You can now download and read a paper on “Religion and violence” that I first presented at a special colloquium on world religions that the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2003.
Many of the papers presented there, including mine, will be published in an upcoming special edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which is published by Oxford University Press.
Well, I’ve been kind of eager for the paper to be published and out there, so I could share it with a bunch of people and get some discussion going on what I said/wrote in it… The JAAR publishing process has seemed to me extremely lengthy but then I guess that’s in the nature of academic publishing. (As opposed to, for example, blogging.)
Now, I just heard that this edition of JAAR will be coming out this December. And here’s the neat thing about the rights to the text that I retain under the terms of the contract with OUP: I can “mount” the pre-published version of the Article–I’m quoting directly from OUP’s rights Agreement here–on my personal Web site, “as long as [I] acknowledge that the Article has been accepted for publication by OUP.”
Okay, I think I’ve acknowledged that.
Actually I’m just re-reading the Agreement here. Even after publication I am “entitled to use parts or all of the Article in other publications written or edited by [my]self, providing that a full acknowledgement is given to the Journal and to Oxford University Press…”
I guess I’ll just go back into the text of the Article, as I recently uploaded it here, and put that acknowledgement in there at the top, and then I can publish it here myself forever…
Done.
15 thoughts on “Paper on “Religion and violence””
Comments are closed.
Helena,
I’ve just done a (very) quick first read of the paper, which is very engaging. Your conclusion is interesting because it partly echoes the meme George Lakoff of Berkeley brings up regarding conservative and liberal views of the family, and by extension, the body politic.
As obvious as this seems, we apparently need to remind ourselves repeatedly that a specific religion has little to do with individual or social morality. And, speaking as an agnostic, compassion is not limited to the religious. Religion simply provides a template for whatever neurosis a given group is going to manifest, regardless.
The link to the article doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried it many times.
Hi, Dominic. I just resaved it as an HTM file, uploaded it thusly, and changed the link. This might make it more readable by a browser. let me know if there are still probs.
(I actually notice there are a couple of typos in the the text but that’s what journal editors are FOR, right?)
Thank you Helena, it works, and I’ve gone through the article. It’s emotional for a South African.
My first reaction is that yes, politicians use religion. It’s another way of saying that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” as the 1848 Communist Manifesto says. In other words class is the driver, not religion, and not race.
Let me also quote from Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
Let me tell you also that Bishop Tutu is an annoying man, a pokey arrogant anti-Communist bossy-boots. Still I am grateful for him and the other religious people who staged the Truth Commission. They listened to a lot of people who otherwise would not have been heard or had their testimony read into any kind of lasting record. That was a huge thing.
It gave a lot of us a chance to pluck the living flowers of life again, which otherwise we would not have had.
Helena: Wow, Catholics involved in the Genocide in Rwanda? That really saddens me. Yesterday there was a story about how the Catholic Bishop in San Diego refused to give a church funeral and burial for a gay man on the grounds that he ran some “adult entertainment” bars. (aka gay bars).
Dominic at 19. marec 2005 11:57
Bishop Tutu is an annoying man, a pokey arrogant anti-Communist bossy-boots. HA! Good one.
I heard him on the Majority Report on Air America Radio. He said some great things but could have used an editor. My how he does go on!
Helena, I’m going to re-read the paper later, I’m especially interested in this weird disconnect in the US between Christian’s raging about “unborn babies” and yet silence or even encouragement about the war in Iraq through their support of the President.
Frankly, I see a failure of correct education with in the leadership of the Christian community that there wasn’t a massive protest against the war from the Christian community. What kind of mental hoops they must jump through in order to ignore the atrocities that are going on in Iraq is amazing to me.
Spocko, has not the “weird disconnent” existed since the beginning of religion? Did it not have something to do with Christ throwing the money-lenders out of the Temple? Isn’t it what Helena is writing about, altogether?
As for us commies, Marx hit the nail on the head as a young man in 1845 with his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, which says: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
People must not only think righteously, they must act upon their righteous thinking. Religious or non-religious, Christian or Moslem, we have the same problem in front of us, action or quietism.
The commies did not escape this problem once and for all in 1845. Unfortunately, it was out of our own ranks that the Imperialist “post-modern” philosophy of today arose. Post-modernism says there is nothing you can do, there is no free will, you cannot change the world, it is all written in the sands.
Post-modernism is the perfect handmaiden to its apparent opposite, which is the fascist view that says that the rulers (specisically the US rulers) make reality now. Both these errors come out of the same bigger error, which is the disconnection between though and action, mind and matter, subject and object, will and world.
The Quakers, from what I hear, have a very sensible idea of the relation between the spiritual and material worlds. So do the Catholics, at least at the level of doctrine. To deny free will is a heresy for a Catholic. Without free will there cannot be sin, they say.
We all have free will and we are all sinners. Or, as Frantz Fanon put it, “There are no innocents and there are no onlookers” (see “The Wretched of the Earth”). Free will also means that we can always do better. It means that progress and even revolution are possible.
Today, Palm Sunday, participants from the organization, Every Church A Peace Church http://www.ecapc.org are participating with Palestinians in a march (some on donkeys)from Bethlehem to Jerusalem; participants are hopeful to pass through a checkpoint. Please see Greg Moses’ peacefile.org/wordpress for more on the potential for religious organizations to promote peace and justice.
I just wanted to say that at our peace rally yesterday in Asheville, the name of Jesus came from the stage many times. There were a couple of church groups there with signs identifying them (Quaker and Episcopalian). The little flags we made to represent Iraqi Civilian Casualties (which the local police made us take up before the rally – they said they could be used as a weapon – and so could the microphone stands!) are now on display at the Unitarian Universalist Church.
At least in our community, people of religion are taking a stand against violence and war.
I only saw the presence of the Quaker House at the Fayetteville Rally.
oh, and Helena… I finally met Tony Bing!
I think perhaps your generalization doesn’t go far enough. Rather than seeking to generalize about groups, religions in this case, you should seek to generalize individuals as judging vs. healing. (I suppose you have to address the level of religion since that is the focus of both you and the journal.)
You acknowledge this somewhat by saying that both “flavors come mixed together in the same institutional package.” I have certainly noticed this to be true in the gamut of religions from Catholicism to Judaism to Islam to Buddhism, but I think that either perspective can emanate from identical doctrine in many cases, and the variable is the person involved.
But normal people are generally inclined to be religious. Read sociologists of religion from Durkheim to the present and it is clear that anyone expecting a “withering away” of religion is not in touch with reality.
Given that most religions contain elements of two different flavors, it becomes clear that the healing of the world does not involve the ascendancy of some religions and the faltering of others, but the ascendancy of healing elements within each religion at the expense of non-healing elements.
Hi all, I am so happy to read all your comments here. Sometime I wonder why I blog but getting this amount of feedback is really great.
Anothony, I totally agree with you here: Given that most religions contain elements of two different flavors, it becomes clear that the healing of the world does not involve the ascendancy of some religions and the faltering of others, but the ascendancy of healing elements within each religion at the expense of non-healing elements.
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