Random thoughts after 7 October

In commenting on religion, I am not forgetting the comfort it has brought to mankind.  It is the chronic need for that comfort, the mystical source of the power, the mix with politics, philosophy, and tribalism, and the consequent reliance and dependency, and capacity for abuse of power that troubles me.  Someone who holds the keys to Paradise or Hades is the most powerful person in the world.  And we all know what  power can do to people.   

As someone once said: ‘Freedom of speech, I am with you all the way – it’s just the Press I can’t stand.’   The problem I see is not with God – it is with us.

(I may add that religion has left all of us with one great and undeniable gift – the abolition of slavery.  That movement, as I recall it, was led by the Anglicans and Quakers when no one else seemed interested.  This was a great achievement for humanity.  At that time, America and Russia had yet to emancipate their own slaves.  If you take the view that a state that allows slavery is not civilised, then a gaggle of Anglican and Quaker activists gave the world its first civilised nation. )

The major moral failure in the Middle East, and elsewhere, in my view is that we do not treat each person as having worth or dignity just because he or she is human.  We want to put people in boxes or categories – or label  them by their faith or tribe or colour.

I have and need no religion to reach that conclusion.                                                                                    

Religion turns on faith.  It is beyond logic or proof.  Most of it seems at best silly to most of us.  But most of us allow one exception – our own faith. 

I do not allow any exception.  I hold no belief that could be called religious. 

Most people inherit their faith – it is not chosen after careful thought .  It is an accident of history. But once they adopt their faith, generally in childhood, it does not matter to them that most of the world think that they are deluded. But it remains the brute  statistical fact that all the world regards most of the rest of the world as misled, to put it softly, on religion.  They are content to live in hope that they have drawn the winning ticket in the lottery.   

I hold nothing against people practising religion, but I have a full understanding of the wrongs done in its name.  It is enough to mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the religious wars after Luther.  The schism in Islam is a blot on the world.

I cannot think of one major faith that has not been disfigured by hate.

I can think of plenty that look to be driven by fraud or who were so exotic that they stretched credulity and charity.  But that is not enough to disqualify their faith.  I had to decide such a case.  It is tricky.  And many Australians were revolted to find that the High Court put their decent faith in the same basket as Scientology  – which they look upon in horror. 

I can also think of plenty that have in my view far too much political influence or power.

I resent having people seek to rule me or affect my life – or death – by reference to dogmas that derive from faith alone.  Kant said that a church tends to pass itself off as the only universal one – ‘even though it is based  on faith in a particular revelation which, since it is historical, can never be demanded of everyone.’  That is crucial.

There is too much hate speech in scripture.  Including the Bible and Koran.  A lot of scripture revolts me.

One of the problems with the faiths coming out of the desert is that they are exclusive and absolute.  Greece and Rome were far more tolerant.  David Hume said: ‘The intolerance of almost all religions which have maintained the unity of God is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists…And if among Christians, the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued effort of priests and bigots.’

Then there is the problem of God and power. The Church was behind the conquest of South America, and fully acquiesced in  the imperial rape of all Africa.  The peaceful Dutch may have been the worst.  And the Church did deals with Napoleon and Hitler, and the Orthodox Church, which has so badly failed Greece and Russia, treats with Putin.

For that matter, the role of religion here is at best spotty.  (The settlers here proceeded against those who were there before them  with the rifle, the bottle, and the Bible.  They derived their warrant not from Almighty God, but His Majesty King George III.)

In the result, religious bodies have at best limited plausibility.  There are so many of them.  They are mutually exclusive.  And they have a gruesome history of competition and conflict and starting wars.  Fear of the unknown has always driven mankind to religion.  It is the price of knowledge, and not a cross to be borne by the apes.  But is mankind nett better off because of God?   If so, which?

Partly as a result of the absolutism of current faiths , and partly as a result of tribal bonding and history, restraint and tolerance go straight out the window.  Brick wall meets brick wall, and each side is anxiously monolithic – but always so very righteous, so damnably righteous.  Neither finds fault in itself,  or virtue in its adversary.

But a decent community depends on restraint and tolerance.

And clever combatants should recall that Australians do not like intellectuals.  (In the old days, Prots held this against the Jesuits.) 

And judges do not like clever arguments.

The first proposition above I take from Kant.  He and Spinoza are very instructive on religion. 

Religious hate is the worst. 

Apart from schism, and charges of heresy, two factors make it worse.  A conflict may go beyond life and death, and reach the afterlife.  Or it may relate to land.  In the Holy Land, three faiths have fought for dominance in a very limited area.  We got a similar flow on from conflict in the Balkans in the fifties.

The conflict about Gaza looks to me to occur in some kind of legal vacuum.  By what rule book does one nation state take an army outside its borders into land not of any nation state and say that it will stay at war with those in the area it has invaded until it has eliminated all those who command those who attacked it?  It looks to me to be a kind of no-man’s land, which is fraught in any zone of conflict.  Whatever else it is, it is not a war between nations.

Both sides in this conflict claim some kind of victimhood.  One problem is that there is no agreement on how far back you should go to assess what may lie in the balance.  (Our First Nations might think that it is hilarious that people in the Middle East only go back a few thousand years for this purpose.)

Another problem is holding people responsible for what their ancestors did.  This violates the proposition I set out first.

But it is a political fact of life that a nation will be damned for crimes committed in its name.  Hannah Arendt is very good on this at the end of her book on Eichman.  ‘Many people today would agree there is no such thing as collective guilt, or, for that matter, collective innocence…This, of course, is not to deny that there is such a thing as political responsibility….It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.’

But extending that damnation to external supporters of the nation accused of wrongdoing is in my view wrong for the reasons given.

It follows I think that it may not be a good idea for members of a religious or tribal group to say that because of events in their history, they should be treated differently.  That is just the kind of bad thinking that lies at the heart of these conflicts.

I find it hard to think of any decent exceptionalism – the English used to get away with it, but the Americans no longer can.

Few who think they are different think that others are superior to them.

You hope that those who harbour feelings of their own superiority have the grace and courtesy to keep it to themselves.

It follows that neither side has exclusive claims to victimhood, that neither can accuse the other of being the only unreasonable party,  and that each will be in luck if it gets a sensible response from the other side.

The worst problem with vendettas is that they have no ending.

The attack on 7 October was an outrage and a crime against humanity that could never be justified by any felt grievance on the part of those making the attack.

For reasons that were obvious, the target nation felt the attack as a grievous affront to its national psyche, and a gruesome intimation of its own mortality.

The issue then  is whether its response is consistent with a general obligation to treat each person as having worth or dignity just because he or she is human.

And as lawyers are wont to say when they are being honest, or merely tired, that is a matter on which reasonable minds may differ.  But you will find plenty on either side who say that the other side are beyond the pale.  That is what happens when God is built into a nation or tribe.  The result is at best fraught.

Perhaps I may refer to another skeleton of religion which has no bearing on Gaza but shows why religion generally is under a cloud for many.  The ancient gods look theologically vacuous and intellectually savage, but they showed the supreme grace of tolerance.  Then we get the link between Christianity and philosophy.  That led to sectarianism, factionalism, and persecution.  David Hume said: ‘Hence naturally arose keenness in dispute, when the Christian religion came to be split into new divisions and heresies.  And this keenness assisted the priests in their policy of begetting a mutual hatred among their deluded followers.’  The logical corollary of exclusive belief  is heresy – which justifies persecution.  Doubt or dissent is criminalised.  The comparison with totalitarian governments last century is shocking. 

And religious fanaticism leads to wars, rebellions, pogroms, and inquisitions. It at least in part underlay the invasion from Gaza and is at large in the settlements.   It endorses confrontation and coercion.  And it so often stands in the way of freedom under the law.