The trouble with religion

In Australia, we have, we ‘enjoy’, sometimes ‘suffer’, freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion: What does that really mean, especially in the context of the urgent call to somehow inscribe restrictions on that in the light of the Bondi killings? But now let’s not rush too much as a means of dealing with the hatred which possibly motivated that attack, clearly, antisemitism, since the victims were at a Jewish religious celebration.

As an immigrant nation, we have one of the most diverse ranges of religions in the world. People have come here from all corners of the world, for any number of motivations, but the most common ones are economic opportunities and to escape from discriminations, war, and the fear of war.

Coming to a strange land, often with language and cultural differences, it is natural to seek solace in a like community, whether that be in an ethnic-based club, such as the Italian (or some other national) club, or a religious body in which language and cultural sound like and feel like the homes just left.

There is a fundamental difference between faith and religion, and in considering the issues of religious-based hate speech, it is important to draw that distinction, to understand believing the orthodoxy preached by the authoritative religious body, such as what is seen in Iran: execution of people not for religion, but for faith. Faith really is the divisive tool which drives hatred, and has done so as long as there has been religion.

Faith is a personal conviction, trust and reliance in a ‘higher power’ or perceived truth, it is individual, existing within a person, regardless of others and is dynamic in that it is characterised by a trust that endures doubt, in that a person’s faith is pretty much unshakable.

Religion, on the other hand, is an organised system of worship, doctrines and practices which are communal, involving shared beliefs and practices within a church, temple, mosque or other communal space, providing a structured framework of rules and traditions.

Religion is structured, it has a hierarchy, leadership which incorporates power, and seeks to protect its power through the development to rules for adherents, followers of the religion, dogmas, interpretations of scriptures and teachings to guide its members through life, and with a promise of some sort of life after this life is ended. There are times when the ‘authority’ of religion is challenged, and history recounts many times of inter-faith wars, the current situation in Iran stands as an example.

Where a religion is imposed, where there is no freedom to decide how to live, people are repressed, corralled into a life which is not really them, until something breaks.

In trying to come to terms with issues such as the rise of antisemitism, the fear of Islam, the push to ban the burkha – it is good to listen to some voices who have lived through changes which have heightened the fears and hatred.

Reading Amal Awad’s ‘Beyond Veiled Cliches’ (Vintage Books, 2017) a comment is made by a Lebanese woman interviewed for the book, regarding the lasting effect of the civil war of 1982:

‘People never had problems with religion before the so called civil war, which wasn’t really just civil war – it was a regional war on Lebanese soil. So I think this is how you control people… make them fear each other and to divide them by religion… And now it’s more problematic because, again, the trauma was never healed, so we act as if we don’t care, but actually people do care.

… In Australia, religion and race have exploded into major sources of conflict. They take up newspaper column inches almost daily. If you’re active on social media, identity politics can fill your feed. New generations are finding their voices as they try to  make sense of their place in a society that compels them to question or leave it.’ (Page 18).

Teaching about politics and law a number of years ago, a young Muslim student insisted that we could have Sharia Law in Australia. My response was that if that student was so committed to Sharia Law, he should ensure that he follow it as a personal guide to life. That way, he would never transgress any Australian laws.

And it is a truth. If a person living, say the Christian faith, rather than an interpretation of that faith imposed through a church, through the guardrails of religion, and adopted the Ten Commandments as their guide to life, their personal guide to life, they would not dishonour their god and they would do no harm to anyone they came in contact with. But take any one of those Ten Commandments and insist they become the measure by which others are judged, suddenly, the world becomes a dark place, a place where running out of milk on a Sunday, and a quick dash to the local deli for a litre of milk becomes a sin, because that is not honouring the Sabbath.

Right from the outset though, religions rule through fear, the earliest rule god gave to the newly created Adam was that he was not to eat the fruit from a certain tree, the punishment would be a banishment from the garden, from that little bit of paradise, not only banishment and a life of toil and strife, but also that he would die. Each religion, no matter which creed we examine has a restriction of the freedoms which faith offers.

Each ‘god’, even the ‘made up gods’ create fear to enforce compliance.

Christopher Hitchens, in his book ‘God is not great’, references a made up god from the novel Erewhon Revisited, where the principal character, Mr Higgs, returns after having escaped in a hot air ballon twenty years earlier, that escape being seen as his ascent into heavens, he was deified, a ‘religion’ had  been formed, and when the high priests were told that Mr Higgs should come clean, tell the people he was merely mortal, just like them, he was told:

“You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are  bound around this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all become wicked.”

The return of gods are a part of religious beliefs, part of the control of the people, the mystery, the mystique of religion, of the power of deities to make mere mortals subservient, obedient. The anxious wait for the return… In the early days of Hawaii, the deified leader, Lono, rumoured around the year 1200, killed his wife in a pique of anger and wandered through the islands, engaging in fights and ultimately disappearing, but he had promised he would return and about 500 years later, Captain Cook turned up, following the route Lono had said he would use, and on landing, Cook was feted, treated with reverence, worshipped, until it was time to go. He was then attacked, killed and dismembered as a sacrifice, and his remains handed back to his ship mates to return Cook to his homeland.

Not just gods, in Islamic lore, in the holy city of Qom there is a well, a cistern where legend has it the ‘Twelfth or “occulted” or “hidden” Iman took refuge in 873, at the age of five, never to be seen again, until his long-awaited and beseeched reappearance will astonish and redeem the world. (God is not great: page 335). In 2006 President Ahmadinejad of Iran took a scroll of paper and thrust it into an aperture to update the “occulted’ one on Iran’s progress in thermonuclear fission and enrichment of uranium.

Just keeping the Iman up to date, so he has all the knowledge he will need when’s time to return comes.

The long awaited return of Jesus, as promised in Matthew 28 and referred to in Revelations, or the arrival of the long awaited Messiah in Judaic culture, the final battle, Armageddon, to mark the end of a sinful world, the vanquishing of the not saved, the sinners, the condemned, the not chosen ones will be eternally tormented in the realm of satan, punishment for either not being Christian enough or Jewish enough, while the faithful recline in the everlasting glow of their god in the New Jerusalem.

The ‘promise’ in the Bible foreshadows the return of the Jewish people to their homeland, the land promised 3000 years ago, but they will be followers of Jesus, so two stories, but both ‘justifying’ the genocide we are witnessing in Gaza and The West Bank.

Being god’s chosen, living under the promises of whatever deity, allows special privileges, such as invading some lands, colonising them, displacing the original inhabitants or perhaps even converting them to Christianity, erasing their cultures while stealing their lands, killing those who stand in the way, even taking their women as sex slaves, while the missionaries are indoctrinating them with the Grace of Christ and the law of their god which forbids stealing, killing and adultery.

In talking about the harm that religions have caused and continue to cause, the wars fought over which god is the true god, or at least the toughest one, I am constantly told that so much good is done through religions.

I suggest that so much good is done by people of faith. And that faith is not necessarily bound up in religious belief, it is just a goodness, a compassion, an empathy that people have to ease suffering, to feed the hungry, to comfort those who are ill. That faith can be just an attitude of love or compassion, not tied to any sacred text, just a sense of humanity.

It was not at all surprising that leaders from all religions spoke to the Prime Minister regarding the hate speech legislation, to not pick on any religion, to not restrict the right to teach what ever the religion’s holy books prescribe (or how that could be interpreted) and yet, when we really think about where so much hatred originates, it is from those very books, to claim some sense of superiority because ‘I am of God’s Chosen’, or ‘This land was promised to our father Abraham 3000 years ago, so just go away, and if you don’t we will wipe you out’, or as in South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church preached as a dogma that black and white were biblically forbidden to mix, the Calvinist creed of being ‘elected by God’, that same party which created the rule of Apartheid were equally infected with antisemitism and justified their claim to the land as it being a ‘promised land’.

Or the concept of Manifest Destiny in the American settler’s land grab as indigenous tribes were over-run, their lands taken.

So much evil through the teachings of religions, so many have died because of the teachings of religion, so much hatred is manifest in religious dogma, but please do not stop us from teaching what we believe our god has told us to teach.

I come back to the faithfulness of ‘believers’.

If a person has faith, and defines as Christian, and lives a life as prescribed in the Ten Commandments, live it for themselves, honouring their god in the life they live, they will hurt no one, they may even do good to their fellow humans.

If a person believes that Sharia Law should determine how they should live, if that is how they express the faith they have, again they will hurt no one, they may even be a blessing in the community they live in.

If, however, those people determine that the Ten Commandments or Sharia Law should be how every one lives, they suddenly become religious, no longer motivated by their faith, but becoming judgemental, sowing the seeds of division, of difference, disparaging people for not being ‘faithful enough’, for not being of whatever-god’s chosen people.

Their religious laws will be seen as more legitimate than the laws of the land.

When one religion teaches that their religion is superior for what ever reason, allowing to judge, even dehumanise those of other religions, or of no religion, we have a problem, and that problem manifests itself in acts of violence. Acts we have seen repeated time after time after time.

The closing line of the anti-war song “Where have all the flowers gone” is “When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn.”

Listening to those esteemed religious leaders? Probably not. Not until they reconsider their self-righteous interpretations of their scriptures, and start teaching faith rather than religion.

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