The Speed of God: Mainline Religion

Karl Marx famously observed that religion was the opiate of the masses, meaning that it provided an escape from the harsh realities of life. This may well be true, but looking at the conflicts arising in the Middle East these days, I’m inclined to observe that religion is the amphetamine of the masses.

Now, some will suggest that the conflicts between Arabs, Christians and Jews in Palestine/Israel, or between or among Islamists (Sunni and Shi’a) are simply proxy struggles for what is at base political conflict. I think this gets things wrong, and does a disservice to religion, as well as politics.

There may well be cynical non-believers who make use of the religions conflicts of our time to their own political ends. However, there are also true believers for whom the religious issues are the source and end of the conflict. A look at European history will show that this is not a new phenomenon. Look back to the European conflicts of the 15th through the 17th century — focus just on England if that makes it easier — and you will see people killing each other over things like vernacular liturgy and the theology of the Eucharist. There is nothing new about beheading or burning people over religious differences. As I said in an earlier post, if you want to understand the Muslim present, look to the Christian past.

It is also no use trying to play one Muslim off against another — or to accept with an easy nod the soothing reassurances of the “good Muslims” that the Islamists are in error and do not truly represent Islam. Who says? Council after council anathematized those it deemed “heretics”; the Pope said the same thing about Elizabeth I; American Baptists distance themselves from the folks in Westboro; the Global South Anglicans will condemn Episcopalians as apostates. These divisions of opinion do not mark the boundary between true and false religion — or if they do, who is to decide which side is right? One chooses one’s side based one’s own understanding of what is right and just and true — but so do they all, excepting the odd occasional cynic who might just be doing it all for political gain; and I think every side may have one or more such game-players.

So I hate to be the bearer of bad news to those who think that “good” religion will solve the problems of the current world crisis. Religion isn’t the solution; it is the problem. Christians trying to be sweet and reasonable by saying to Jews and Muslims, “We all worship the same God” is really a bit condescending, and ultimately false, since only some nominal Christians are willing to soft-pedal the orthodox notion that Jesus is God — so not really quite the same as the God of Judaism or Islam, at least from their point of view.

However, we nor they need not alter beliefs in order to work towards a pluralistic world in which people resolve not to kill each other over religious differences. What is needed is something like the Elizabethan settlement — which derives not so much from an act of will or resolve to peace as from a war-weariness in which all but the most zealous finally recognize that the continued fighting is getting them nowhere fast, and it is time to stop mainlining the speed of religion. Christianity more or less reached this detente a few centuries ago; we can only hope that Islam doesn’t take as long to reach its stasis point.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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In a Glass, Darkly

When religions of whatever sort have the power of armed forces at their disposal they will go to war with those they hold in contempt, eager to convert or expunge. That goes for Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, as well as most other sects. The larger Christian bodies lost their state-supported armies a few hundred years ago. A few insurgencies lasted until my own lifetime, in, say, Ireland; and there are fringe groups in the Pacific Northwest whose force of arms warrants our concern. 

That there is relative peace among Christians in our day has precious little to do with Christianity as a religion of peace, but more to do with the withering of state and popular support for Christian warfare, a pragmatic response summed up by Elizabeth I in her desire to keep her counselors’ heads upon their shoulders.  

For whenever Christians had the coercive power of arms at their disposal, they were just as likely to use them as anyone else. Imperialism, triumphalism, conquest and intersectarian bloodbaths are all a part of our Christian past — the Gospel notwithstanding. Look to that Christian past and you will see the Muslim present. It is not a pretty reflection, nor is it monolithic: there are islands of sanity amongst the chaos and crisis, but the theme is one of struggle rather than of settlement. Meanwhile, the God of peace weeps over his foolish children.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

To this Temple...

William Temple was Bishop of Manchester, Archbishop of York, and briefly of Canterbury, before his untimely death in 1944, in the midst of the war. His was a brilliant and penetrating mind, but not one stuck in the attic of an ivory tower, academic or ecclesiastical. Perhaps one of his most famous quips says it best:

The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.

It is also telling to note that, in spite of the claims that no one really knew what was going on in Europe with regard to the wholesale elimination of European Jewry, Temple addressed the House of Lords in 1943 (March 23) with this:

My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. ... The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. ... It is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller's wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.

God bless this good and faithful speaker of the truth.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
icon written 11/4/2013

8.9.1945 11:02

 

The bombing of Hiroshima, falling as it does on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and having been the first wartime use of nuclear weapons, holds an ironic pride of place. But lest we forget, Nagasaki was bombed a few days later, with similar devastation. The event is dealt with in tender retrospect in Rhapsody in August, a late film in the oeuvre of the incomparable Akira Kurosawa. This is not, by far, his best film, nor is it my favorite. (That palm goes to Ikiru.) But it is a masterwork nonetheless, perhaps too talky and slow-paced for most audiences. 

One moment in the film, however, is worth seeing the whole thing. At 16'20" the three children, who have been wandering modern Nagasaki looking for signs of the past (as their grandfather perished in the bombing) come upon something in the playground of a school. Silently turning to behold it, the girl holds out her hand and points, and then Kurosawa's indomitable and unblinking camera-eye slowly moves in on the melted relic of a jungle-gym, marked with a simple plaque bearing the moment at which it took its present form, surrounded by a small garden. A solo alto voice sings a mournful melody, as the children approach and instinctively remove their caps. It is a powerful image, one of many delivered by the master's hand in this "small" film on a big topic.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Another image, and others from the film, can be seen at IMDB here.