The absurd fantasy that is religious toleration

We've all seen the bumper sticker with the word "Coexist," spelled out with symbols of religions, genders, pagans, hippies, and Bruce Lee movies. I guess the other denominations can coexist peacefully, but not the religions, because peace is a fundamental contradiction of Western religion. Or more precisely, peace contradicts the fundamentals of Abrahamic religions, because these religions - except for the parts of the Old Testament that no one really reads - are monotheistic (so are some of their offshoots, such as Sikhism). And if there's only one true God, then other people's Gods cannot be correct. Why do you think it is that the Bible demands genocide, explicitly and unambiguously, several times:  Numbers 25: 3-5, Numbers 31: 17-18,  Deuteronomy 20: 16-18, Samuel 15:3, Isiah 13:1-19. I should note that this list only includes the genocides that God explicitly instructed His followers to commit, not the ones (as in Joshua: 6-8) that were committed with more ambiguous instructions from God, or the ones that God committed Himself, as with Sodom and Gomorrah. I also concede that these genocides took place on a much  smaller scale than in later stages of history, so some people might not consider some of these demands genocidal. However, I should note that at this time cities were often considered nations with their own ethnicity, so in that sense the destruction of "every man and woman, child, goat and ass" in a city could be considered genocide. Or, to look at this issue from a different angle, some people think they will go to heaven for killing people of other faiths. Are they right? Can people go to hell for not killing people of other faiths? I guess we can't really know, except from personal experience.

Before I discuss religious violence I want to discuss something that happens very frequently on a smaller scale, and that is desecration. For instance, does the Bible justify damaging a Quran by putting it in the toilet and flushing? Not explicitly, but it would be difficult to make a strong argument to the contrary. Here are some desecration passages which occur within too consecutive genocide passage (which I considered too passive to list above): Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Deuteronomy 7:23-26. According to these passages, it is absolutely, absolutely justified, if not obligatory, to destroy Qurans in the manner of, say, Rev. Terry Jones.

Also on a smaller scale are the murders that usually occur independently of political institutions. It's well known that all countries, with the possible exception of St Kitt and Nevis (although only by a small margin), have a higher murder the rate the more religious they are; if you don't believe me you can take it from Wikipedia or from any other source. Why are murders more common among religious people? It must be a factor that that Abrahamic religious texts are preoccupied with the subject of killing. There are many other reasons, though, that do not relate directly to my argument. For example the people who commit murders are usually very uneducated and lead lives which are so hopeless that they can benefit, in some ways, from even arbitrary guidance. It's also true that religion is used to justify these murders, although the reasons have more to do with religion generally than with the idiosyncrasies of Abrahamic religion. I concede that American gang symbols are generally not religious in nature (although some might argue that the Crips are an exception). I would guess that sincere religious discourse is very common in American gangs, that it arises in such contexts as bonding rituals and motivational discourse, and that it also occurs more directly in conjunction with killing. Plus, I doubt there are many Protestant members of the Latin King. Furthermore, besides the major gangs, there are thousands of active gangs in the US, so there must be some that explicitly profess a particular religion.

And then there are the more formal conflicts, closely associated with political institutions, that use religion as a justification. Among the conflicts that I have listed below, many - perhaps most - could have occurred independently of religion. Ok, but I'll leave it to the readers to determine which ones. And even though these wars could have been initiated without religion, they were not, and therefore they were of a different nature than secular wars. The reader might note that the most of wars I listed were extremely nasty and unnecessary, whereas many secular wars were not.

I want to emphasize that most of these conflicts were not merely the work of religious people; they were started and continued by religious institutions: religious establishments, governments, rebel forces. Since the 18th century, governments have been urged to undergo a "separation of church and state." The value of a secular government, even without a secular population, has been demonstrated time and again since then. After European countries secularized their governments, religious wars between these countries have ended altogether, without a single exception that I can think of. Religious wars continued, mostly in developing countries, either because the government was blatantly religious (as with many Middle Eastern countries even now), or because the secular government was not holding the country together, or otherwise because a few of the people were driven to violence on their own accord (as with the post-Civil War terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland). And if I haven't made my point clear enough, let's look at the first two verses of the national anthem of a country that does not formally separate church and state:

God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save the Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and Glorious
Long to live over us
God save the Queen!

Oh Lord our Lord arise
Scatter Her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On Thee our hope we fix
God save us all!

In another post, I am listing all the instances of explicitly religious violence, initiated by a force loyal to an Abrahamic faith, that I can find any account of, since the death of Christ. This list includes violence includes Jewish rebellions against Roman rule; the spread of Christianity through the Middle East and Europe; conflicts initiated by Byzantines against regions practicing other religions; the spread of Islam through the Middle East, most of Africa, and a belt line that spans across the Asian continent, replacing entire civilizations along the way; conflicts between Sunni and Shi'a; conflicts between Byzantines and Catholics; the Crusades; the utter annihilation of Buddhist civilization in Central Asia by Islamic khans of the Chagatai Khanate and the Ilkhanante; the Ghuri genocide in India; conflicts involving medieval splinter groups of Christianity; clergy-sponsored persecutions of Jews; prosecutions of witches and other undesirables; the Reconquista; conflicts between Europeans and Ottomans; conflicts between Ottomans and their other neighbors that had not endorsed Sunni Islam as a state religion; the Episcopal, Papal, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican and Roman Inquisitions; persecutions of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Christians in Mogul India, followed by their responses; conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries; in what we now call "New Spain," there was a religious genocide on a large enough scale to create an all-Catholic empire that encompasses what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerta Rico, 21 American states, some bits of Alabama and Mississippi, parts of Canada, most of the Philippines, and the obscure Pacific islands that the IRS personnel can recite; the Western Hemisphere has also witnessed more passive genocide, assisted by friendly Jesuits, which created a mostly-Catholic empire comprising what we now call the Viceroyalty of Peru, the territory of which includes what is now Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, parts of Uruguay and of Paraguay, and some snippets of Brazil; there were also the religious conflicts in the English colonies in the Americas - which are a a series of catfights compared to their Spanish counterparts - and which include the Mystic Massacre and other explicitly religious Indian massacres, the destruction and Protestant remake of a French Jesuit mission in what is now Maine, the Battle of the Severn, some religiously-motivated homocides resulting from requiring Protestants to own guns while confiscating guns from Catholics, and some prosecutions of heretics, witches, and religious minorities; back in the Eastern Hemisphere there were the conflicts between Europeans and Berbers; the struggle by the Wahhabi for control of the Arabian peninsula; the conflict in China initiated by a group of revolutionaries who called themselves the Taiping, meaning "Extreme Peace," who wanted to establish a theocratic Christian republic under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan (supposedly the brother of Jesus Christ), but who instead caused a war resulting in 20-30 million deaths by most expert estimates, and at least 40 million if we include the other rebellions that occurred in China at the same time because the Taiping provided the right opportunity; Christian terrorism in the US after the Civil War; religious wars in India following British partition; religious wars in the Middle East following British and French partition; the Second Sudanese Civil War; the super-sized Islamic insurgencies in the Philippines, Tajikistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Chad, Eritrea and Mali; the role of Pastor Ntoumi's Ninja militia in the Republic of Congo's civil war; the Anti-Sikh Riots, and terrorist attacks by Sikhs; persecutions of Hindus in Bangladesh; the decades-long struggle by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and its vicinity to establish a state founded on the Ten Commandments, which as of yet they have not succeeded in doing, but they have left two million people displaced, one hundred thousand dead, twenty thousand children kidnapped (most of them girls), and after 24 years of all these atrocities and no state, Obama sent a small contingent of troops to assist the Ugandan government in weakening the LRA, and Rush Limbaugh opposed this intervention on the following grounds:

So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it. Now, are we gonna help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians? Wouldn’t you say that we are? I mean the Coptic Christians are being wiped out, but it wasn’t just Obama that supported that. The conservative intelligentsia thought it was an outbreak of democracy. Now they’ve done a 180 on that, but they forgot that they supported it in the first place. Now they’re criticizing it.

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following:

"To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

Even if they were successful, I think the last thing we need in the world is a state whose founding ideology is the Ten Commandments (just look at the first two). And lastly, the past few decades have seen terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists in North America, Europe, Israel, Russian and the Caucasus region, India, Southeast Asia and elsewhere; and we have seen acts of Christian terrorism in Northern Ireland, and also elsewhere by such people as Eric Randolph, Anders Behring Brevik, Wade Michael Page and other participants in the RAHOWA (Racial Holy War), anti-abortion terrorists, the Army of God, the Lambs of Christian, the Christian Identity movements and the hundreds of other Christian hate groups in the US. Every few days these home-grown terrorists commit an attack on a Mosque or an abortion clinic or the like. It's an ongoing thing.

And if I had to list conflicts where religion was a likely factor, but not an official justification, then that would become career. Let's take some examples from the 20th century. One prime example is the slew of wars in Southeast Europe in the 1990s, which were fought between two or more political entities, governmental or non-governmental, with the most involved aggressors on both sides being predominated by one religion different from the other side. I guess the same is true of the Balkan Wars that culminated in the outbreak of World War I. The above description is also true of the Nigerian Civil War, Cypriot Civil War, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the First and Second Eritrean Civil War, the Armenia-Azerbaijan War, the East Prigorodny conflict, the Chechen Wars, the Jammu/Kashmir conflict (since the countries have different predominant religions), conflicts in Myanmar between Rohingya and Rakhine, and the series of conflicts in East Timor in recent decades. The Iran-Iraq War took place between (1) a Sunni leader, in the early stages of establishing a quasi-socialist secular state, creating tensions with the Shi'a majority and (2) a theocratic Shi'a leader backed by an Ayatollah. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not so different in its framework. The genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and shortly after, was not explicitly religious, but it was committed by a theocratic Islamic regime against several ethnic minorities that were almost exclusively Christian (the Armenians, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks, and Anatolian Greeks). The Nazi government targeted religious and/or ethnic groups based on a secular ideology, although it received enormous assistance from local churches, which collected birth certificates from the community in order to locate Jews and other minorities. Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, a fervid Catholic who gradually made Catholicism a quasi-official state religion, discriminated generously against Buddhists by denying them arms when organizing citizen militias, by outlawing public practices of their religion and by organizing large-scale persecutions of Buddhists who were following the rules. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was initiated and led by clerics who resented the monarchs' neglect for the theocratic amendments to the country's 1906 Constitution. And needless to say, the word "God" is a staple in war-related discourse; some examples include Bush's God-binges during the Global Action Movie on Terror, the addition of the phrase "one nation under God" to our flag salute during the height of the Cold War, the ironic use of the phrase "God on our side" by Bob Dylan ...

And the 20th century has also seen the reverse of religious warfare on an apocalyptic scale - with any number of mass-prosecutions of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and other religious groups by secular totalitarian governments, not to mention the US government in Waco, TX. In all these scenarios, who, precisely, were the good and bad guys? These deaths would not have occurred if the prosecuted had abandoned their religion first. And when these people still insist on practicing their religion, well, that's just brilliant. The Tajikistan Civil War took more than one million lives from a country with fewer than seven million people at the start of the war. The Taiping Rebellion created a civil war that took 20-30 million lives from a country whose population has since grown nearly four-fold. Moreover, an uprising of the sort in China might be more problematic in the 21st century, not only because of the greater population size, but also because the government has generally become more entrenched and more involved in every aspect of society than in the 19 century, so the near-removal of the current government would cause even more destabilization. So in the 21st century, does China really need Falun Gong practitioners? Does it need foreign missionaries converting millions of their people, in blatant violation of their visas, to non-state-sponsored Christian faiths when state-sponsored Protestant and Catholic churches are available? What if the state only kills a few of these troublemakers, painfully and overtly, to scare the rest into compliance so that everyone else can live in peace? I think it's well-understood that the Falun Gong practitioners, in general, were actively looking for trouble by the time the government began cracking down on them.

The fact is, people of all religions - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Druze, Yazids, Yarsan, Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Mazdaks, Mithraics, Bahai, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Bakhtis, Meivazhi, Buddhists, Daoists, Shinto, Zulu, Peyoteros, Selknams, Wyandots, Indian Shakers, Vodouists, Rastafarians, etc, they all have one thing in common: without their religion they'd be fine. Freedom of speech is a prerequisite for effective democracy; freedom of religion is not. As I am arguing in an unfinished blog post, I think the Abrahamic religions are inexorably an obstacle to freedom of speech. Given that, though, when a reliably democratic government is in place, freedom of religion can usually be created without too many problems. However, unfortunately, many countries are still very autocratic. And how should an autocratic government interpret the overt practice of a religion that is expressly forbidden? Yes, that's the only right answer.