Religion’s Dark Side
By Denise Best | Related entries in In The News, News, ReligionHistory bears out the fact that atrocities, in the name of religion, have happened as a result of man essentially being taken over beyond reason and act in ways that could not be comprehended to those not in that state of mind and belief.
An interesting, but no doubt controversial take on the dynamics and impact religion has and continues to make upon society.
An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose, seeking neither nourishment nor home. It persists in its futile climb, explains Daniel C. Dennett at the opening of his new book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” (Viking), because its brain has been taken over by a parasite, a lancet fluke, which, over the course of evolution, has found this to be a particularly efficient way to get into the stomach of a grazing sheep or cow where it can flourish and reproduce. The ant is controlled by the worm, which, equally unconscious of purpose, maneuvers the ant into place.
Mr. Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea “that has lodged in their brains.”
That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Islam, he points out, means “submission,” and submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett’s view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.
There appears to be a growing intolerance to hypothesis and alternatives opinions and depictions when it comes to the area of religion. The fallout regarding the Mohammed cartoons is just the latest incident involving how religion is factored into the societal scheme of life.
Mr. Dennett would like the coolness of reason to replace the commands of faith. The riots, though, show that at the very least, reason alone is insufficient. They are not just metaphorically iconoclastic in their challenge.
They are literally iconoclastic: attempts to destroy any trace of forbidden images or inspire fear in any who might object. They are the latest manifestations of battles that once took place within the West, particularly during the eighth century, when iconoclasm got its name. At that time leaders of the Eastern Church, perhaps inspired by Islamic and Judaic prohibitions against images, objected to religious icons as a form of idolatry.
Iconoclasm (from the Greek, meaning the “breaking of images”) was adopted as doctrine by Emperor Leo III (680-741) and his successors, and, for a century, led to the destruction of art, massacres, torture of monks and attacks on shrines, decisively widening the schism in the Church between Constantinople and the papacy.
The Iconoclasts of the eighth century and their successors during the Reformation were like the Taliban or rioting Muslims of the 21st. Except that that older violence occurred within a religion, inspired by theology.
Today’s Iconoclasts want to oppose all attempts to display forbidden images, whatever their provenance. And for a variety of reasons, many in the West readily defer. Last fall, for example, Burger King withdrew its ice cream from restaurants in Britain after receiving complaints from Muslims that the swirling illustration on the package resembled the name of Allah.
When religion takes on elements of fanaticism, there must be a counter element that brings reason back into the equation.
The issues, though, remain intractable and unrelenting. But it may be that the United States has already offered one kind of an answer, creating a society in which faith and reason continually cohabit in uneasy proximity, and iconoclasm is as commonplace as belief.
Is our nation’s oftentimes lack of reverence in societal actions somehow a saving grace when it comes to the dangers of becoming consumed by religion’s “dark side”?
This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 and is filed under In The News, News, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 20th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
History bears out the fact that atrocities, in the name of religion, have happened as a result of man essentially being taken over…
If you take out the “,in the name of religion,” that sentence is just as accurate.
The Nazis weren’t acting out of belief in a God, and religion wasn’t the driving force in Rawanda.
Religion is often used to justify hatred, but doesn’t cause it. Do you think the man that holds the ‘God hates fags’ sign would be a friend to homosexuals if there weren’t a couple of quotes in the bible regarding homosexuality.
The Islamic fundamentalists wouldn’t suddenly become good people if they dropped religion.
There are many more messages of love in the Bible then there are of violence and punishment. It’s just the violent ones that stand out in people’s minds, especially those that detest religion.
I’m not a christian but it’s astounding how many academics are attempting to scientifically explain why all of those poor, undereducated fools choose to believe in a God.
February 20th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Mash wrote:
I tend to think religion was first “invented” by early man as a coping mechanism, in order to reconcile self-awareness with the awareness of one’s own mortality by positing the ideas of God, the soul and eternity. Over the years, as humans discovered how best to get along and even cooperate with other self-aware humans, they married that knowledge (let’s call it “morality”) with their spiritual awareness to form a system of belief that encompassed the entire human condition as it was understood at the time - in other words, a religion.
I also tend to think that religion did not take on its “dark side” until humans also invented politics, and discovered that great power could be had in this life by politicizing the prevailing religion.
February 20th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Mash,
How about the Crusades and the Iconclast Age? I wasn’t referring to all atrocitites, rather those that were done as a misguided response to fulfilling a religious driven vision.
February 20th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
I agree with the commentor Mash that religion is a vehicle used by humans to justify their own actions, and that sometimes those actions are wrong. I agree with Joshua that humans invented religion. I disagree that religion’s dark side did not come about until politics were invented.
I think that religion reflects all the aspects of human nature, including the bad, because it was made by humans. In the Bible, God seems schizophrenic in that he can seem all-loving one moment and then wrathful the next. The Greeks dealt with this by creating many Gods to reflect the many different possibilities, while more modern religions attribute them all to one entity. I consider God’s flooding of the Earth and His wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah to show religion’s dark side, irrespective of politics. There is plenty of vengeance and wrath in religious texts because that reflects part of who we are. If a person believes in a wrathful idea they will be able to find a religious passage to justify it, and those ideas exist in religion regardless of politicians.
Religion can be used in politics to make people do good things also. MLK and Ghandi were political and their ideas were based in religion. All major religions speak of love and charity. Religions are just always going to be a mixed bag since they are created by fallible humans and used by fallible humans.
Beyond that, the dark side of religion is created from the mere fact that people believe that it is the absolute truth, and not just man made. Religious texts were written to reflect the biases of the author’s culture, and an unwillingness to permit change allows people to hang on to bad ideas. Slavery was fine in God’s eyes because it was socially accepted at the time in the author’s culture. The same goes for the disparagement of homosexuality. Pork was seen as a forbidden food because it could go bad when not kept cold, and could kill you. The fact that people believe these things to be the actual word of God creates a dark side to religion because people are then unwilling to accept better ideas. In situations like these I think that religion can tilt the balance towards the bad since the person may have held a better view if the religious passage did not exist.
Aside from the parts of religious texts that address very factually specific situations like those, I agree that religion will be used merely as a vehicle for humans to pursue good and bad means, regardless of politicians. This is no surprise since religious texts are only a mirror of human nature as a whole.