truth, and what is wrong is making it into the whole truth. We do have a duty to care for our families. But that duty does not outweigh every other, and it does not mean that we can treat all other families as unworthy of any consideration.

Yet in Nazi Germany, loyalty to the nation and to the Führer was proclaimed as a virtue that called for total self-sacrifice, and a virtue that stood higher than all others. I think it is possible that some people, brought up and rigorously trained in such a system, might have genuinely come to believe in the principle of ‘my country right or wrong’. But actually there were some giveaways that should have alerted even them to the fact that something was very wrong.

Nationalist diatribes were filled with hate, with a sense of grievance, and with a desire for revenge for past humiliations. That is not a good basis for making decisions about what is really right or wrong.

Jews were being publicly attacked and made into objects of derision. A grotesque stereotype of ‘the Jew’ was substituted for detailed knowledge of actual Jews. When a whole class of people is made into an object of hatred, not for their individual crimes, but because of some alleged ‘general character’ they are all supposed to share, that is a sign that opinion is being manipulated – and we need to ask why.

The ideology of Hitler was readily accessible, and it should have been clear to any reader of that turgid volume Mein Kampf that Hitler’s basic beliefs were in the will to power, in eliminating the weak, in military dominance, and in the superiority of the Aryan race. It is more than a little odd to uphold loyalty and honour as basic moral values when the very foundations of morality are being undermined by a naked appeal to power.

Moreover, could anyone who was seriously concerned about morality genuinely believe that loyalty to one’s own nation and its honour are the highest moral virtues, to which all others must be subordinated? There is, of course, some virtue in loyalty to family and to nation, but if morality means anything at all, such loyalty cannot be the highest virtue. Any appeal to what is morally good must be an appeal to what is good for anyone, not just to what is good for me, for my kinship group or for my nation. Thinking seriously about morality means thinking about what is good for its own sake, and about how as many people as possible can obtain such good. Any morality that does not do so is counterfeit; it is some form of self-interest or of the will to power masquerading as virtue, and perverting our moral sense.

So we have some tests for serious moral beliefs. They must not be founded on hatred or vindictiveness; they must not propagate negative stereotypes of others or inflated estimates of our own importance; they must not be founded on self-interest or on the will to power; and they must express a serious concern for the well-being of all.

National Socialism in twentieth-century Germany failed all these tests. For that reason, we may well doubt that any reflective people could have really believed National Socialism was morally good. But most people are not very reflective. They are easily influenced by peer-group pressure. They do not get too concerned with politics unless forced to do so. And they have a naive trust in the wisdom of their political leaders. We may therefore excuse them; but we can never condone their beliefs. Those beliefs are evil, even if they seem to be good.

If we now look again at Al Qaida and its activities, it is perfectly clear that its ideology is founded on hatred and on a stereotypical idolisation of Muslims and demonisation of ‘Kafirs’ (unbelievers). It manifests the will to power, in the drive to dominate the world. And it is indifferent to the well-being of most of the world’s population, who are to be eliminated or converted. The beliefs of Al Qaida are unequivocally evil.

But are they not religious beliefs? Yes, they are. There are some unequivocally evil religious beliefs. In the discussion of National Socialism, it is obvious that there are also some unequivocally evil non-religious beliefs. What ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other titles by Keith Ward from Lion
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: What is religion?
• Part One: Religion and violence
• Part Two: Are religious beliefs irrational?
• Part Three: Are religious beliefs immoral?
• Part Four: Does religion do more harm than good?
• Notes