When Religion Gets Ugly

Recently, I added a new friend to Facebook.  He was writing some rather poignant ideas on a friend's Wall about the need to establish peaceful dialog between races and religions, both at home and abroad. I expected to look on his info page and find that he was a devoutly religious man, but what I found was even more interesting. Listed under his "religious beliefs" was the following phrase:

Religion has caused more damage to man kind than any other hobby in the history of mankind.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. Increasingly, many I've encountered who are most interested in peaceful coexistence, tolerance, and consistency and integrity in beliefs are disillusioned with the traditional organized religions.  The most famous example of this was Mahatma Gandhi, when he said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."  Who could argue with that? From Crusades, to the KKK, to sex abuse scandals, inquisitions, holocausts, and beyond, the white baptismal gowns of the Western religions are spotted with centuries of dirt and blood.

There are several intriguing and challenging aspects of this problem that can basically be relegated into two distinctive categories. The first is the actions of believers, or supposed believers, in the name of religion. The second category is the religious teachings and sacred texts that may contain contradictions, violence, hate, or other material that are objectionable or questionable to the contemporary person.

Frankly, the first category is the human condition. Jesus and his mother are unique, potentially in the entire history of human kind, because they are the only people who were ever perceived as perfect. For the rest of us, we are doomed to fall short of the expectations that our religious traditions hold us to. This is sin, imperfection, hypocrisy, and the ever present reality of our human condition. This is NOT an excuse, however, for the failure of humanity. Most importantly, it is not the excuse for licentiousness,  a reason to stop aiming for perfection. In other words, even though none of us is perfect, even the holiest of people and the leaders and scholars of religions, this does not excuse us from the quest to constantly seek to better ourselves and more closely align our will with the Will of God. There will also always be fringe elements of every religious belief who practice hypocrisy or violence in the name of their religion. Some of these folk may be evil, mentally ill, or mistaken. But these people do not, and should not, reflect negatively on faith as a whole.

The problem, therefore, is not that the faithful, sometimes, are not. The problem is not that the leaders of religions do not avoid sin and hypocrisy. After all, one of the stated goals of religion is to approach and fix these problems. The real problem is that those who claim they are religious sometimes seem content or arrogant in the way they are leading their lives.

However, more troubling are the internal contradictions contained inside religious texts and traditions. What can we make of the violence, the immorality, the intolerance and the hypocrisy sometimes contained within the very fabric of religion?

Christians don't need to spend much time finding a guide through this process, because Jesus Himself struggled with this very idea.  There is a reason that we call the Gospels and the following books of the Christian Bible the "New Testament" and Jesus' Word as the "New Covenant" because they reinterpret and renew the established promises between God and man. One such example, and perhaps the most powerful, is the story of the adulterous woman.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. “Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

Jesus does not contradict the previous law, but rather he points out that in in his contemporary time, it had become superseded by a new law, a new covenant, a New Testament.  There are other, similar stories in the Gospels, such as the disciples decisions to not follow certain Jewish traditional washing during meal time, or the decision after Jesus' death to allow Gentiles to become Christians without first becoming Jews.

M0dern scholars would point out that within the Old Testament there is a huge amount of ethnocentrism, strict moral code with a high emphasis on external symbolic acts, and a rigid order.  They would also argue that these things were important to the early Jews because of their tribal nature and the open hostility of their pagan neighbors. These symbols set them apart from the other tribes, their rigid order and focus on ethnic and religious identity would help preserve the Jews and spread their culture and influence.  To be successful, the Jews would need to become wealthy and powerful. The weak would NOT inherit the earth, especially as the Jews escaped slavery and established their homeland.

By the time of Jesus, the world was a different place. The focus on non-violence and harmony would set the Christians apart from the Romans, as would the emphasis of weakness and poverty as superior to wealth and strength. The Christians would make their impact culturally, not militarily (initially). Things changed, and so did the interpretation of religion.

The concept of evolution of religion would not be foreign to Buddhists either. The Buddha often explained that his public teachings evolved as his disciples grew in understanding. Christ himself uses similar methods with his own disciples, and changes his teachings as the circumstances of his own followers change. The truth has not shifted, but rather the application of truth to the situation has changed. These ideas help explain some of the contradictions in the religious texts.

But there is one more thing that we are ignoring. Even though most religions believe that their texts are sacred truth, they are still set down into writing by the hands of flawed men.

Perhaps the real problem here isn't that the religious texts evolve, or are contradictory, or that the history and tradition of all of the major religions are marked with flaws, and sometimes blood. Perhaps the problem has become that our own clerics and religious thinkers have stopped evolving themselves, that they have become more rigid than even their religious texts and traditions.  Once this occurs, the inconsistencies of thousands of years of history and thousands of pages of scripture become glaring signs of hypocrisy.

We live in troubled times. Traditional religions have struggled to keep up with the pace of globalism, relativism, and new technological and scientific knowledge. This does not nullify the truth of faith, but rather it points out that those who take these issues seriously need to help evolve religion, instead of simply evolving out of it.

Because if we don't do this legwork, who will?