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How To Lessen Religion-Based Strife
"My Dad can beat up your Dad" characterizes quite well the disagreements among competing religionists, which all too often lead to violence. The taunt assumes that fathers are wont to rove about looking for other fathers to knock over. Most people in their right minds know that such an assumption is ludicrous. And it is.
Yet it is the meat and drink craved by zealots of virtually every religion. The deity is thought by the champions of Religion X to be, in the better case, the most powerful of all such unseen entities, and those of Religion Y, in a worse case, the only one. And because the holy writ of Y is said to have emanated from the Great Nowhere, it must be that it sets forth that deity's will and wishes, thus those of X are ipso facto invalid.
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah." OH, YEAH????" "YEAH!!!" Then ensue, at best, political maneuvering by the partisans of C to get established their religious ideas ahead of those proclaimed by D. At worst, it comes to beheading, village burning, rape, pillage and murder -- all in the name of god X or Y, or C or D.
One can almost hear the echoes of Shakespeare's wounded Mercutio: A plague o' both your houses.* In the case of our alphabetical deities, on all their houses.
Religious authorities -- including rabbis, ayatollahs, popes, archbishops, metropolitans, presbyters, preachers -- need to yield to responsible philosophers in their various traditions, who in the 21st century at long last have come to see that beliefs must be validated by knowledge.
The instant that an invisible deity is postulated and submitted to the process of rationalization, the reality of such a deity is shown to be dubious at best. Not because anyone can disprove its presence in the universe but also because no one can do more than infer it.
If the impossibility of successfully demonstrating the reality of a deity is conceded, it follows that no oral or written tradition attributed to X or Y or C or D can be said to be the word or will of any one of them. It soon enough becomes clear that the privileged texts are the products of rather ingenious human beings who were trying to extract meaning from the worlds in which they lived and moved and had their being.
We Jews and Christians honor the 613 mitzvoth of Torah and acknowledge that the texts that go with them depict their delivery by a divine hand. One needs to work for a while with that story to see that the mitzvoth must have grown out of the life of a community whose elders were trying to figure out how to live with some semblance of commonsense and security. Not committing adultery probably goes a long way toward preventing murder, which is also enjoined.
Moses, it is said by tradition, got the revelation up on a mountain. Mohammed in a cave. Joseph Smith on a hillside. Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein got theirs the hard way, i.e. through patient observation and subsequent cogitation. Darwin in particular had only a vague sense of where he was going with his ideas until he observed the natural life in the Gal�pagos Islands, and over the next 20 years worked out the concept of Natural Selection. Gazing hour upon hour at the stratified cliffs of St. Jago, he concluded that Earth must have been countless eons old rather than having been spoken into being by the Elohim in 4004 BCE.**
In each case, the truth of the matter was revealed through observation and reasoned analysis. Certainly it must have seemed that the proverbial light bulbs came on over their heads, but not until they had done the work to turn them on. Why then should not the same protocol be followed in trying to turn imagination about unseen deities into reality?
Now the professional atheists among us should not think of these comments as a bandwagon upon which they can jump. It is as ludicrous to say "there is no god" as it is to say "there is a god and his/her/its name is thus-and-such." As an alternative, I recommend agnosticism of a humble and, dare I say, reverent kind.
The domesticated puppeteer type of god that is rife among the religious is an insult to human wisdom and aspiration. To contemplate the idea of deity is to stand at the edge of an abyss in silent wonder. Tell that to the prolix theologians.
The supposed prophets of supposed deities include the aforementioned Moses and Mohammed. They are joined by Buddha, Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, the anonymous authors of such texts as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son as well as by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and yet other prophetic voices that may from time to time have been heard.
They were all of them human beings of their times and places. They evolved along the same path as the rest of us, but were clearly quickened by a gene pool that made them great. We are indebted to them for their epoch-making insights that illumine our lives down to this very day.
They can teach us, if we will be taught, that religion is a way (the word means "way of restraint") for one set of human beings to recognize in another set the same longings and aspirations as possess them. Religion at its best is a way to achieve and maintain mutual regard for the dignity of the other. No wars over gods and the theologies that created them need be fought. It is a tragic waste of time.
*Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Sc. 3, L. 95
** Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), by cross-referencing biblical passages and known historical events, established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE.
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