'The great religions are ships...' Photo: Ziv Turner / flickr CC.
The ‘Great Beast’
Tony D’Souza reflects on religion in the modern world
What is the problem with religion in the contemporary world? Never in human history have so many people prayed to a God unseen, and never in human history has so much suffering, mayhem and death been caused by the followers of religion.
In 2003 coalition forces invaded Iraq, which destabilised that country and the effects continue to this day. This was followed by the collapse of the Gaddafi dictatorship in Libya and the unspeakable horror of the civil war in Syria. All this made possible the sudden rise of the murderous death cult known as Isis. Thousands of people have died and millions have been affected.
Hatred and division
The mass migration of people fleeing war and terror now threatens to destabilise the Western democracies. The atmosphere of fear and loathing, at least in part fuelled by the mass media, has created a climate in which populism has bloomed and thrived. Along with its simplistic solutions, this populism has brought a form of hatred and division to our societies the like of which we have not seen since the end of the second world war.
The West is not alone. In Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma) the minority Muslim community known as the Rohingya Muslims are horribly repressed and discriminated against. Denied citizenship by their own government, they are confined to small isolated areas that they are not allowed to leave.
The press in Myanmar, encouraged by fundamentalist Buddhist monks, brand the Rohingya Muslims as less than human. ‘Lower than dogs’ is one of their more charitable descriptions. This dehumanisation of the ‘other’ is often the precursor to dreadful human rights violations. Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi, the erstwhile darling of the West and figurehead of the democracy movement, seems unable or unwilling to make few comments on the unfolding tragedy of the Muslim minority in her own country.
An idea of God
When it comes to religious violence, none of this is new. Sadly, there is no shortage of historical examples. The religious violence of the Crusades was on an epic scale and went on for nearly 200 years. There was the wholesale slaughter of the Inquisition, witch-burning and the attempted genocide of the native people of South America, North America and Australia. In more modern times, the genocide against the Jews we know as the Holocaust had its roots in virulent (Christian) religious bigotry. The religious war in Sri Lanka went on for twenty-six years and cost the lives of thousands, as did the deadly violence of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The bloody effects of the Hindu-Muslim riots in India in 1947 still rumble on in Kashmir.
What is going on? What has religion to do with all this? Well, here is one answer. Religion, I believe, has not got very much to do with God. All the mystics agree on this. If we approach the idea of God, we approach an idea which is unintelligible in that it is beyond human concepts. We can have some vague intimation of it but no more. The problem with religion, for me, is that it does give us an idea of God that is pre-digested and easily assimilated. In this it also gives us something tha can be disastrous, because it gives us the safety of the collective mind, the safety of the social.
The collective, I feel, is like a herd of wildebeest, or a flock of birds or a shoal of fish. It offers security to each individual member (even if that security is an illusion). In much the same way, religion offers the security of belonging. When we belong to a group our capacity for individual thought is soon eroded as we consciously and unconsciously take up the values, mores and beliefs of the group. We start believing what the group believes and we soon come to like what it likes and disapprove of what it disapproves of. That is the (largely unknown) cost of belonging.
Truth and security
In the social or collective we lose the truth and settle, instead, for a security blanket in the shape of a collective self-deception. It is a self-deception that we and our co-religionists will vociferously defend. We will die for it and often be happy to kill defending it. This is the disaster of the social, the collective mind or the ‘Great Beast’. Here is what Simone Weil says about it:
It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.
‘He to whom little is forgiven, loveth little.’ This concerns someone with whom social virtue occupies a very large place. Grace finds little room to spare in him. Obedience to the Great Beast, which conforms to the good – that is social virtue.
A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.
The social allows a man to feel virtuous, but the virtue is an ersatz virtue– and it belongs to the created order, so must call for a reaction. This is why we have the phenomenon of so-called holy followers of religion behaving badly in private. The ‘street saint and the indoor sinner’ can be common among believers; it is psychologically inescapable. Carl Jung, the great psychologist, said that we should observe how a pious or ‘saintly’ man behaves in private. If his virtue is the virtue of the social you will always find anger or other strange manifestations of psychological repression. The much-loved staple of the Sunday newspaper, the vicar discovered in flagrante, is just such an example.
Enemies
The social not only provides a safe haven and a false morality but also provides something the ego needs almost above all else – an enemy. As soon as we belong, we are automatically aware of those who do not belong. If we belong to a religion, there are all those who do not belong to our particular brand of religion. If there are believers, there are unbelievers. If there is the elect, there is the unelect, the adherent and an infidel.
So, religion becomes a tribal affair, a bit like supporting a football team or belonging to any form of social collective. However, as we have seen from the examples above, religion is capable of violence on a far greater scale than most collectives, apart perhaps from the national collective when an army is mobilised to do violence on behalf of the state. Even then, religion and its qualities of group identity often play a part.
Yet, religion is not all bad. Without it nobody would learn how to transcend the purely selfish, and without its moral guidance man would be lost to his worst instincts and desires. Religion provides a sense of meaning for many and at its best is indisputably a force for good.
Perhaps the last word should go to the great Sufi poet Hafiz: ‘The great religions are ships; poets the lifeboats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard.’
Comments
It all becomes understandable when you understand the role that the unconscious plays in ruling our relationships and actions. See Thomas Keating and centering prayer.
By Richard on 1st February 2018 - 19:37
A book called Jung and the Quaker Way by Jack H. Wallis explores some of these issues, as you may well already know.
I do find that in any body or organisation there always seem to be some people who are strongly ‘tribal’ and others who see a fuzzier boundary between the group they belong to and other groups and individuals. I don’t know why this is.
On a practical level, most Quakers are very busy and there always seems to be plenty of work to do (that is another story), but I do think that it is important for all of us to allow at least some time which we spend outside our chosen sphere - so that we are not always meeting only Quakers, members of X political party, those from the town or country or whatever. These Quaker extra activities can creep up on us…
By NeilS on 2nd February 2018 - 9:30
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