Karen Armstrong - Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Now Hevel became a shepherd of flocks, and Kayin became a worker of the soil

But then it was, when they were out in the field

that Kayin rose up against Hevel his brother

and he killed him.

Y HWH said to Kayin:

Where is Hevel your brother?

He said:

I do not know. Am I the watcher of my brother?

Now he said:

What have you done!

Harkyour brothers blood cries out to me from the soil!

GENESIS 4:2, 810, translated by Everett Fox

In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, religion and drive it out into the political wilderness.

Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential belligerence for granted. They claim that monotheism is especially intolerant and that once people believe that God is on their side, compromise becomes impossible. They cite the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They also point to the recent spate of terrorism committed in the name of religion to prove that Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention Buddhist nonviolence, they retort that Buddhism is a secular philosophy, not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is certainly not a religion as this word has been understood in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But our modern Western conception of religion is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any attempt to pronounce on religions propensity to violence.

To complicate things still further, for about fifty years now it has been clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion.

The only faith tradition that does fit the The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state using religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail.

In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. We shall see that a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where religion ended and politics began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence.

They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the neuroanatomy.

Although these limbic emotions would never be as strong as the me first drives still issuing from our reptilian core, we humans have evolved a substantial hard-wiring for

We cannot entirely understand Menciuss argument without considering the third part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the

Paleolithic hunters may have had a similar understanding.Mencius would describe some seventeen millennia laterand helped them live with their need to kill them.

In Lascaux there are no pictures of the reindeer that featured so largely in the diet of these hunters. From the first, then, one of the major preoccupations of both religion and art (the two being inseparable) was to cultivate a sense of communitywith nature, the animal world, and our fellow humans.