Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
over a huge system, and consciously or not determine the priorities of which laws or procedures or standards shall be the focus as well as the extent to which the “norms” need to be revised to meet their determined priorities. In order to absolutize both revisions as well as whatever parts of the inherited corpus they want to preserve, that body of law, tradition, and values must be presented apodictically, that is, not only as the best but totally and unconditionally incommensurable. It is not put up for a vote.
While fascism and autocracy are blatant opponents of a democracy, laws accommodating even a religious majoritarianism within a multicultural nation are also predictably inimical to the ideal of equality of all citizens. We have seen it in past ages in its violent manifestations in British–Indian and British–Irish relations. In fact, it still manifests itself in many countries such as India, where the majority Hindu population often feels threatened by the minority Hindus but especially by the minority Muslims. We have seen it recently in Myanmar where Buddhists drive Muslims out of the country. But religious majoritarianism is present in many other forms in countries around the world. Unfortunately, the weakened communal support many of the “majority” religion in the United States have experienced has left some of the most conservative feeling ever more “alienated,”6 even as victims.
Once people become convinced they have been marginalized and deprived of vital rights, they often react strongly. The attempts to counter this have been demonstrations of protest, revolutions, even “terrorism” committed against the perceived enemy. The need to give equal voice within a nation suffering from this malady has often itself turned out to be a mockery, with rigged elections or “emergency” political and military powers, which simply retain the present presumptuous leaders in place. Many “strongmen” national leaders today have learned new methods of dissembling, to stand for pluralism and equal voices of all, even for explicit democracy, while covertly undermining any of their citizens who differ with their deceitful tyranny.
The idea of allowing more voices into the mix itself often seems to these leaders only to suggest an unworkable plethora of opinions, dissatisfaction, and bitter criticism. But more than that, it poses a loss of power to those authorities. Of course, sometimes diversity of voices does bring inexperienced and unworthy leaders into a place of influence, making things even worse. Those occasions should not preclude the importance of a democracy’s adequate representation of its diversity. Meanwhile, even the economic majority or middle class may feel their freedoms as individuals continue to be truncated, while the leaders become more singularly powerful, simply forcing the middle class to accept an undesirable status quo, given off as the “best” society can expect, or blaming the lack of freedom on diversity per se.
If this raises the question of whether humans are capable of self-governance, most religions are quick to answer “No, humans are not capable!” and volunteer their Absolute as the answer. But should we not ask whether religious institutions are as involved, if not more, as in this reduction of personal freedom through their heteronomy and absolutizing as any agencies? Have they themselves become a chief element of the problem, since no institutions have been more absolutizing than most religions or more protective of their administrators or more secretive about their ethical mistakes? History reveals this; it is not mere cynicism to acknowledge that it has been true.
Countries rend themselves apart, with most of the intolerant adversaries issuing opposing claims of sole legitimacy based on ancient, outdated, and oversimplified ideologies and metaphysics of the past, that is, often using similar absolutizing retrospective interpretations, a method that they have actually opposed in those who uphold the status quo. Yes, that is irony. But many of these groups with ancient ideologies bear weapons from the future. Violence and wars are fought with neither respect nor formal declaration nor observable rules. Preemption, stealth, terror, torture, slavery, and inhumaneness reign. Tyrants order their forces to bomb schools and hospitals, threaten other nations with nuclear weapons, starve people with their children, or squelch the free press, even killing honest reporters. Do we need a universal ethic? Indeed! Do religions’ Absolutes only intensify the divisions in humanity?
Yet these leaders are even admired in some circles—by those who are only impressed with the exercise of authority or are adamant about retaining the status quo from which they have derived their disproportionate wealth or power. Disrespect, lying, and hatred of the “other” is thought to be justified by one’s feeling neglected, slighted, restricted, or left out—that is, feeling insufficient freedom or a least insufficient effectiveness. Suspicion, disrespect, and hatred of this often nebulous, different “other” can be even divinely approved by one’s sectarian reading of one’s own religion. But such hatred spawns more of the same.
It may seem anemic for this inquiry to address the question of absolutism vs. relativism, religion vs. humanization, heteronomy vs. autonomy, or whether people must negotiate from vested interests or a sense of equality. These may connote primarily private relationships, but they are not. All of these involve the most basic relating of one human to another, and then to multiple others in a social structure, so that the fairest and most obviously symbiotic relationship must first be established in one’s life and principles, one of honesty, trusting mutual autonomy, equal voice, and compromise.7 Where these are lacking, there is little hope for a peaceful or compatible family, state, nation, or world. Much of the present fabric of our cosmos seems to be unraveling as structures of trust and truth are replaced by suspicion and alternative “facts.”
Religions or any absolutized schemas cannot save humans from their ego-centered self-deceit, not as long as they operate “above reason”—in naive faith or sheer power. For those who doubt that religions that propose salvation, peace, integrity, and kindness are as responsible for or involved in the “collision” of values, Martin E. Marty’s When Faiths Collide (2005) is a good primer. Marty emphasizes that the divisiveness that is perpetuated or at least exacerbated by religions, with regard to the outsiders in a variety of negative ways, must be responded to by more than mere “tolerance.” People need to engage in a more substantial “risk” of offering or extending hospitality to those others.8 Of course, to extend hospitality to those one has been taught are one’s dreaded enemies does not come naturally. Perhaps people are too receptive to the idea that others who are different are their “enemies.”9 They might be only cultural “scapegoats,” which one will never discover without personally befriending them.
Of course, much of the turmoil of our present world is not novel. The world has known similar polarization and disruptions before. But now the globalization and cyber sphere enable the movements of ideologies of resentment to capitalize on the accessibility of powerful weapons by which they can threaten humanity at large. Economic crises and disproportionate advantages and disadvantages within single nations, then reduplicated on a more universal scale, reveal pockets of chaos that threaten much of the organized world, with the secular elements being absolutized, whether of race, sexuality, or other “accidentals” of one’s birth, simply exacerbating the already strident juxtaposition and animosity of existing and inflexible absolutized ancient religious ideas and practices that continue to permeate human existence, stirring emotions to kill the “other,” even to the point of welcoming self-sacrifice in the process. Are we not all citizens of one earth, who sit at one table of the earth, but, rather than sharing the goodness of it with each other, easily see the other as “enemy”? Where is the human trust in the obvious other humans?
Group identities naturally point out very distinct differences. But when identities feel threatened by globalization or other vital or new powers or are challenged intellectually, the “us vis-à-vis them” easily morphs into an “us versus them.” Mere difference is read as competition at best, sinister threat at worst. If people feel confident that they have access to a final or Absolute “authority,” the Absolute truth or Absolute god, that enables many to assert Absolute rights, utter unquestionable platitudes, even to revise history in many cultures, without recognizing that they are absolutizing ancient views which never had any more universal credibility in their own day than they do in ours. The absoluteness eliminates one’s ability to seriously challenge it, even if it is obviously immoral.10 To read the origins of religions differently, as if their claims were once upon a time more credible and universal,