Dialogue: More harm from secular faiths than spiritual ones

Religion has been taking a battering lately. Far too much so if relative costs and contributions are analysed, writes OWEN McSHANE*.

I am an atheist and yet I feel obliged to make a stand for religion.

Since the Islamic attack on America, people from all walks of life have argued that religion is the cause of all the trouble in the world; if we could only abandon religion in favour of secular rationalism, peace and happiness would surely reign.

Of course, religion has much to answer for. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the slaughter of the Huguenots, "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland, and the Iran-Iraq war, are all historical facts.

However, for all that these were terrible events, the numbers killed were comparatively small. The Inquisition disposed of thousands, not millions. The Crusades killed scores of thousands, not scores of millions.

But by the end of the 20th century, the two great experiments in the secular rationalism of Marxist-Leninism had left more than 100 million dead. They made the most brutal religions seem positively benign.

Marx, too, declared that religion was the opiate of the people and promised to deliver a secular heaven on earth.

Tragically, the realisation of his workers' paradise in both the Soviet Union and China soon turned to hell on earth.

Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic", and went on to demonstrate his love of statistics. Mao said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and went on to show how much he loved political power.

The traditional faiths should help to keep such totalitarians at bay, because they must have learned that secular faiths tolerate no competition.

However, it is fair to ask why religions spawn so many atrocities when they espouse divine love and the common virtues. One answer is obvious. True believers, being human, seek to impose the benefits of their true faith on the rest of us.

Fired-up fundamentalists are even prepared to kill us for the good of our souls.

And today we must be prepared to ask why the Islamic states seem to throw up more than their fair share of murderous fanatics. One reason is Islam's relationship between church and state.

The great and powerful civilisations of today draw on the Judeo-Christian tradition, Confucianism and Islam.

When Christ said, "Render, therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's," he initiated the idea of separating the Church from the state.

Seventeen hundred years later, article one of the first amendment to the United States Constitution entrenched this separation when it said: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

The American Founding Fathers were not opposed to religion. On the contrary, they were deeply religious people. But they knew that only this secular society would guarantee freedom of worship, while equally ensuring that no one person or group could impose their beliefs on others.

Around the time of Socrates, Confucius had written his analects, which promoted virtuous governance, independent of any religious framework. Hence, excluding the temporary aberration of the Maoist regime, the Chinese culture of governance is Confucian, but Chinese people are able to be Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or whatever faith they may choose.

Islam is different. It makes no distinction between religion and politics. Islam constitutes a complete social system that embraces all who belong, and claims influence over every corner of their lives.

For Islamic states this makes the transition from religious tribalism to the open society of modernity extremely difficult, and no states have ever found it easy.

The transition to modernity requires major political change and those changes soon run up against Islam's religious law. The problem is exacerbated by Islam's fourth Pillar of Wisdom which demands ongoing zakat or "purification". Muslim faith must be protected from the impurities of foreign thought and behaviour.

When an Islamic state begins to modernise, it is not long before some charismatic and pious leader arises to halt the backsliding.

Afghanistan's present problems began in 1929 when King Amanullah was overthrown for trying to accelerate modernisation and secularisation. Iran suffered the same fate in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini's revivalists overthrew the Pahlavi Shah.

The result is that the world's billion or so Muslims are convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Their faith and culture is assaulted from both within and without. Progressives within seek change and freedom. The outside world has assaulted their faith by colonisation in the past, and more recently all-pervasive Western values erode their whole place in the world.

While we can trace the rise of the Nazis in Germany to the reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's Holocaust was driven by his obsession with racial purity.

Similarly, while most of the Islamic world is distressed by the invasive Israeli state, the Taleban zealots are driven by the need to defend the purity of the faith. For example, the very idea that women have the right to be educated, to work, to govern, and to wear makeup in the street, must drive them to suicidal fury.

Finally, fundamentalism is fuelled by oppression. The fundamentalist Taleban were born out of the invasion of their country by the godless Soviets. America's fundamentalist Christians are mostly found in the Southern states, whose values and culture were overturned by the northern victory in the Civil War.

When politics and religion are totally entwined, the whole culture is threatened from both sides. And Muslims have reason to be proud of their culture.

In these times it is easy to overlook Islam's contribution to art, poetry, architecture, and even science. If a scientific or mathematical term is not Greek, it will almost certainly be Arabic. This is my other argument in favour of religion. The great religions of the world have inspired some of our greatest art, music, architecture, painting and literature.

But the truly secular Soviet and Maoist regimes inspired nothing. The artists of Russia and China maintained their creativity despite their rulers, rather than because of them.

So while the great religions of the world have plenty of blood on their hands, they have also inspired Chartres, Michelangelo's Pieta, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Handel's Messiah, Da Vinci's Last Supper, Bach's fugues, Milton's Paradise Lost - and these are just from Europe.

The balance sheets of the Marxist states remain deeply in the red.

* Owen McShane, of Kaiwaka, is a research consultant and public-policy analyst.

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