The Sins of All Fathers

As I alluded to in a previous post, the popular concept that “religion has caused more death and tragedy than anything else in human history” betrays a shocking ignorance of history, and is motivated more by the speaker's religious baggage than by reality.

I think the strongest argument against such a position is the thousands of years of atrocities perpetuated by ancient men against others, not in the name of God, but in the name of nation, cult, family, wealth and ideology. Before Mohammad attacked Mecca, before Christ was born and before the exceptional idea of Hebrew monotheism became a prominent belief, people were killed and women were raped because of the selfish, individualistic desires of irreligious men.

There are innumerable historical examples of this. I'll use the one of the Assyrians', who are best known for their barbaric wartime practices. They piled the dead bodies of their enemies against city walls to make ramps so they could get over them. They raped and pillaged and tortured captives—peeling the skin off of them and then impaling them on poles—for fun. In the mid-700s BC, Sennacherib of Assyria went on a spree throughout the Near East, conquering city after city—not for God, but for himself. When he got to Jerusalem, he mocked king Hezekiah for having faith in his God. He sent his messenger to the gate of Jerusalem, who shouted in Hebrew to the Israelites to try to demoralize them.

“Then Rabshakeh [the Assyrian messenger] stood and cried with a loud voice in Judean and said, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. “Thus says the king, ‘Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you; nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, “The LORD will surely deliver us, this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.” ‘Do not listen to Hezekiah,’ for thus says the king of Assyria, ‘Make your peace with me and come out to me, and eat each of his vine and each of his fig tree and drink each of the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards. ‘Beware that Hezekiah does not mislead you, saying, “The LORD will deliver us.” Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? ‘Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And when have they delivered Samaria from my hand? ‘Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their land from my hand, that the LORD would deliver Jerusalem from my hand?’” (Isaiah 36:13-20)

The Assyrians had utter contempt for not only the God of Israel, but of all other gods in the Near East. They made war for themselves, to widen their own borders, to add to their own wealth, and they did so in such a barbarous manner—in ways that would make the holocaust look tame--to satisfy their own evil urges. How is religion responsible for this? Is this not the result of evil, self-serving, irreligious men?

Hundreds of years later, Thucydides, the great historian, recounts the tragedy of the Peloponnesian War. After the defeat of Xerxes by Athens, the Greeks formed the Delian League so that they could have some sort of unity in case the Persians attacked again. Athens, being the maritime power, took advantage of being the dominant Greek polis (or city-state). When the Greek-owned treasury on the island of Delos was moved by the Athenians to Athens, the other Greeks realized that Athens was setting itself up to be master of the Greeks, and so many of them rallied behind Sparta and formed the Peloponnesian League. Athens went from polis to polis, forcing Greek cities to become their allies, and when they didn't, they made war upon them and, sometimes, destroyed them.

This can best be seen in the Melian Dialogue, as recounted by Thucydides. Melos, an island in the Aegean, wanted no part of the war. They refused to ally themselves with Athens and they refused to ally themselves with Sparta. Athens sent two messengers to threaten Melos. They said that the Melians were foolish to refuse to ally with Athens because they held some vain hope that the gods would see the injustice and help the Melians in their time of need.

“Melians: You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust... Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.

Athenians. When you speak of the favor of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practice among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage... Such a way of thinking does not promise much for the safety which you now unreasonably count upon.” (Thucydides, 15.17)

The Melains saw the gods as creatures that acted against injustice. The Athenians believed, if the gods existed, that they were indifferent to the ways of men, and that, indeed, encouraged men to act in their own best interests—in the Athenian's case, to seek power over the Greeks because they can, as the famous Athenian phrase “The weak will do what they must and the strong will do what they can” so clearly demonstrates. In the end, the Melians refused to ally and Athens came in force, killing all the men of Melos and burning the city to the ground.

Because of this Athenian hunger for power and wealth, they devastated the Greeks, causing many civil wars, which led to rape, starvation, cannibalism, treachery, mass slaughter, foolish executions and every other horror a man can cause against another man. Where was religion in this mess? Was this not a chapter in human history caused by men wanting power for their own clan, tribe or polis at the expense of others? And we can't blame the Athenians alone. After Athens was defeated by Sparta, Sparta became powerful and committed the same sins as Athens—and after Sparta was defeated, Thebes took over and did likewise.

Even after the advent of Christianity, tragedy has been done on a grand scale without ever invoking religion. Here I will refer you to two fantastic books: Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick and GULAG: A History by Anne Applebaum. These books recount how ideology, purposefully divorced from religion, came to control the lives of everyone under the curtain of Soviet communism. Men and women who believed in God were rounded up as “socially-dangerous elements” and “counter-revolutionary propagandists” and imprisoned in Russian concentration camps called “gulags”. These gulags were often situated in the most remote and harsh areas of Siberia. Food was inadequate, medical attention was mostly non-existent, and the prisoners were required to do forced labor to make the land habitable. Millions died. The books recount horrible stories of pregnant women being loaded onto trucks, driven for weeks on end with the only food being moldy bread and soiled water, and forced to give birth on the truck. They recount stories of women unable to feed their children during the ride, and once those children died the mothers would hurl the bodies at their captors in contempt. There were no bathroom breaks and the prisoners had to do their business on the truck. Vivid recollections of urine constantly dripping through the cracks in the wooden floor, the slipperiness, the smell, the disease—all for no reason at all but so that the establishment could maintain the feeling of control.

This society was adamantly atheistic. Those suffering from “backwardness” were sent to gulag, but all religious people—Jews and Christians specifically—were automatically considered backward for holding a belief system that was “counter-revolutionary”. The common people of the Soviet lived every day in paranoid fear that they were being spied on by the NKVD and that they would be lugged off to Siberia—a fear that was justified, because the NKVD was spying on them, trying to fill their government-mandated quota of counter-revolutionaries. How was religion responsible for these millions of deaths? How was religion responsible for the broken families, ruined marriages, sleepless nights, deep-rooted paranoia and sickly living conditions that spanned decades? Was this not the fruit of an ideology that rejected God and instead celebrated the State above all else?

Religion is surely not responsible for all evil in the world. Men are responsible--evil men who make decisions to satisfy their own desires, fears, needs and bigotry. They use a number of excuses to justify their evil, but that evil comes from within them, generation after generation. It is an abused individualism, an indulgent selfishness that makes oneself and ones own fears and desires more important than those of others, that is the root cause of all these evils. To cry out against religion is to ignore thousands of years of history and the source of the problem. Men must change by being more Christ-like, less selfish and less individualistic. This is the very thing this society does not want to hear—so they blame religion. It is a cop-out.