Every Evil in the World is laid at the feet of
Religion. And it is true enough that
some seriously bad things had happened with certain Zones of Religion, but is
it really entirely to correct to blame what we now think of as Religion?
Nowadays, Religions are thought to be Moral
Institutions and Belief Systems. Well,
we need to look back in History and see whether these “Moral Institutions and
Belief Systems” had directly done anybody any intentional harm. And, yes, sometimes the answer is “yes”, but
in many cases, other forces, outside of what we now view as “religious” were at
work.
Take Catholicism in Europe as a prime example. When the Political Infrastructure of the Roman
Empire collapsed in the First Millennium, the only Institution with Reach and
Resources that was able to step into the Power Breach was the Roman Catholic
Church. A Religion, yes, but answering
the call of Political Necessity, it became a Political Entity.
Now, when has anybody every applied the same Moral Criteria
to a Political Entity as they do to a Religion?
Never. Take the current President
of the United States. He personally
orders these drone airplanes to fly off and deliberately assassinate people, without
any due process or fair trial, and, yes, there is a strong argument that these
are very bad people and largely deserve it, and that these actions are absolutely
“necessary”, given the broad Political Picture and the exigencies of Survival
for the Civilized World Order, but it is also true that he can only get away
with it because he is a Political Leader.
No Church Leader would be allowed to fly a Fleet of Death Planes. Well, maybe
a Southern Baptist could swing it…
Anyway, when we are tempted to blame Religion for
certain terrible events in History, we need to first check the Political
Infrastructure that prevailed at the time and ask the following questions, were
the purely political institutions so weak at the time that the Religious
Institutions had to step into the Political Realm as a matter of Necessity and
take matters into their own hands, or were the Religious Institutions so weak
that they had no effective Power for intervening against Political excesses?
In the first instance we have an example of the
Catholic Church and the Crusades. Waves
of Barbarians had been coming from the East and had made predations and inroads
into the Islamic Sultanate which would eventually end with the Collapse of the Golden
Age of Islam and with the Islamic World being held captive by first the Mongols
and then the Turks, leading to an age of barbarism from which they had never
really been able to recover. But Catholic Europe, held together by a
network of Catholic Clergy, noticed the Threat, for indeed, many Islamic Princes
from various regions in the Sultanate had even applied to the Roman Pope for
assistance against the invading Barbarians, who, while calling themselves
Muslim, were still thieves and barbarians, resorting to bare conquest whenever
their purses ran thin. Seeing that
Europe was next in line for Invasion from the East, the clergy applied to the
Warrior Castes, the Lords and Knights, and gathered an Army sufficient to
buffer Europe with a line drawn in the Mid-East, at Jerusalem. While the rest of the World sank under
Genghis Khan and remained backward for the rest of the Millennium, Europe
survived, and only because the Church had been willing and able to take off its
Religious Hood and put on a Political Hat.
The next example is of Religion being too weak to
stop Political Excess. I have heard
people blame Catholicism for the NAZIs, because Adolf Hitler had been
christened a Catholic. Well, after the
defeat of Catholicism and the Rise of Anti-Christical Protestantism, and then
the Rise of Secular Atheism after the French Revolution, Catholicism has been
rendered utterly toothless, with no political influence and little moral
influence over a World that laughs at the too-obviously morally
fastidious. Perhaps the most famous of
the dark quips about Catholic Political Impotence came from Joseph Stalin, the
Soviet Union’s Strong Man during World War Two.
When being told that the Catholic Pope had made some demands from
himself and some of the other World Leaders in regards to the Moral Considerations
of the Conduct of the War, Joseph Stalin paused to think and then replied, “Yes,
yes, all very well, but remind me again, how many Armored Divisions does the
Pope have?” The idea was that if the Church
has no real Potical Power, then it has no real political influence, and that it
should run off and play with the other children and let the Adults speak amongst
each other.
So, if the Pope was in any way responsible for the excesses
committed in World War II, it was because he had failed to assemble a serious
enough contingent of Armored Divisions, Bomber Squadrons and strategic Naval
Vessels to back up his boast, so to speak.
But he would have been blamed for that too.
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