\documentclass[letterpaper,twoside]{report}
% \usepackage[width=6in, height=10in, nohead, foot=12pt]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{verse}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{minutes} \minutesstyle{
  % columns = {1},
  header = {list}, %or {table},
  vote = {list}, %or {table},
  contents = {true}, %or {false}
} \usepackage{manglar}
% \setcounter{secnumdepth}{4}
\usepackage{color}

\begin{document}
\begin{sffamily}

  \begin{Minutes}{ Lakeside Freethinkers }
    \selectlanguage{english}
    \participant{Scotty McMillan, Paul Bennett, Rich Birkett, Mike
      Wood, Lew Crippen, Ron Napier, Stephen Segall, Hank Shriver,
      Jerry Smith}
    \minutesdate{May 20, 2015} \starttime{4:00pm}
    \endtime{6:08pm}
    \author{Henry Laxen}
    \maketitle
    \listofdecisions

    \topic{President's Remarks}



Our meeting was well attended with 16 members present. This was
rewarding, given that our winter visitors have left. The vice-Chair
and Secretary were absent.

New, or old members after a long absence were: Scotty McMillan, Paul
Bennett, Rich Birkett, and Mike Woody. Welcome to all.

Lew Crippen gave an interesting talk entitled, Religious Conflict: Is
it Due to Religion?  A copy of his presentation is below.



A presentation and/or a book report is needed for the next
meeting. Please contact me or the Program Committee Chairperson, John
de Waal to schedule your presentation.

We have an ``official announcements only'' mailing list. If you would
like to be on this new list and receive only official announcements,
please reply to this email.

Also, if you would like to be removed from the Lakeside Freethinkers
mailing lists, just reply to this email.

\newpage

\topic{Presentation}

\begin{center}
Religious Conflict: Is it Due to Religion?\\ 
by Lew Crippen​
\end{center}

This talk was prepared for the Unitarian Universalists in early
April. As this was delivered as a part of the UU service, some parts
of that service are either germane to the talk or serve as a bit of an
introduction to and preparation for the talk.

Therefore I am going to include some readings as a preface to my remarks.

Taken from Karen Armstrong, writing in The Guardian:

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from the western Europe were
fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people
have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith—even
though when this prejudice took root, Islam had a better record of
tolerance than Christianity

From Saint Augustine writing in The City of God:

\ldots{} while individuals should not resort immediately to violence, God has
given the sword to government for good reason…Christians as a part of
government should not be ashamed to protect peace and punish
wickedness.…They who have waged war in obedience to the divine
command, or in conformity with His laws have represented in their
persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this
capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means
violated the first commandment, ``thou shalt not kill.'' …But say they,
the wise men will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather
lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man,
for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore
be delivered from all wars….Christians by divine edict, have no choice
but to subject themselves to heir political masters and should seek to
that they execute their war-fighting duty as justly as possible.

And finally two passages from the Qur'an:

\begin{verse}

 By the sun and its brightness\\
 And by the moon when it follows it\\
 And by the day when it displays it\\
 And by the night when it covers it\\
 And by the sky and He who constructed it\\
 And by the earth and He who proportioned it\\
 And inspired it with its discernment of its wickedness and its righteousness,\\
 He has succeeded who purifies it,\\
 And he has failed who instills it with corruption.\\
 And\\

\end{verse}

Among the people there is he whose discourse on the life of the world
pleases you, and he calls on God as witness to what is in his heart,
yet he is an unyielding and antagonistic adversary. When he turns and
leaves, he walks about corrupting the earth, destroying crops and
livestock—God loves not corruption.

I had originally titled this talk, Zealotry: Is it Due to Religion,
but on reflection, I changed it for a number of reasons, perhaps the
most important, is due to the derivation of the work Zealot. It is a
term in Hebrew, deriving of course from the Greek that means ‘One who
is zealous on behalf of God'. While this might prove to be
interesting, I thought that a focus on the original Zealots who in the
first century sought to incite the people of Judea to rebel against
the Roman Empire and to expel them from the holy land by force of arms
would lead me down a path that would be too specific for the direction
that I was taken during research and writing.

But not to worry, there is plenty of material from which to choose
regarding religious conflict.

Much of the material used in preparing this talk came several sources,
most especially Karen Armstrong, former nun and author of several
books and papers on religion in an historical context and William
Cavanaugh, most especially his seminal book, The Myth of Religious
Violence. I will try to indicate when I am quoting one of them
directly.

As George Carlin commented in his hilarious analysis of the The 10
Commandments, ``More people have been killed in the name of God than
for any other reason''. This has so much appeal, especially among
liberals, secular humanists, agnostics, atheists and other pinko
commies that it is rarely questioned. And even some of the religious
right would agree, as would much of the liberal religious community.

On the flip side of the liberal tradition, are the Taliban in
Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic State in the Middle
East, the Hindu right, the Jewish right, the Buddhist right and on and
on.

We have as examples, and often cited, The Crusades, The Inquisition,
The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Pakistan and India,
Abyssinia and Somalia, Nigeria, The Lebanese Civil War, Bosnia, The
Thirty Years War, Sudan and on and on. Further this list does not even
cover the conflicts described in the Bible or the sweep of Islam from
Medina across the Middle East through to India.

Just to cite one current example, consider that even though Barack
Obama insists that the lawless violence of ISIS has nothing to do with
Islam, many will disagree, even some as liberal as Bill Maher.

These religious conflicts are often celebrated during the holiest and
highest of holidays. My wife, Trudy and I recently attended a Passover
Seder dinner where the Haggadah (a text that sets forth the order of
the Seder) was read by the attendees, as a shared experience. Our
son's future mother-in-law commented that as the daughter of
communists, her experience had always been to just talk about peace,
harmony and everyone working together during Seder. It was a
revelation, later in life for her to find that the Haggadah details
wars fought and won by the Jewish people and that killing and winning
by either the Jews or by God, was a good thing—something to be
celebrated.

All this would seem to support Carlin's (as well as others) contention
that ``more people have been killed due to war than for any other
reason. But does his hold up under objective analysis?

Now for a brief history lesson or for most of you, a review (leaving out the academic arguments).

Going back to the Enlightenment, (and more on this later) we in the
west, learned from bitter experience that the fanatical bigotry which
religion seems always to unleash can only be contained by the creation
of a liberal state that separates politics and religion. Never again,
we believed, would these intolerant passions be allowed to intrude on
political life. But why, oh why, have Muslims found it impossible to
arrive at, as Richard Dawkins suggests, a logical solution to their
problems? Why do they cling with perverse obstinacy to the obviously
bad idea of theocracy? Why, in short, have they been unable to enter
the modern world? The answer must surely lie in their primitive and
atavistic religion. As Karen Armstrong writes in The Guardian,

Perhaps it is because we in the west developed our view of religion as
a purely private pursuit, separate from all other human activities and
especially distinct from politics. After all, warfare and violence has
always been a feature of political life, and yet we alone (in the
West) drew the conclusion that separating the church from the state
was a prerequisite for peace. Secularism has become so natural to us
that we assume it emerged organically, as a necessary condition of any
society's progress into modernity. Yet it was in fact a distinct
creation, which arose as a result of a peculiar concatenation of
historical circumstances; we may be mistaken to assume that it would
evolve in the same fashion in every culture in every part of the
world.

We now take the secular state so much for granted that it is hard for
us to appreciate its novelty, since before the modern period, there
were no ``secular'' institutions and no ‘secular' states in our sense of
the word. Their creation required the development of an entirely
different understanding of religion, one that was unique to the modern
west. No other culture has had anything remotely like it, and before
the 18th century, it would have been incomprehensible even to European
Catholics. The words in other languages that we translate as
``religion'' invariably refer to something vaguer, larger and more
inclusive. The Arabic worddin signifies an entire way of life, and the
Sanskritdharmacovers law, politics, and social institutions as well as
piety. The Hebrew Bible has no abstract concept of ``religion''; and the
Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to define faith in a
single word or formula, because the Talmud was expressly designed to
bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred. The Oxford
Classical Dictionary states: ``No word in either Greek or Latin
corresponds to the English ‘religion' or ‘religious'.'' In fact, the
only tradition that satisfies the modern western criterion of religion
as a purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which, like
our western view of ``religion'', was also a creation of the early
modern period.

In short, or in other words, before the modern period, there was no
separation of church and state. They were one. As an example, one
State or set of States was called ``The Holy Roman Empire''. A whole
violent period of English history revolves not around ‘Papists' and
protestants, but rather the struggle as to who would be in control of
England. Would it be Henry the VIII, or the Pope? Would it be Mary,
Queen of Scots or Elizabeth?

Added to that, it was European wars, in the 16th and 17th centuries
that helped create what has been called ``the myth of religious
violence''. It was said that Protestants and Catholics were so inflamed
by the theological passions of the Reformation that they butchered one
another in senseless battles that killed 35\% of the population of
central Europe. Yet while there is no doubt that the participants
certainly experienced these wars as a life-and-death religious
struggle, this was also a conflict between two sets of state-builders:
the princes of Germany and the other kings of Europe were battling
against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his ambition to
establish a trans-European hegemony modeled after the Ottoman empire.

If the wars of religion had been solely motivated by sectarian
bigotry, we should not expect to have found Protestants and Catholics
fighting on the same side, yet in fact they often did so. Thus
Catholic France repeatedly fought the Catholic Habsburgs, who were
regularly supported by some of the Protestant princes. In the French
wars of religion (1562–98) and the thirty years war, combatants
crossed confessional lines so often that it was impossible to talk
about solidly ``Catholic'' or ``Protestant'' populations. These wars were
neither ``all about religion'' nor ``all about politics''. Nor was it a
question of the state simply ``using'' religion for political
ends. There was as yet no coherent way to divide religious causes from
social causes. People were fighting for different visions of society,
but they would not, and could not, have distinguished between
religious and temporal factors in these conflicts. Until the 18th
century, dissociating the two would have been like trying to take the
gin out of a martini.

Further, much, perhaps most of the violence, war, death and
destruction of the 18\textsuperscript{th}, 19\textsuperscript{th} and
20\textsuperscript{th} century was not due to religion. The American
Revolution, the French Revolution, The Napoleonic Campaigns, the
American Civil War, WWI, The Russian Revolution, WWII, The Holocaust,
Korea, Vietnam, the killing fields of Cambodia and more were all
political or primarily political struggles. Even such seemingly
religious conflicts as ``The troubles'' in Northern Ireland and Bosnia
were more about politics than about religion. As one observer replied
to my query as to how was an atheist viewed in Northern Ireland, the
reply was, ``Well in Ireland you are either a Catholic atheist or a
Protestant atheist''. The subtext of course being that the struggle was
really about political control, not about religion.

Just considering modern history, this list puts the lie to Carlin's
contention.

When Napoleon's armies invaded Prussia in 1807, the German philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte urged his countrymen to lay down their lives
for the Fatherland If we define the sacred as that for which we are
prepared to die, the ``imagined community'' of the nation had come to
replace God. It is now considered admirable to die for your country,
but not for your religion.

Separating the State from religion while not forgetting that for much
of history and for much of the world, the term religion is a
relativity new concept, really did not happen until the Enlightment,
the Renaissance and finally the Industrial Revolution. One could now
die honorably for one's country, but not necessarily for one's
religion. Put another way, ``killing for religion is bad, killing for
the state is often good.'' The myth of religious violence thus becomes
a justification for the use of violence. So now the tortured logic
becomes ``We will have peace, once we have bombed the Muslims into
being reasonable.''

When secularization was implemented in the developing world, it was
experienced as a profound disruption—just, as we have seen, as it had
originally been in Europe. Because it usually came with colonial rule,
it was seen as a foreign import and rejected as profoundly
unnatural. In almost every region of the world where secular
governments have been established with a goal of separating religion
and politics, a counter-cultural movement has developed in response,
determined to bring religion back into public life. What we call
``fundamentalism'' has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with a
secularization that is experienced as cruel, violent and invasive. All
too often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent
riposte. According to Karen Armstrong, ``Every fundamentalist movement
that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a
profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the liberal or secular
establishment is determined to destroy their way of life.''

This has been tragically apparent in the Middle East. And it is even
more apparent in the United States (perhaps the model for separating
the church from the state) where the religious fundamentalists are
reacting desperately to the increasingly secular society. And not just
Christian fundamentalists: orthodox Jews are beginning to demand to
change seats on airplanes so that they are not required to sit next to
a woman, and in France (the other model of secular separation),
Muslims are rising against dress standards in schools that impact
their fundamental beliefs.

We unthinkingly believe that violence that is labeled religious is
always irrational, particularly virulent and reprehensible. Violence
labeled secular, on the other hand, no matter how regrettable, is
often necessary and sometimes even praiseworthy for the job it does
defending us from religious violence.

I'm not sure about you, but my brain is about to explode.

As William Cavanaugh, professor of religion at DePaul University,
suggests in his book, ``The Myth of Religious Violence'', There is no
doubt that, under certain circumstances, particular constructs of
Islam or Christianity contribute to violence… Where the above
arguments [about the intrinsic ties of religion to violence]–and
others like them—fail is in trying to separate a category called
religion with a peculiar tendency toward violence from a putatively
secular reality that is less prone to violence. There is no reason to
suppose that so-called secular ideologies such as nationalism,
patriotism, capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism are any less prone to
be absolutist, divisive, and irrational than belief in, for example,
the biblical God.

And what may we conclude from any or all of this? I suggest that many
wars and much violence have had nothing at all to do with
religion. And that much of what seems to be religious violence have
had any number of motivating factors. That many wars of religion,
especially in pre-modern times, were in fact wars of economy or wars
of power structures and the like.

And that much of the current violence associated with religion, is in
part, due to a lack of understanding in the west that non-secular
societies view very differently the state and religion, much closer to
pre-enlighten Europe. That there is little to separate the state from
religion in many of these countries and societies.

I suggest (a bit cribbed from Thomas Aquinas) that in order for a war
to be a war of religion, the combatants must be motivated by religious
differences, that the primary cause of the war was religion, that
those religious causes were separable form political, economic and
social causes at the time of the wars and that the rise of the modern
state was not a cause of the wars.

I believe that a careful analysis using these criteria would lead us
to the conclusion that most, if not all of these wars, acts of
terrorism and violence, were in fact not wars of religion.

What do you think?

\end{Minutes}

\end{sffamily}
\end{document}