Will Ending Religion End All Violence?

Journalist Sam de Brito had a piece in the weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald called, God is with us, unfortunately, where he went on a tirade arguing that if we got rid of religion then we could get rid of all the violence and hardship troubling this world.

Remove questions of God from Israel and Gaza and you’re left with two people who have more in common than they care to realise. Remove God from the rest of the Middle East, it wouldn’t be devouring itself in a sectarian war over a 1400-year-old disagreement. Remove God from Australia and gays can marry, penalty rates disappear on Sunday and a seven-year-old won’t be holding a severed head on the news.

In response, I’ve written a piece called Ending Religion Won’t End the Conflict (HT to Simon Smart of CPX for editing and brokering the piece to the ABC) which has appeared over at ABC’s The Drum.

I argue:

While religion can be a source of indescribable evil, it can also be a source of unexpected compassion too. This week I heard news reports of Turkish Muslims providing shelter and care for Yezidi refugees fleeing northern Iraq. I know of several Christian aid groups not only in refugee camps in the region but even risking their own lives to go into Iraq to help rescue religious minorities fleeing the violence.

Atheists like de Brito are very good at cursing the darkness, but it’s more often than not the religiously minded who are out there lighting a candle against it.

I cannot speak for all religions, I belong to the Christian tradition, but one of the strengths of the Christian tradition is that we can take evil seriously. For Christians, evil is not simply a game with words, mythical language deployed to describe our own likes and dislikes, relative rather than real.

Instead, the Christian believes that evil is an intrusive force in this world, not how it was supposed to be, and not how it will be. According to Christianity, God’s plan is to expunge evil, not with holy violence or crusader carnage, but, mysteriously, to draw it all into himself, into his son’s own crucifixion, so that its power will, ultimately, be defeated.

Well, that’s my two cents in the debate.