I think people watch CNN or Fox (or whatever terrible news source they prefer) and see rightwing homophobes and stuff blowing up in the Middle East and you think to yourself “This world is going to hell in a hand basket. Religion makes people stupid, violent, and crazy!” But all you did was watch CNN and maybe a couple of movies, and you drew these hasty generalizations. No good. Did you research early human history and the history of religion? No. Did you travel to the Middle East and see it for yourself? I suspect you did not. You drew these hasty generalizations in your living room with your dog in your lap.
I hate to say it, but you’re thinking like a racist. “You know how they are! Harms is full of horseshit. I know what’s what. I don’t need a bunch of books to tell me how the world is! I know how it is!”
Humans are a cooperative species. About 45,000 years ago, human foragers began suppressing alpha-male dominance. What occurred was a more horizontal distribution of power. Human groups became more egalitarian. In the context of big-game hunting, human groups now more equitably distributed the meat they got from hunting large ungulates. This created a set of expectations within a given group. These expectations eventually (over more than a thousand generations) entered the human genome. You will know it as your conscience.
When you treat someone poorly or you do something you know is wrong, you feel bad about it (unless you’re a sociopath). That is your conscience. It’s roughly 50,000 years old. The humans living in caves painting hunting scenes on the walls, they had it, too. Those were rather sophisticated groups of humans, highly cooperative.
I wonder what the motive is to automatically assume humans are bad and religion is bad. Does it make one feel smart to sum everything up like that? Does it make one feel wise? Or is it a tantrum: “There is crap in the world so I’m just going to say the world is all the way crap! Take that crappy world!!” Well, this is not how I proceed. I try very hard to describe the world as it is, and I have done enough world traveling to see how people EVERYWHERE tend to get along and cooperate. I have studied anthropology and early human history and I know well the early history of human spirituality. So, if you’re looking for a humans = bad message, or religion = bad perspective, you’ll have to find another blog. Because I’m not going to adjust course to merely accommodate vulgar preconceived ideas.
Oscar Romero (photo) died 43 years ago today. He was an archbishop—a man of religion. You should know who he is. And when folks assert that religion makes people stupid, violent, and crazy, they are insulting his memory. This might make you feel smart, but we might have to add shame to that.
