The GOD Delusion (39 page)

In
the latter half of Hartung's paper, he moves on to the New Testament.
To give a brief summary of his thesis, Jesus was a devotee of the same
in-group morality - coupled with out-group hostility - that was taken
for granted in the Old Testament. Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul
who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung
puts it more bluntly than I dare: 'Jesus would have turned over in his
grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.'

Hartung
has some good fun with the book of Revelation, which is certainly one
of the weirdest books in the Bible. It is supposed to have
been written by St John and, as
Ken's Guide to the Bible
neatly
put it, if his epistles can be seen as John on pot, then Revelation is
John on acid.
¹⁰⁰
Hartung draws attention to the
two verses in Revelation where the number of those 'sealed' (which some
sects, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, interpret to mean 'saved') is
limited to 144,000. Hartung's point is that they all had to be Jews:
12,000 from each of the 12 tribes. Ken Smith goes further, pointing out
that the 144,000 elect 'did not defile themselves with women', which
presumably means that none of them could
be
women.
Well, that's the sort of thing we've come to expect.

There's
a lot more in Hartung's entertaining paper. I shall simply recommend it
once more, and summarize it in a quotation:

The
Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions
for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the
Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification
of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that - The Iliad,
the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the
inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling
the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The
Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their
lives. And it is, by far, the world's all-time best seller.

Lest
it be thought that the exclusiveness of traditional Judaism is unique
among religions, look at the following confident verse from a hymn by
Isaac Watts (1674-1748):

Lord,
I ascribe it to Thy Grace, 

And not to chance, as
others do, 

That I was
born of Christian Race 

And not a Heathen or
a Jew.

What
puzzles me about this verse is not the exclusiveness
per se
but
the logic. Since plenty of others
were
born into
religions other than Christianity, how did God decide which future
people should receive
such favoured birth? Why favour Isaac Watts and those individuals whom
he visualized singing his hymn? In any case, before Isaac Watts was
conceived, what was the nature of the entity being favoured? These are
deep waters, but perhaps not too deep for a mind tuned to theology.
Isaac Watts's hymn is reminiscent of three daily prayers that male
Orthodox and Conservative (but not Reform) Jews are taught to recite:
'Blessed are You for not making me a Gentile. Blessed are You for not
making me a woman. Blessed are You for not making me a slave.'

Religion
is undoubtedly a divisive force, and this is one of the main
accusations levelled against it. But it is frequently and rightly said
that wars, and feuds between religious groups or sects, are seldom
actually about theological disagreements. When an Ulster Protestant
paramilitary murders a Catholic, he is not muttering to himself, 'Take
that, transubstantiationist, mariolatrous, incense-reeking bastard!' He
is much more likely to be avenging the death of another Protestant
killed by another Catholic, perhaps in the course of a sustained
transgenerational vendetta. Religion is a
label
of
in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than
other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team,
but often available when other labels are not.

Yes
yes, of course the troubles in Northern Ireland are political. There
really has been economic and political oppression of one group by
another, and it goes back centuries. There really are genuine
grievances and injustices, and these seem to have little to do with
religion; except that - and this is important and widely overlooked -
without religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to
oppress and whom to avenge. And the real problem in Northern Ireland is
that the labels are inherited down many generations. Catholics, whose
parents, grandparents and great-grandparents went to Catholic schools,
send their children to Catholic schools. Protestants, whose parents,
grandparents and great-grandparents went to Protestant schools, send
their children to Protestant schools. The two sets of people have the
same skin colour, they speak the same language, they enjoy the same
things, but they might as well belong to different species, so deep is
the historic divide. And without religion, and religiously segregated
education, the divide simply would not be there. From Kosovo to
Palestine,
from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian subcontinent, look
carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity
and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you'll find
religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it's
a very good bet.

In
India at the time of partition, more than a million people were
massacred in religious riots between Hindus and Muslims (and fifteen
million displaced from their homes). There were no badges other than
religious ones with which to label whom to kill. Ultimately, there was
nothing to divide them but religion. Salman Rushdie was moved by a more
recent bout of religious massacres in India to write an article called
'Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood'.
¹⁰¹
Here's his concluding paragraph:

What
is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being
committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How
well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing
we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the
deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.

So
India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in
India has happened in God's name.

The
problem's name is God.

I do
not deny that humanity's powerful tendencies towards in-group loyalties
and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion.
Fans of rival football teams are an example of the phenomenon writ
small. Even football supporters sometimes divide along religious lines,
as in the case of Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Languages (as in
Belgium), races and tribes (especially in Africa) can be important
divisive tokens. But religion amplifies and exacerbates the damage in
at least three ways:

•
Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or
'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too
early for them to have made up their own minds
on what they think about religion (I return to this abuse of childhood
in Chapter 9).

• 
Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very
early age, with members of a religious in-group and separately from
children whose families adhere to other religions. It is not an
exaggeration to say that the troubles in Northern Ireland would
disappear in a generation if segregated schooling were abolished.

• 
Taboos against 'marrying out'. This perpetuates hereditary feuds and
vendettas by preventing the mingling of feuding groups. Intermarriage,
if it were permitted, would naturally tend to mollify enmities.

The
village of Glenarm in Northern Ireland is the seat of the Earls of
Antrim. On one occasion within living memory, the then Earl did the
unthinkable: he married a Catholic. Immediately, in houses throughout
Glenarm, the blinds were drawn in mourning. A horror of 'marrying out'
is also widespread among religious Jews. Several of the Israeli
children quoted above mentioned the dire perils of 'assimilation' at
the forefront of their defence of Joshua's Battle of Jericho. When
people of different religions do marry, it is described with foreboding
on both sides as a 'mixed marriage' and there are often prolonged
battles over how the children are to be brought up. When I was a child
and still carried a guttering torch for the Anglican Church, I remember
being dumbfounded to be told of a rule that when a Roman Catholic
married an Anglican, the children were always brought up Catholic. I
could readily understand why a priest of either denomination would try
to insist on this condition. What I couldn't understand (still can't)
was the asymmetry. Why didn't the Anglican priests retaliate with the
equivalent rule in reverse? Just less ruthless, I suppose. My old
chaplain and Betjeman's 'Our Padre' were simply too nice.

Sociologists
have done statistical surveys of religious homogamy (marrying somebody
of the same religion) and heterogamy (marrying somebody of a different
religion). Norval D. Glenn, of the University of Texas at Austin,
gathered a number of such studies up to 1978 and analysed them together.
¹⁰²
He concluded that there is a
significant tendency towards religious homogamy in Christians
(Protestants marry Protestants, and Catholics Catholics, and this goes
beyond the ordinary 'boy next door effect'), but that it is especially
marked among Jews. Out of a total sample of 6,021 married respondents
to the questionnaire, 140 called themselves Jews and, of these, 85.7
per cent married Jews. This is hugely greater than the randomly
expected percentage of homogamous marriages. And of course it will not
come as news to anybody. Observant Jews are strongly discouraged from
'marrying out', and the taboo shows itself in Jewish jokes about
mothers warning their boys about blonde shiksas lying in wait to entrap
them. Here are typical statements by three American rabbis:

• 
'I refuse to officiate at interfaith marriages.'

• 
'I officiate when couples state their intention to raise children as
Jews.'

• 
'I officiate if couples agree to premarital counselling.'

Rabbis
who will agree to officiate together with a Christian priest are rare,
and much in demand.

Even
if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully
nurtured divisiveness - its deliberate and cultivated pandering to
humanity's natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out-groups -
would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.

This
chapter began by showing that we do not - even the religious among us -
ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly
imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No
matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we
do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that
prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection
with religion. It extends, however, to most
religious people, whether or not they
think
their
morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan
Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip
service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The
majority of us don't cause needless suffering; we believe in free
speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we
pay our taxes; we don't cheat, don't kill, don't commit incest, don't
do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these
good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much
else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do
not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the
bad.

One
way to express our consensual ethics is as a 'New Ten Commandments'.
Various individuals and institutions have attempted this. What is
significant is that they tend to produce rather similar results to each
other, and what they produce is characteristic of the times in which
they happen to live. Here is one set of 'New Ten Commandments' from
today, which I happened to find on an atheist website.
¹⁰³

• 
Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

• 
In all things, strive to cause no harm.

• 
Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the
world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

• 
Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always
be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

• 
Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

• 
Always seek to be learning something new.

• 
Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be
ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

• 
Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect
the right of others to disagree with you.

• 
Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and
experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

• 
Question everything.

This
little collection is not the work of a great sage or prophet or
professional ethicist. It is just one ordinary web logger's rather
endearing attempt to summarize the principles of the good life today,
for comparison with the biblical Ten Commandments. It was the first
list I found when I typed 'New Ten Commandments' into a search engine,
and I deliberately didn't look any further. The whole point is that it
is the sort of list that any ordinary, decent person today would come
up with. Not everybody would home in on exactly the same list of ten.
The philosopher John Rawls might include something like the following:
'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going
be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.' An alleged Inuit
system for sharing out food is a practical example of the Rawls
principle: the individual who cuts up the food gets last pick.