War is Caused by Religion, Obviously!

Like most people of my acquaintance, I suspect, I smiled wryly at an article from the Daily Mash that somebody had posted on Facebook the other day. It was a message, supposedly from Voyager 1 which is just leaving the Solar System, explaining that it was now ashamed of its origins and that “while I’m grateful for all of mankind’s help in launching me, I think it’s best we go our separate ways until they can learn to stop massacring people for kneeling to a different fictional deity."

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/good-riddance-says-voyager-1-2013081978759

A good gag and of course I can afford to smile, safe in the knowledge that I am on the side of good against evil, the side of enlightenment and progress, satirically mocking the forces of ignorance and arrogance, the toxic cocktail that is the cause of human conflict.

But something about it niggled and I started to ask myself whether this is really true. Are wars and massacres really caused by religion? Are the great military machines and the guerrilla armies across the globe really devoted to punishing or converting heathens? Put like that it didn't seem so obvious. In fact I couldn't think of a war that was really fought to make people kneel to a different deity, fictional or otherwise? Conquer them, maybe, subdue them probably, steal their land and their women, pillage their resources but convert them? Really?

So I started to run through some wars and slaughters: First World War? No, that was Imperialism. Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust? No, that was racism and nationalism. The Cold War, Vietnam and all the other vicious little proxies? No, that was world domination. Could we blame it for Stalinism and the Soviet Gulag? No. Cambodia? No. Rwanda? No.

But at least we can blame religion fairly and squarely for Northern Ireland and Islamist terrorism, can't we?

Well, in all honesty no, not even them. Religion is a powerful signifier. Among other things it signifies race, culture, national identity, economic and political power, and historic injustice. For those who feel themselves discriminated against and oppressed, it provides a sense of identity and a rallying cry. For the powerful and the oppressors it provides a convenient excuse and a way of deflecting attention from what is really going on. And so the language of religion provides easy labels for conflicts that are actually about something else altogether, something deeper and usually much more complicated. In Northern Ireland, for example, religion (or rather religions) are the hashtags for a tribal and political conflict that has deep and bitter roots - even though the deity is the same! And Islamism is not even a religion. It is a resistance movement against what they see as the decadence of the West, against the tsunami of commercial and cultural junk, the Coca Cola and the X Factor, that threatens to engulf the Islamic world. Religion is the rallying cry but it is not about religion - it is about us.

So if it is not true that wars and massacres are caused by religion, where does this myth come from? And who would want to perpetuate it? And why?

Well, us. We perpetuate it. And why? Because it allows us to tell ourselves that just by losing our faith in God we can somehow dissociate ourselves from all the horrors of human history. We have the vision to see that the causes of warfare and mass slaughter are really incredibly petty and that superior beings like ourselves are above them. We can pretend that progressive and enlightened atheists like us are somehow immune to the racism, bigotry, selfishness, greed and the blindness to injustice that are the real causes of warfare. More than that, by blaming religion we can just shrug off responsibility for the consequences of our economic domination, our cultural imperialism and our ecological vandalism. Mockery and ridicule is a way of shifting the blame onto people who think there may be more to life than this.

To me that is both ignorant and arrogant. And ignorance and arrogance is a toxic cocktail...