The Root Of All Evil
Jan. 10th, 2006 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloIt's refreshing that militant Darwinist Richard Dawkins has been given the opportunity to attack religion- all religion- in his new TV series The Root Of All Evil.
On the other hand there's something a bit stringy and gristly about his case.
While it's quite true that the worldwide revival of fundamentalist religion- Islamic, Christian, Hindu- is one of the scariest developments of recent years, it's quite false to argue that religion has been behind all that is bad in human history.
The greatest atrocities of the 20th century were committed by atheist or areligious regimes- Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Communist China, Communist Cambodia. The First World War had little to do with religion and everything to do with nationalism.
Human beings like to believe. They like to believe en masse. It keeps them warm. But they don't particularly need to believe in God. Any ideology will do.
And Dawkins igonores the good that religion can accomplish. It was evangelical Christians, as I wrote the other day, who broke the slave trade. And- on a different tack- recent research has shown that, as a matter of statistics, believers are more likely to be happy and fulfilled than unbelievers.
Religion is a stalk, a branch, a tendril- not a root.
On the other hand there's something a bit stringy and gristly about his case.
While it's quite true that the worldwide revival of fundamentalist religion- Islamic, Christian, Hindu- is one of the scariest developments of recent years, it's quite false to argue that religion has been behind all that is bad in human history.
The greatest atrocities of the 20th century were committed by atheist or areligious regimes- Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Communist China, Communist Cambodia. The First World War had little to do with religion and everything to do with nationalism.
Human beings like to believe. They like to believe en masse. It keeps them warm. But they don't particularly need to believe in God. Any ideology will do.
And Dawkins igonores the good that religion can accomplish. It was evangelical Christians, as I wrote the other day, who broke the slave trade. And- on a different tack- recent research has shown that, as a matter of statistics, believers are more likely to be happy and fulfilled than unbelievers.
Religion is a stalk, a branch, a tendril- not a root.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 11:52 am (UTC)"You seem to have latched onto a single aspect of my post"
Given that I wrote six paragraphs, of which only one was concerned with the paganism issue, I would have to politely disagree with this assertion.
"merely pointing out that a significant number of Hitler's closest advisors were anti-Christian in general, or specifically anti-Catholic, and put those sentiments into Reich social policy."
I do not dispute this and believe I did previously note this to be the case with Bormann (though to be clear, his is probably the one and only name in the Reich of whom this can be said). But it would be dishonest not to note that there were many figures in the Riech who were christian (such as William Kube and Walter Buch, the head of the Nazi Party Court), many self styled 'positive christians' (Goebbels and Hitler, I would argue), plus the aforementioned lunatic fringe of pagans. These individuals did have a strong effect on Riech policy, with the outcome that much of the German Catholic and Protestant churches found Nazism a highly congenial counterpart to their faith.
"The bullet points specifically demand the cessation of the publication of Bibles in Nazi Germany, removed crosses from the National Church altars, and stated no clergy were to be allowed in the Church. Whether it used Teutonic myth and imagery is irrelevant; it may not have been pagan, but it was decidedly anti-Christian."
I'm not sure I haven't already dealt with this one (adn given that you complained that I'd seized on him before I'm a little puzzled as to why you come back yet again to the rather sorry figure of Rosenberg). The Reich certainly sought to create a national church, partly as a means of suppressing dissent, partly as a means of national unification. Nonetheless, suppression of some churches for political reaons does not mean that christianity as a whole was being attacked (since whether you like it or not, the Reich church was a christian church; certainly christian enough for Hitler to have taken communion from it). To take the example of Bibles, what you neglect to mention is that the Reich did publish the 'Himmler Bible' in line with their vision of christianity. Ditto the other two examples.
"if Hitler was willing to abandon his Christian beliefs whenever they challenged his power, then frankly it's wishful thinking to call him Christian."
The problem here is that you're starting from a set of a priori assumptions about what is a christian and then assume that anything not cognate with that must qualify as un-christian or anti-christian. Europe has changed church structures and doctrines to suit the religious and political ideologies of its elites for centuries; the fact that political expediency motivated Henry or Elizabeth during the English reformation (or Cromwell later) is not normally considered as grounds for characterising the theology and doctrines that were produced as not being christian - it seems rather inconsistent not to apply the same principles to the Reich, even if its regime was of a quite different moral complexion.
In the case of Hitler, he very clearly appears to have identified as a christian and saw the reich church as consistent with his vision of 'positive' christianity. It might not have been consistent with your vision of christianity (though I certainly wouldn't have said it was entirely inconsistent with many aspects of Lutheranism) or most visions for that matter, but I'm not relly sure why that should be relevant.
*It reminds me of the risible argument that islam is a religion of peace and strains like wahhabism are somehow disqualified from being manifestations of exactly the same religion - and typically with more doctrinal justification than the moderate version. But then if you start off with the assumption that religion is a good thing then anything that falls outside is automatically considered to be incompatible with religion...