Peace

If you are in a Christian society, at this time of year, you hear the word “peace” more than at other times. Yet, if you watch the news, you will read of war and murder every day.

When I was first becoming acquainted with Islam, most of my friends at the time, Muslims, again, peace was a word I heard quite often. The most common greetings in Arabic were “peace upon you,” or just “with peace.” Even the word “Islam” is derived from the word “peace.” This would seem weird to many Americans, especially conservative Christians, because they see Islam as a religion of war and violence. But here’s the real kicker: once you become truly embedded in an Islamic culture, you would realize that they see the Christians in the same light. It is hard for Americans to understand that in the eyes of the world, America is considered the number one source of hate and state-sponsored terrorism. To the Muslim, the violent, merciless crusades happened yesterday. The slaughter of almost 100,000 innocent Gazans was done with American weapons. The disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan (disasters for both the indigenous and American people) were an ill-guided American expeditions.

The Obstacle to Peace

Putting that aside, I examined what the biggest obstacle to genuine peace between people is. There are disagreements, but do they always have to lead to conflict? No. It is more than that. It is the next step, disrespect, and some aspect of dehumanization of those who disagree with you. Then there is murder.

Jesus pointed out that if you call someone “raqa,” it is the same as murder. The Aramaic word, raqa (ריקא), which means “empty-headed,” or stupid. So why would Jesus equate calling someone stupid with murder? It is because each is on the same continuum. Once you start down that path, disharmony and even murder (at least the imagining of murder) could be consequences.

I love to deconstruct all things social down to their microscopic level. I think that is where we can have the most insight and a point of correction.

Each of us creates our own catalog of beliefs. These beliefs are shaped by our childhood experiences, our daily interactions with people, and the stories we read and hear. These beliefs are of what we think is true and moral, eventually define us.

The primal driver for all people, I believe, is the search for significance. Building this catalog of beliefs is part of that process. We favor these particular beliefs because we think they are true, or sometimes we don’t care if our beliefs are true, but they say something positive about ourselves.

When someone has different beliefs from us, be they social, political, or religious, it is part of our narcissistic drive to call them stupid. Calling someone stupid who believes x means that we, who believe y, are smart and good. All the negative attachments we can place on the other, who thinks the opposite of us, enhances our significance. Comparisons are the fastest and most reliable means of improving our relevance.

It is difficult for a person to change their beliefs or admit that someone else is right, because it suggests that person has been foolish or immoral up to that point. By doubling down on our disparaging of them, going from stupid to evil to monster to dogs to unworthy of life is a slippery slope.

The Religious Setting

In the religious context, I will speak primarily from my decades as a religious person (up until 1990), drawing on honest introspection. I hope that I don’t hold these views now, but likely do.

For the religious person, they develop their catalog of beliefs like everyone else, through social coercion. Some of their beliefs stem from the teachings of their holy book, the Bible, for Christians. But it is not that clean.

When I was an evangelical, we sincerely believed that our extensive catalog of beliefs came directly from the Bible. We referred to ourselves as “Biblical.” It was almost impossible, psychologically, to understand how much we were a product of the 1970s – 90s American conservative evangelical culture. I believe the vast majority of what we call Christianity is 2000 years of culture, not Biblical mandates. That doesn’t mean they are evil, but superfluous.

We read the Bible through the lens of what our culture taught us to believe. But don’t take me wrong. The Bible isn’t a “tabula rasa” or just an empty screen upon which we project our beliefs that come from someplace else. Some of our beliefs do come from the Bible. But with three major church divisions and well over a hundred Protestant denominations, all reading from the same Bible, the actual concepts of the Bible constitute only the basis for a small portion of our beliefs. Here is a candid observation that took me thirty years to realize: the Bible contains confusing texts, and if it were not so, there would be only one church denomination.

Most wars over the past two hundred years, at least in Western civilization, have been religious wars. Even World Wars I and II had some religious overtones. When this basic human concept of building a worldview, or a catalog of beliefs, takes on religious overtones, it can be perilous. For then, we have the delusion that we are on the side of the creator of the cosmos and that he/she, God, has given “Royal Assent,” or approval to our beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln wrestled with the issue of God’s providence in the light of the bloody Civil War. Here is one thing he wrote in his private notes in September 1862,

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.

It seems a puzzlement to many that a belief system, such as Christianity, which is built upon the teachings of a man, a messiah, who only taught love and peace, is full of hate and war. But this dark side of religion has to do with what I call the sanctification of their belief system.

If God has only ordained my personal belief catalog, then I therefore have the right to hate you, because I’m defending God… right? Hate in the defense of God, must be righteous? Both Christianity and Islam get this tragically wrong.

Most of us don’t understand the level of self-deception that we experience. The Bible calls our own heart, the seat of emotions, the most deceptive thing in the cosmos. When we think we are hating others, for God’s sake, it is one of the greatest deceptions.

This is one of the primary reasons that I don’t like religion. As I define religion, it is all about enhancing one’s feeling of piety. Piety, like significance, is best enhanced by comparisons. That is why we evangelicals built towering walls between the nasty people on the outside of evangelicalism and ourselves. We demonized them, dehumanized them…. and hated them. The nastier we made them, the more pious we felt.

But once you start thinking a certain way, it bleeds into the interior of those walls, and we constantly scrutinize our “brothers and sisters.” If they disagreed with us on a single point, we had a place to demonize those folks too… to further enhance our feeling of piety. I have lost most of my evangelical friends because they started every conversation with, “I can’t believe that you believe or do such and such.” This is always a moral attack, going for the jugular.

Some will say that I’m doing the same thing by criticizing them. I hope not. I try very hard to deconstruct broad ideas without making it a personal attack.

The Solution

There are only two ways out of this problem of hate. One is to dilute our differences by embracing the postmodernist idea that all beliefs are the same with respect to truth or morality. This is a very popular concept, especially in the progressive church that I attend. While those who adopt this approach have good intentions and are likely better people than I am, I think giving up the aspiration for truth will be a dead end. Without any truth, how do we stand against the destruction of lies or immorality? If we walked into an Inca religious ceremony where hundreds of children were being sacrificed in cold blood, would we have the right to say it is wrong? If our neighbor was seducing and raping children, and in his belief system, that was good, would we have the right to criticize him?

I have quoted Thomas Aquinas here many times, and I will again. He wrote:

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.

In my humble opinion, this is the best road to peace. To love and respect those with whom we disagree, recognizing that we are cut from the same cloth (the same creator), with the same intention of trying to find the truth, yet acknowledging that not all answers are the truth.

Peace,

Mike