ENDING RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE (an attempt)

introduction
I was born Christian, baptized in a catholic church and grew up in a Christian community. I was taught of the goodness and wonderful promises of God and to “love thy neighbor as you love thyself.” Yet everyday I hear of the evilness of man around; radios broadcasting about husbands beating their wives, televisions showing massacres, movies depicting wars, newspapers and magazines telling about the recent robbery in town, etc. People who claim to be religious are not excluded in these chaotic scenes either. We hear news about priests molesting a little girl, suicide bombings between Jews and Arabs, and the fact that we are all Filipinos cannot stop the prejudices we have with each other to Moslem and Christian brothers and sisters here in the Philippines. It is no wonder why more and more people are now becoming more and more apathetic that they turn out agnostics or rather choose to become atheists.

In this essay I will try to present some instances of violence brought about by religion and the different reasons and justifications of these violence, resulting to the secular lost of the transcendence of God and try to restore, as it were the devastated world by bridging the gap between people by traveling us back to the real essence of religion in light of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan, on his view of what religion is and how it should be able to transform an individual into a better human person and not the other way around, by pointing us out that the recurrent structure of human understanding proceeds generally from experience to insight or understanding of experience; from insight to judgment of the truth or falsity of claims; and from judgment to decisions that lead us back to experience. Thus at the end of the day, religion is not about imposing to the other what we “believe” but rather about respecting the other’s belief and that the evilness in this world is not for God to be blamed but to the person herself who is the doer of the action.

religious violence and its justifications
The term religion comes from Latin root religare, which means, “to bind together,”[1] suggests a communal orientation and common purpose about whose behavior reasonable generation can be made. However beneath the histories of religious traditions from the great acts of martyrdom to crusading ventures back to biblical wars, oppression and violence has lurked as a shadowy presence. Precisely the reason why Karl Marx propounded that religion is the opium of the people because if it is that which “binds” things together, why are there many alienated and oppressed people and are willing to do violence in the name of religion?

One of the ever-famous personalities in the darkest chapters in history of religion or of the human history in general is Adolf Hitler, known for being the one responsible for the Jewish Holocaust. He said, “…as for the Jews…I don’t put race above religion, but I do see the danger in the representations of this race for church and state, and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service.[2]Certainly, this one does not understand his faith enough that instead of making him a better person, his crooked belief led him to the lower level of beasts instead of becoming the best person he could possibly become. The oppressive and violent acts of priests and political leaders or any person are not to be justified just because they belong to a certain religion. If religions have legitimated certain acts of violence, they have also attempted to limit the frequency and scope of those acts.

William Ernest Hocking once wrote:
“Religion is often described as the healing of an alienation which has spread between man and his world: this is true; but we may forget that it is religion which has brought about that alienation religion is healing of a breach which religion itself is made.”[3]

The concept and experience, then, of alienation are part of the religious attitude itself. Back to the history of Christianity, the feudal system of government has used religion to control and oppress people. In ancient times, the intellectualism and rationality of Greeks are all about the pervading idea of “fate,” that order is designed by gods for the pleasure of gods so that the person cannot do anything for his improvement anymore. However at Medieval period, Christianity became the most prevailing practice and the “pagan” thing was evil. According to them, fate is a pagan belief. Yet they just changed this concept of “fate” into “faith in Divine Providence” wherein there should be a resignation to the will of God, i.e., whatever the Divine Providence wills, people cannot do anything about it anymore hence feudalism is impressed in the Christian mind. Thus any revolutionary ideas, which are aimed at eliminating inequality, were an act against the will of God. Looking at the feudal system closely, Christianity actually practiced paganism under the guise of “faith in Divine Providence.” Hence, the breeding ground of Marx’s idea is that he saw religion as a form of alienation through which humankind had attributed all the goodness and wisdom which it was capable to a remote God instead of recognizing them as essentially human capacities. For how can we uncover God’s face in a context where people are reduced to insignificance? What does it mean to speak about the God of life of people whose daily experience is being despised because they are poor people in oppressed races?

In the case of Israelites and Palestinians, suicide bombings have been rampant because of conflicting religious beliefs and ideas. Mark Juergensmeyer, in his book, Terror in the Mind of God,[4] shares, that Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish Israelite, saw the situation of Jewish people of Israel as that of victims oppressed in their own land. Encroaching presence of Arabs on the West Bank was not just a distant threat. Goldstein lived there and saw on the daily basis what he perceives to be the Arabs arrogance in thinking that they had the right to the land on which they lived. He had watched with mourning wrath as Palestinian Arabs increased their attacks on his fellow resident and complained that automobiles driven by Jewish settlers had been stoned on the major road leading to Jerusalem and several settlers had been killed. At night he could hear noises and occasionally hear some shouting the terrible words, it bah al-yahud, meaning, “slaughter the Jews.” He has had enough and so one day he went to the shrine of the Mosque on the Muslim side of the building and pulled out a Gail assault rifle firing and killing more than 30 worshippers, and injuring scores more. Goldstein was overwhelmed by the crowd and pummeled to death.

For the Jews the idea that the creation of a Palestinian government on the West Bank poses a danger not only to Israel as a nation but to Jews in general and to Judaism as a religion was explained by Rabbi Meir Kahane – founder of Israel’s Right-wing Kach (Thus) Party. At the heart of Kahane’s thinking was “catastrophic messianism,” the idea that the messiah will come in a great conflict in which Jews triumph and praise God through their success. This was their understanding of the term Kiddush ha Shem, “the sanctification of God.” Anything that humiliates the Jews was not only an embarrassment but also a retrograde motion in the world’s progress towards salvation.

On the other hand, like other religions, Islam occasionally allows for force while stressing that the main spiritual goal is one of nonviolence and peace. According to Sheik Mar Abdul Rahman in an interview shortly after the bombing of the World Trade Center, a Muslim can “never call for violence,” only for “love, forgiveness and tolerance.” But he added that if they are aggressed against it, they must call for hitting the attacker and the aggressor to put an end to the aggression. Iran’s ayatollah Khomeini said he knew of no command ‘more binding’ to the Muslim than the command to sacrifice life and property to defend the bolster Islam. Violence is required for purposes of punishment, for example, and it is sometimes deemed necessary for defending faith. In the “world of conflict” outside the Muslim world, force is a means of cultural survival. In such a context, maintaining the purity of religious existence is thought to be a matter of jihad, a word literally means, “striving” and is often translated as “holy war.” It is as a political one, stemming from religious commitment. It was also part of a tradition of Islamic protest against injustice.

With these justifications for violence in mind, they have been able to go about their business killing with certainty that they were following the logic of God. It is really an irony that religious leaders claim that their principal aim is to promote peace and order yet are using violence, abusing and oppressing people to achieve these “wonderful” goals of their own religion. Nevertheless, this narrow usage of “religion” confuses people even more. It binds us to the fact that we live today in the midst of competing religious value systems and that we are being pressed by this warfare of the gods into making choices we would rather avoid.

religion is cultural
Other people contend that all religions are one. Many have said this because they wanted it to be so, but some of these claims are results of personal experience with many religious faiths. It is not much important proving that “all religions are one” but we just have to accept the fact that different people of different culture attributes different characteristics to their God, hence behave and respond differently from those who have a different God. It is of no objection to me if someone will tell me that to Black Africans, Christ must be seen as black. It is not a matter of having many and different gods either. As Simone Weil once said, “All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a man to name God in his native tongue rather than in one that is foreign to him,” hence the name Jesus, Brahma, Allah, Kabunyan, etc. In one of the Vedic texts it says, Ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti, meaning, “Truth is One; sages call it by various names.”

Men have always had experiences that they venture with great importance and often such circumstances, from the acts of audacity and fortitude and moments of love to visions and aesthetic ‘highs’ brings about drastic changes in our lives. We uphold the essence of an experience by trying to understand it by conceptualizing and reflecting on it. To Bernard Lonergan, Insight is the act of understanding understanding. Understanding shapes the being of the human person hence, to understand understanding is to commit oneself to being, i.e., to commit oneself to the unfolding of reality. And to unfold reality is to know ourselves by situating us within a particular realm or sphere of being. As we experience something, the mind interprets it hence what experience “means” is therefore culturally relative. Every culture has a particular world-view at its foundation. People have their own particular mode of experience so we have to understand them according to their experiences or tradition. In an interview, Lonergan tell us that his “concern is with a state of culture. Theology mediates between a religion and a culture.” Furthermore, a system (or any religious system) he says,
“presupposes a horizon, a world-view, a differentiation of consciousness that has unfolded under the conditions and circumstances of a particular culture and a particular historical development.”[5]

Lonergan’s approach is historicist. He recognizes that culture is on the move hence it changes over time, because cultures are man-made. The development (or decline) of a culture reflects the mythological concepts in an attempt to make sense of the experience of the people of the awe and supposed certainties they have on the minds which in turn will reflect the underlying belief system of the culture. Faith thus is rooted in people’s experiences hence an account of human person’s self-consciousness. Religion is a lifetime journey of knowing oneself, hence self-transcendence. Each human culture is an ongoing process of human self-creation. Humans make cultures and each culture makes the humans of that culture. In an analysis of cultural progress and decline, Lonergan maintains that: “insight into insight brings to light the cumulative process of progress. For concrete situations give rise to insights which issue into policies and courses of action. Action transforms the existing situation to give rise to further insights, better policies, and more effective courses of action. It follows that if insight occurs, it keeps occurring; and at each recurrence knowledge develops, action increases its scope, and situations improve.”

restoring the distorted essence of religion
Lonergan developed a religious epistemology that is rooted in the dynamism of human understanding: insight. In the subject’s pursuit of truth, which is the demand of her rationality is the call to authentic existence. The truth of what one is, is revealed more fully in the light of the telos of religion. Religion is a mode of the divine-human encounter, which is consummated in love. Love is the perfection of religion; the love of creation for the love of God is what defines the nature of religion. Religion is the unique condition of integral human transformation. Being religious, then, in the strictest sense of the word, means being human in the most special way.[6]

Religion must permeates every level of existence and not prevent the people from realizing their potentials. The sad thing in the history of religion is that people of “power” used the name of God and religion to degrade the lowly more into their doom and destruction. That is why religion, to be properly human is supposed to be critical, it should help people realize their own uniqueness and importance, not just as human but also as Person. The key towards understanding Lonergan’s vision of religion is to take into account the human persons capacity of self-transcendence. And an authentic self-transcendence is Love, that is, the love of God and love of neighbor. As Lonergan eloquently puts it:
“I have conceived being in love with God as an ultimate fulfillment of man’s capacity for self-transcendence; as the supreme fulfillment of the transcendental notions, as supreme intelligence, truth, reality, righteousness, goodness…unless religion is totally directed to what is good, to genuine love of one’s neighbor and to a self-denial that is subordinated to a fuller goodness in oneself, then the cult of a God that is terrifying can slip over into the demonic, into an exultant destructiveness of oneself and of others.”[7]

Religion therefore is the opportunity accorded for people to transcend themselves by loving God and neighbors. It must not be seen as a body of doctrine but rather as a way of life that articulates the challenge of co-existence, that is, to be open minded to different perspectives of different people belonging to different culture and religion and be able to compare and evaluate the conflicting views in history by willing to engage ourselves in a dialogue. Religion is pedagogical because it allows us to learn the truth of who we really are, and the truth of who we are is very much affected by our experiences and of the kind of culture where we grew up. But as we interact with other cultures we form some view of the world. Like all unfamiliar insights, this propositions requires a horizon shift. Of course these may present a communication problem because of different perspectives but Lonergan is hopeful of achieving the unity of plurality. He says,
“But behind this multiplicity there is a basic unity that comes to light in the exercise of transcendental method.[8] We can inquire into the possibility of fruitful inquiry. We can reflect on the nature of reflection. We can deliberate whether our deliberation is worth while.”[9]

Religion is not about imposing or forcing the other to accept your convictions that often result to catastrophic killing but rather, it should make people broad minded enough to be able to listen to the side of the other. We have to be critical and at the same time understanding of our own and of other people’s experiences.

conclusion
Religion is human’s involvement in the search of the meaning of her existence, and the depth of the person’s involvement is the depth of her religion. It is a participation in solving the riddle of life in a special way for a special purpose. Religion is our attempt to make sense of the universe and find a meaningful relatedness to all the pregnant event of human experiences. It is “our ultimate concern for the ultimate,” as Paul Tillich once said.

However, everyday we hear news of violence committed by people in the name of religion. People spitting people, people cursing people, people killing people just because of conflicting religious beliefs brought about by cultural differences. Because of these many people now consider religion as a world system used to mislead or deceive people. According to Marx,
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation.”[10]

The religious and moral risk of tragic consciousness is to encounter reality or truth in its radical plurality, unmooring the mood from any metaphysical anchor, so that it becomes entirely human, entirely fragile relationship. It is our ignorance of the connection we have with others that causes this to happen. It wouldn't happen if we didn't do it to ourselves. People can reflect anything they need to, to not do what they are compelled to do by a healthy heart, and that is to love unconditionally, which means to forgive unconditionally.

Many of us becomes dependent on others, to our “religious leaders” who pretend to have in them the “love of God” in which they usually use the natural needs and instincts to another person for their own selfish ends. What stops a person from knowing it is themselves. So now we have man struggling with his own mind, but most of the time he does not appear to struggle because he is comfortable with what he is told by other people on what to know. I am not telling us to go against our pastors or priests or any religious leaders in our community but if we are to understand our faith, we have to understand it thoroughly and reflect within and ask ourselves where does our religion or belief or faith is bringing us. Because for one to be truly religious in strictest sense of the word, a self-transformation should be seen in the person. Religion must be humanity and not doctrines; religion unites and not divides.

According to Lonergan, the gift of God’s love is that “it leads to a transformation in life, but more on the order of practice than on the order of intellectual knowledge”[11] so that at the end of the day, all knowing must lead into acting. That is to love God, and to love God is to love the other as you love yourself.

The human person is an insight-full being; a being capable of knowing herself, of understanding herself, that is to say she knows and understands her actions hence she takes responsibility of her actions and it is in being responsible that she is able to commit herself to the unfolding of reality which is done by loving. Our ignorance or failure to take a look into the depths of ourselves is that which creates disharmony, destruction, non-oneness. God is eternal will, eternal consciousness and awareness, hence it is in wisdom or in the human person’s capacity to understand her understanding, in reflecting, in in-sighting that God creates the harmony, order, and oneness. God lives through us; in a family or friends or community of being or even to the ones we consider as our enemies. A collective consciousness is much like our own body; one person is a hand, another is a foot, an eye, an ear, and so on. One mind controls them all (which is God), maneuvering them in a graceful harmony. The collective tie is love, which is to say each individual mind sees their oneness with the whole. If each mind or if each of us acts from the same perspective, the same place, even though we are separate, we are still the same. Each human mind acts from the same place, truth. Truth is God and if one has insight of the truth she has an insight of love and it is the bond of love that will encompass all the seeming differences we have. This is oneness, this is harmony.The world is what it is today because we are not all acting from the same place. We are still very much consumed by our prejudices and biases of other people just because they grew up in a different place and time, in a different culture and call their God a different name, etc., making each one act differently. Religion is not about imposing our belief to the other saying, “this is truth, this is what is.” Not that it is what is, just that we will take it for what is. We all must be highly present, gentle, and flexible in order to perceive reality for what it is and construct the proper beliefs/codes/directives that will act as hand me downs for our children to come. Our beliefs will be theirs, so our beliefs now will create their world when it is happening in the now.

In an era like ours, where peaceful dialogue is lacking, religion can either worsen the disease or help contribute to a recovery. This situation will become less baffling however, if we stop trying to understand it as a battle between faith and reason, emotion and intelligence, religion and culture.
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endnotes

[1] Scott, Appleby R. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
[2] Rivera, Alberto. Alberto. CA USA: Jack T. Chick, Chick Publications, 1985. vol. 16, p.26-27.
[3] Dupre, Louis. The Other Dimensions: A search for the Meaning of Religions. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
[4] Published by The Regents of the University of CA, 2000.
[5] Lonergan, Bernard J.F., S.J. Philosophy of God and Theology. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973, p.12.
[6] Assistant philosophy professor - Mr. Jeffrey Centeno’s introductory lecture of Bernard Lonergan’s thought, first semester 2004, Saint Louis University, Baguio City, Philippines.
[7] Lonergan, Bernard J.F., S.J. Method in Theology. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1973, p.111.
[8] Transcendental Method is the epistemological pattern of cognitive operations or the response to the demands of the mind, that is, the dynamism of rational self-consciousness. It is about the willingness to walk an extra mile, to reach further, to know further until we arrive to the question of God. And religion, according to Lonergan tells us of the possibility of the knowledge of God because the possibility of knowledge lies in the unity of the structures of the mind.
[9] Method in Theology, p.101.
[10] Palmer,Donald. Looking at Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 2001. p. 259.
[11] Philosophy of God and Theology, p. 41.