Can a religious person write an honest book about religious violence?
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| Posted : Oct, 18, 2009 | Author [beinghuman]
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Christopher Catherwood's "Making war in the name of God" is a fine book about a very central problem that has plagued humanity for millennium. This book is however ridden with hidden paradoxes and enigmas. The biggest of them is the reason why this book has been written in the first place.
The book tells the story of modern Abrahamic religions as a source of constant violence, hatred and endless mass-killings. However the writer still professes to being of a good Christian stock. He has seemingly not lost any of his belief in the very same belief-systems that he himself freely admits for being the cause of endless atrocities, mass-murders and genocide throughout the centuries.
One could well understand why an atheist or even an agnostic would go through the trouble of presenting all the big bloodsheds of the history that have been in the end been caused by religions, but why would any Christian writer do such a thing?
He could of course have as well continued the long Christian tradition of explaining the very same conflicts with economical, political and cultural factors, which are of course always present too in every major conflict.
Christopher Catherwood however cheerily admits the major and very central role that the Abrahamic religions have had in promoting and inspiring violence in the world as long as they have existed.
I however suspect that one of main goals of Christopher Catherwood is to present the case of Islam being the main culprit in the field of religious violence.
First of all he quite rightly reminds us of the fact that Crusades were in fact a response to the earlier wave of violence brought about by Islam. Just that wave of extreme violence did spread that religion through the religious warfare of conquest through the Middle East and to the western half of the Asian continent.
He also spends a very good part of the book presenting the bloody wars of conquest carried out by the Ottoman Empire, that did bring tens of millions of Christians under the yoke of the Islam for centuries.
On the other hand my little theory falls short of explaining why Christopher Catherwood then tells in vivid and horrifying detail about the extremely nasty and brutal religious warfare that was stirred up by the Protestant reformation in the 1500's and 1600's and by the Catholic backlash.
He spares no words in describing the ultimate horrors Catholics and Protestants did inflict at the name of their cherished ideology that purports of being of bringing about love and understanding between men.
Christopher Catherwood reminds us also how religion was before Reformation a integral part machinery of state in all of Europe and religious infidelity was automatically seen as treason also.
He even digs bravely the unbelievable atrocities that the Orthodox Christian Serbs did inflict in Bosnia on their religious adversaries. Christopher Catherwood even reminds us pointedly how the conflict in former Yugoslavia was and is based on religious differences and nothing else, as Bosnian Muslims and Serbs speak the same language and are of the same ethnicity.
He does not waver from noting that religiously based violence is a common occurrence in all religions and how neighbors kill neighbors with unbelievable ease if they think that their deeds have been sanctioned by God.
In my mind it is quite unbelievable that a person can write this book and in the same breath tell how decent Muslims he has met have been so pleased to meet a "person of faith" instead of a horrific secularist who they so fear and loathe.
This enigma is course explained by the nature of belief in a faith. A believer can very well hold two different, and even contradictory views of the world at the same time, as he so easily explains away the bad things done in the name of his very own faith as failings of the people and not of the faith.
Time after time, atrocity after atrocity the blame is not put on the faith that these killers have been promoting by killing people, but on an idea that they have failed their faith.
In the eye of believer the core of the faith remains pure and snow-white, even if the practical implementations of that faith have caused misery and violence throughout centuries.
The true believer thinks that when one finally implement the beliefs in the right way, the misery and violence will go away, even if he is himself presenting by the dozens of examples telling the other story.
This phenomena explains why there still are communists too in the world where the immense failure of the communist system in there for anybody to see. A believer of communist dogma just shrugs that evidence away and says that there was nothing wrong in the basic belief-system, it was just implemented in a wrong way.
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