Based on a previous post made on MySpace years ago in response to Christopher Hitchins. Myspace has since done away with the old blogs and site accessibility. (Sarcasm here) But if you send in a request you can get access in "a few short months" which in internet time is enough of an age to allow for the full evolution of a new species and its subsequent extinction. (The old post was waaaay shorter anyway)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens
It's common among atheist groups to say "religion is the root of all evil". As proof they will often cite holy wars and terrorist attacks seemingly motivated by religion. These religious beliefs are what motivated people to kill, destroy towns, cities, and attack little girls on their way to school.And I agree there are some crazy people wielding religion as a weapon and using it to justify their sadism. I also think this is a smoke screen and it's political bull that's the real motivation. The need to control others is strong in some people.
Perfect examples can be found anywhere around the globe. The gassing of Kurd civilians by Saddam Hussein; the killing of Shi 'ites and destruction of temples not adherent to his religious beliefs.
Also in the middle east, the continued attacks on Israel due to the hatred of Jews. They live surrounded by Muslims whose holy book declare Jews as villains. The book calls for their extermination. My hubbie and I had some conversations around this a few years ago when he studied the Koran. He basically summed it up (the English translation) "God is Great. We hate Jews and this is why."
We also have the Afghanistan Taliban whose religious beliefs regarding the control of women is infamous with torture, sadism, and imprisonment. A woman was raped to death in a soccer stadium as thousands were forced to watch for accidentally showing her ankle while standing up. Her escort had been killed at the picnic they had been having together for defending her from the soldiers. Women and children starved to death because they could not leave their homes to get food with no male relatives left alive to escort them. Little girls are still being attacked for trying to go to school.
Then of course, there are the ethnic wars of Africa, the oppression of native people in Australia and the Americas. All of these oppressions and attempted genocides have a religious component, an ethnic superiority flair.
In order to call something the "root of all evil" you have to break it down to it's lowest common denominator. Asking How and Why are two great ways to get to the lowest number on the multiplication tree of philosophical and psychological thought.
So let's do that: Why does religion exist? How did it become such an important part of how a person defines themself?
Ancient societies have a few factors that archeologists look for to determine when they have become a human society and ceased to be nomadic homo erectus type animals. One is burial. They begin to bury their dead.
Often these burials involved painting the body, dressing the body and burying them with something of significance like a weapon or a necklace. Other factors include, cultivating seeds, food preservation, domesticating animals, and ritual. Ancient societies begin to notice patterns in nature. They begin to celebrate those patterns and sometimes come to believe that they must enact ritual to support that pattern, like the rising of the sun after the longest night of the year, or dancing around a fire and wearing special items to bring on a great hunt.
From the development of an awareness of these patterns they begin to develop a sense of the future. They can predict that the sun will rise every day, the moon will follow a pattern of phases every 28 days, the seasons will follow a cycle. They plant, hunt and preserve food to survive these cycles. Eventually they are going to start asking questions about what happens after death and what force controls all these cycles? This is where the belief in spirits, the Gods and Goddesses of the old worlds come from.
Burial practices follow these beliefs. In order to conquer the fear of death, death must not be seen as the end. Ideas of an after life, or of a person somehow coming back after death begin to develop. We see this in burials where all the earthly pleasures and needs are taken care of. For example in ancient Egypt we see servants, concubines, food, musical instruments, weapons, clothes, etc, being left with the mummified pharoah. Spells are carved into the walls, the sarcophagus, and even painted into the linens wrapped around the body. These spells protect the body, the soul and give instructions for the spirit on his quest to the other side.
http://www.sextimeandpower.com/ (Great Book about women's menstrual cycle and pregnancy shaping society and even men's attitudes toward relationships)
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Goddesses_and_Gods_of_Old_Europe_650.html?id=zKFFOoPlyjIC (Another classic powerful book on the archeological evidence of matriarchal societies and the transition to patriarchal dominance)
So religion came into existence to explain why the world is as it is. Religions explain the creation of the world, man's place in it, and give man a sense of partnership with the forces that shape the world and his own survival. Ritual is a way for man to try to manipulate nature. It became so essential to mankind because it defines one's tribe. A tribe has the same rituals, manner of dress, modes of speech, cyclical patterns and behaviors governed by those patterns. You know who you are by the tribe you ally yourself to. You know who doesn't belong in the same way. Besides age and sex, this element became part of the earliest sense of self-definition of a human being: name, age, gender, tribal affiliation.
Why do different societies war with each other?
When societies came in contact with each other they found their rituals, languages, clothing, and names of gods were not the same. As a result of this contact with each other they became nervous. This is where the crux of the matter of our problem evolves. When these people confronted differences in others, they couldn't predict the behavior of these other groups. They were too different. From this inability to know what the other would do in any situation, came fear of each other. Specifically they feared violence, death, and theft of resources.
If the two societies that are so different could not agree on a set of rules to keep their relationship friendly, then war would often follow. That fear would lead to violence. I guess they may have thought that if they struck first they could save themselves, and this other evil group would be destroyed so any other society they might have come across would be spared as well. We see this in some modern propaganda where the other group is labeled immoral, evil and set on the destruction of our pure and moral society. Religious fanatics often use this argument against atheists and anyone who supports free will and a secular legal system.
How did social laws evolve? Why are laws different everywhere?
The friendly group would lay down laws to govern how people treat each other. These laws became the social contract of the society. In some cases severe punishments were visited upon those that acted in anti-social ways. What constitutes anti-social was highly relative to the society in question.
For some societies like Greece, homosexuality was tolerated and even endorsed. Some philosophers believed wasting one's seed on a woman was deadly to a man's sanity. A waste by itself at best. Other societies would punish homosexuality with torture and/or death. Some societies didn't even have a word for such a thing, it had not been publicly brought up.
The Chosen Ones?
The success of a society over another was often called God's Gift or Favor. It was believed that their god was stronger than the other group's and therefore enabled the victory. In the past few millenia, groups have claimed that the other god doesn't even exist, or is actually an evil deity or demon. Those people have been misled by evil and must be rehabilitated or converted to save their souls.
The truth to why some societies are successful and generate invention, technology and massive food production is actually tied up in geographic luck. It has nothing to do with gods or even necessarily intelligence. If you happen to be born in an area of the world with large spaces of good farm land that can support thousands of varieties of crops, animals and insect life, it's only a matter of time before you domesticate those resources and a small number of people become food producers while others have the luxury of free time to pursue art, invention, music, government, academia and eventually exploration and conquest.
Western Europe was one such perfect breeding ground for such success. The area now known as China was another fantastic place for agriculture, plant and animal diversity and thus invention and art. Really good book on this: Guns, Germs and Steel
http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/ (There's a book and a documentary)
(Summary so far: Humans developed religion to explain cycles of nature, to help them try to manipulate nature for their benefit and eventually created social roles around these beliefs. Not to mention to dispell fear of death. When they came across people who were different they attacked out of fear or created strict rules governing behavior in order to get control of their fear of each other. Fear leads to violence and destruction.
Eventually the cart was placed before the horse. The same beliefs that unified a society enabling working together so they could evolve and invent and explore other worlds, became the justification for their success. Actually it was luck combined with intelligence that created powerful societies, not god.)
How does religion affect us today? Why is it still such a sensitive issue?
So what we have now is religion as the remnant of an old tradition that enabled us as a group to identify members of our tribe. Tribal members, people who we take for granted are safe and follow the same set of rules, are accepted. Outsiders are still pressured to convert or are attacked. We use this same mentality toward politics, education, even simple interest groups we are involved in.
Human beings value their own lives and the lives of those they love. As such they seek communities where they feel safe. They define that feeling of safety as groups of people they have stuff in common with. Laws support that sense of safety, and historically this has included segregation in America. We are still segregated economically. In some places, like Northern Ireland, segregation is still used to try to prevent violence. When the laws fail or are not equally enforced, people become afraid and vigilantism rocks the community. People start to hide, leave, and economies and governments fall often into war. War is what kills, encourages others to be aggressive and destructive and to annihilate the lives of the "others".
So the root of all evil is not religion. Religion is a manifestation of a human being's emotional need to belong to a group where they feel safe. It's the fear that motivated that need to belong that brings about violence. Fear of difference, fear of unpredictable behavior from the foreign tribe, fear that the different tribe is going to take your stuff including your life, is what brings about war. War is a violent attempt to control the behavior of others. Do as we say or your life is forfeit.
Control of others motivated by fear of differences is the rallying sentiment behind abortion clinic bombings, terrorist attacks, genocide, persecutions of all types and women in particular. For some reason men and even women are terrified of other women expressing themselves sexually and controlling their reproduction. I really don't know what is bug up their butt. All I can say is maybe the answer is in The Handmaid's Tale or some other female exploration of dystopic societies in fiction.
So Fear is the root of all evil. It leads to aggression, an attempt to control other's behaviors in order to make them predictable and thus safe. Or dead. Dead works too.
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