Faith and fanaticism
Garvey, John
that Carter's conciliatory gestures -- the cancellation of the B-1, the hesitation on the neutron bomb, the willingness to bargain away the cruise .-- "brought few Soviet concessions." The...
...An Armenian woman who had lived in jerusalem praised Hitler to me once, and hinted that Jews were worthy of death because of their religious obstinacy...
...But to face the implications of this means accepting a painful inner emptiness: I am not now what I sense, somehow, I am meant to be...
...it is true in a time when it has not it has run into criticism...
...The horror and tragedy of the waves of Iranian children moving suicidally them directly related to religion, which _9 against Iraqi artillery recalls an earlier have made the Catholic and Protestant episode in the history of religious fanaticommunities hostile to one another...
...The people are murdei'ed for the sake of abolitionists, many of those who oppose human solidarity...
...Some-of the nervousness is no doubt based on memories of religious fanaticism...
...The question is, how can we be wholehearted without becoming fanatical...
...the big hollow winds, the self-doubts are silenced...
...If it cannot, what is it for...
...The post-Afghanistan mood was captured in a Feiffer cartoon...
...Our bloody history shows us that even the most noble-sounding truths can become excuses for murder...
...Considerations of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and Vietnam were upset by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and Cuban adventures in Africa...
...Francis of Assisi was Catholic through and through, as St...
...The administration was thrown on the defensive by Soviet or Soviet-backed interventions in Ethiopia and Zaire...
...A Jewish friend tells me that it will never be possible for Israel to make peace with the Arabs, who are, because of their religion, incapable of moderation, peace, or religious tolerance...
...It is the desire to fill up that emptiness which leads to political or religious fanaticism...
...the reasons we offer for being willing to kill have...
...The same thing is true of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...I do not know what I feel from the bottom of my heart, I need to know...
...Another argument is that such figures as Saint Francis of Assisi are what religion is really all about...
...Religious people have some easy answers to all this: that was the "spirit of the age," not the essence of the religion...
...Seraphim, and the Baal Shem lived for was real, that escape isn't open...
...To reduce the situation in Northern Ireland to a question of religious intolerance is terribly simplistic...
...But if you believe (as I do) that what St...
...The West since the Enlightenment has consigned religion to the realm of the hobby...
...Religion in its most exalted form does not strike like lightning...
...The need felt by Jews for a homeland, especially after the attempted extermination of European Jewry and the murder of millions, the injustices done to Palestinians who were expelled to make room for Jewish settlers, the continuing violence -- this cism, the children's crusade...
...This sort of religion can only inform...
...Arriving at the answer is the struggle of a lifetime, but without the struggle our desire to do something can turn easily to murder...
...If Christianity is not a perspective, but a radically different way of living, how can it be lived wi~out fanaticism...
...i t could never transform...
...At a time when newscasts were filled with Iranian denunciations of the Great Satan, Feiffer's character says: "it's Historically False To Libel The Vietnamese Revolution Because Of The Drowning Boat People "It's Historically False To Libel The Kampuchean Revolution Because Of The Starving Refugees "It's Historically False To Libel The Iranian Revolution Because Of The Embassy Hostages "An Objective Historical Analysis Proves That Only One Country Deserves Blame And That's America "And Do You Know Why...
...One is our desire to possess truth, rather than serve it...
...Similarly, if World Policy hopes to succeed where the Carterites fell short_9 will have to do more than wish away Soviet power with pieties about the self-defeating nature of violence...
...This was before Afghanistan...
...Of several minds: John Garvey FAITH 8E FANATICISN HOW TRUTH BECOMES AN EXCUSE FOR MURDER A COUPLE OF friends, both involved in politics, were sitting in my living room...
...The Inquisition tortured and burned people in the name of God's truth, it goes back: Moses's troops slaughtered people inthe name of the Lord of Hosts...
...There are lines in the Torah which conAt the same time, religion is involved tradict the behavior of Israelites in the in thesedisputes...
...The U.S...
...Murder for the sake of a holy cause has passed from religious into secular hands...
...Religion has, by and large, murdered those who disagreed that this accepted this definition of its role...
...Seraphim of Sarov was Orthodox, and the Baal Shem Tov a Jew...
...little_9 at: tention has been _9 to the complex historical and economic factors, none Of _9 ~ II , I I1 down with the Pope...
...This was true when, in the name of a man who died for in by those who choose to, an esthetic love of all human beings, his followers preference...
...By possessing the truth (which is very different from being possessed by it) you anchor yourself...
...The temptation is to abandon all thought of truths worth living or dying for, since these can so easily be turned to murder in the name of truth...
...Look at Northern Ireland, the Jews versus the Arabs, Iran . . . . it might be better if there were no religions at all...
...There are people who regard Hiroshima as an unfortunate necessity, who are bothered at religious objections to nuclear arms...
...It is found -- so far in human history, anyway -- in specific religious traditions...
...news media have generally reported the situation in Northern Ireland, for example, as a case of Catholics versus Protestants...
...If it cannot distinguish between the need to negotiate with Cuba and serving as apologists for Castro, its influence will be short lived...
...It is a taste which can be indulged into truths worth killing for...
...The primary religious question is not "What are we to do...
...tween forms of monotheism...
...The Christian will feel a Christian poignancy as he drops the bomb on his enemy for the sake of the truth, as defined by the state...
...Exaggerated hopes, however benign their source, have been consistently disastrous, from the illusions of 1944-46, to the overselling of ddtente in the seventies and Carter's rhetoric about how he and Brezhnev had bar"similar goals and aspirations...
...If Shakespeare or Bach inform us in a way which is spiritually important, it is at least theoretically possible that pornography can degrade us...
...Some important distinctions have to be made, though...
...but "What am I to be...
...Christian crusaders were told that "God wills it," and spiritual rewards were offered those who went as crusaders to the Holy Land...
...They knew what I meant, but weren't entirely convinced, i share some of their discomfort...
...Atheists who look with disdain at the crusades will defend Stalin's purges...
...Where was true of him...
...Sometimes I wonder whether religion isn't more a cause of evil and division than a cure," one said...
...It is important -- even politically important, and it is essential spiritually -- to learn how to wait, with empty hands...
...No doubt Torquemada was sincerely convinced that it was for the faith of Francis of Assisi that the Inquisition was conducted...
...The connection of religion with violence is much clearer in the case of Iran...
...Religion becomes a form of criticism...
...Our murderous inclinations haven't changed...
...doesn't reduce to a disagreement b e - This is true enough, as far as it goes...
...But there is a blind spot here...
...FRED SIEGEL (Fred Siegel is the author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan, just published by Hill and Wang...
...JOHN GARVEY 4 May 1984: 267...
...Francis, St...
...it is essential not to fill it up with answers which have not been earned...
...and fascist art -- the film The Triumph of Will, for example -- has been used to move people to evil...
...The beginning of wisdom is not to flee from this condition or distract yourself from it...
...But this is like the arguments of those who say that art can only uplift...
...WE'RE INFIDELS...
...Without defending religion's often ugly r01e, I pointed out that political ideology in our century had taken more lives than religion ever had in the history of the human race...
...And it is true that more people have been slaughtered in the name of secular ideologies than were ever murdered in the name of God...
...It rebounds on the believer who makes it: what do religious and secular ideologies which lead people to murder have in common with one another...
...I suppose at the practical level this means that the insights of monasticism and the mystical tradition must be seen as central to Christianity, not peripheral, as they are ordinarily understood to be...
...The Soviets, viewing Carter from the backdrop of Vietnam and Watergate, the growing anti-military mood in America and the president' s own rhetoric, assumed that Carter had no choice but to silently accept their incursions...
...The Carter administration was left naked before its hawkish critics...
...You have not made an impressive argument in favor of religion when you say that the victims of Joshua's men, islamic jihads, the crusades, and the Inquisition don't equal the numbers of deaths which occurred under Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or the Pol Pot regime...
...But neither of these arguments is taken to its logical conclusion...
...The communities which formed them were also capable of producing people willing to murder for what the murderers regarded as the same valu e s . . , for the truth of Catholicism, or Orthodoxy, or the Lord of Hosts...
...It has to live with the "other" lessons of Vietnam...
...It is the truths arrived at this way which men kill for...
...I am increasingly convinced that the need to be fight has nothing whatsoever to do with the love of truth...
...The argument that more people have died at the hands of secular and atheistic ideologies is only numerically impressive...
...maybe the problem wasn't to be located so simply in religion...
...Shouldn't religious teaching form its hearers in such a way that they will be able to see through or resist the spirit of the age...
...The other agreed...
...We are now paying the price for their miscalculation...
...And if it can, why has it not done so in a more impressive way...
...As a White House aide put it, "If we spend all our time jawboning against the Soviet Union, we're going to have real problems convincing the American people that the Russians can be trusted...
...it can never corrupt...
...Protestants inNorthern historic books and the behavior of Ireland Sing "Up with King Billy and crusaders and inquisitors is certainly _9 at Commonweal: 266 odds with the teaching of Jesus...
...There is obviously no nuclear arms and abortion, and many of simple answer to this, but I think there those who want to censor school texts are some clues to what makes us willing and purge libraries do the sometimes contradictory things they do on the basis of religious conviction...
...Western religion has become an ingredient or flavor which is introduced into something which really matters: we bring to our work or to a political enterprise a "Christian spirit" or "Christian perspective...
...Unlike its predecessors World Policy does not have the luxury of romantic illusions about third-world revolutions...
...the atrocities are aberrations...
...And whether they are (in conventional terms) acting in areas conventionally labeled fight wing (as in the case of abortion) or left (as in opposition to nuclear arms) they make a lot of liberal editorialists nervous, and a lot of churchmen as well...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 9
