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Imagine
"Imagine there’s no heaven, I wonder if you can
Nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man"
I remember the haunting strains of John Lennon’s song "Imagine" playing over the radio in the early ‘70s. Although I was not yet a full blown conservative (more of a frat boy/party animal in training), even then I knew there was something not right about it. Why would I want to imagine a life without religion? How could anyone imagine that this would be an improvement?
These thoughts came back to me the other day as I listened to a talk radio caller echo its sentiments when he declared that "more wars have been fought because of religion than for any other reason". I seem to be hearing more and more of this lately. It seems to have become conventional wisdom, and I am wondering if it is being taught in our schools. The talk show host rushed right over the statement in his haste to make his own point, but my trigger was tripped, and I launched into my fantasy world talk show host routine right there in the privacy of my own car.
"Stop. Stop right there! Let’s back up and examine that statement. Have you ever studied history? No? I didn’t think so. Let’s start with our own country. The Revolution? Nope. Not about religion. The Civil War? ‘fraid not. 1812, the Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War? No, I’m afraid that no war in which the United States has ever been involved has directly involved religion. Hmm, maybe you mean European Wars. The Napoleonic Wars, The Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese conflict in the late 19th Century? Nope, those weren’t especially religious in nature either."
One could go on and on, and eventually help this poor fellow understand that the only wars explicitly invoking religion were the Crusades, some of the mostly local squabbles surrounding the Reformation and Counter-reformation, and the occasional Islamic jihad. It turns out that a tiny minority of all wars are actually about religion. More than are about soccer matches, but not a whole lot more.
Wait! Says the skeptic, What about Northern Ireland? Those Protestants and Catholics are killing each other. This raises a very important point. In order to have a good war, it is necessary to create a clear "Us vs. Them" distinction. Because religion is a universal social characteristic, it is often used as shorthand to distinguish between Us and Them. If Northern Ireland were about religion, we would be treated to the sight of Orangemen marching through Belfast chanting "Faith, Yes! Works, No!", and the IRA would paint messages such as "Wesley is a Weenie" on their pipe bombs before exploding them. But they don’t. Because it isn’t. It is about deep-seated ethnic conflict. The same is true for the Arab/Israeli conflict and most other ethnic-based squabbles across the world.
This utopian notion that if we could just get rid of religion we would all be happier and more tolerant should have been thoroughly discredited by the ‘90s. What was the communist enterprise, if not an extended "imagining" of what life is like without religion? Religion isn’t optional. It is not a social construct. It is hard-wired to the human soul and psyche. If we pretend to get rid of it in our own lives or others, we will create a vacuum that can not stand. Into the vacuum will creep various imposters: Communism, Fascism, Feminism, Environmentalism, "New Age", Wicca. Each a weak substitute for religion, seeking to explain life and the human condition through self-generated revelation, and in the process running roughshod over our tenuous social stability.
The hard reality is that civilized society is impossible in the absence of organized religion. Just as law and politics define the rules through which we deal with our fellow citizens, so religion defines the rules through which we as individuals and societies deal with the unknown and the infinite. In the process it softens rather than hardens societies.
This seems so obvious that one wonders how anyone could argue to the contrary. But they do. Maybe they should lay off the hippie music and look at human life and society as it is, was and always will be.