THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER, PRIEST-STYLE
ABC
Feb 2 2012
Australia
Damon Young
One of the tragicomic highlights of the religious calendar is watching
Christian priests in the Holy Land beating the bejesus out of one
another.
A few years ago, police had to break up a fistfight between Armenian
and Greek Orthodox clerics, with a marvellously Monty Python detail:
the cops were, according to the BBC, “beaten back by worshippers
using palm fronds.”
Just recently, the same denominations attacked one another with brooms
in the Church of the Nativity – clearly in need of a few wise men.
Bethlehem police Lieutenant-Colonel Khaled al-Tamimi told Reuters
that this was a “trivial problem,” which happens annually, and rarely
leaves anyone seriously hurt. Reading from the same Python script,
al-Tamimi added: “No one was arrested because all those involved were
men of God.” And blessed are the cheesemakers.
What concerns many critics of Christianity clearly is not simply
the physical violence. It is the obvious contradiction between
Christianity’s distinctive message of peace and love, and the vitriol,
broom fracas and crusades (literal and figurative) of Christians now,
and over the past two millenniums.
Jesus spoke metaphorically when he reportedly said, in Matthew,
“I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword.” A great many of
his devoted followers have – characteristically, I add – turned
the trope into a straightforward command. And likewise for Jews,
Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus – all the passages on kindness and care
have regularly been flecked with blood.
Obviously this sometimes has little to do with religious beliefs
and values. Many a knight, king or president has slapped a religious
coat of paint on an otherwise worldly sword. God becomes the grave
spokesman for chivalric glory, imperial conquest or nationalistic
profiteering. Likewise for many ‘faithful’, who clothe their greed,
lasciviousness or brutality in holy habits, without ever really
committing to them. In short, some of the faithful are simply con men –
scripture as sales pitch.
Nonetheless, many vicious souls are also true believers, and it is
illuminating to reveal why, particularly in the case of Christianity.
How can a religion marked by its overt commitment to pacifism – “Love
your enemies,” Christ says in Luke, “do good unto them that hate you.”
– be so aggressive?
One reason for this is simple mortal weakness: the spirit is willing,
but the flesh hankers for a heavy hardwood broom. Pushed, mocked or
punched by an aggressor, even the most faithful cannot “turn to him
the other cheek,” as Jesus is reported to have said in Matthew. Basic
survival instincts kick in, and violence incites violence. Whether
explained by excess passion, deficient logic, or a combination of
the two, the symptoms are the same: a knowing failure to practice
what one preaches.
Another cause of holy violence is scriptural and institutional
diversity. Holy books and churches are the work of many individuals
and groups, and some are more violent and covetous than others. The
most obvious example of this is the Judeo-Christian scriptures,
which include everything from righteous Hebrew massacres (“of the
cities…which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance,
thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth…”) to Christ as a
sacrificial lamb, who commands his disciples to avoid violence.
Likewise for Islam’s Quran, which commands the faithful in war to
“slay the idolaters” in one surah, but wholeheartedly bans murder
in another. Psychological divisions in Holy Land priests reflect
divisions within their religion, which recommends war and peace
with equal symbolic power. And as theology is often the servant of
political institutions – faiths, denominations, factions within each –
it takes little for political apologists to justify atrocities with
authoritative passages, carefully chosen from sacred scripts.
Realpolitik gets the better of simple devotion.
But sometimes the devout are vicious, not in spite of their devotion,
but because of it. That is, their fervent commitment to religion
promotes behaviour that is against the best principles and examples of
their faith. I suspect there are many mechanisms for this, including
cosmological conceit and metaphysical sleight of hand. But the
transformation of piety into hypocrisy is particularly telling.
It is basically a confusion of means and ends. As the philosopher,
dramatist and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once pointed
out, piety is a means of producing a certain psychological end. In
his maxims, Goethe called this end the “purest tranquillity of
soul,” but it can equally be a combination of clarity, patience,
diligence, courage – the virtues of the pagan philosopher, rather
than the Christian saint. The point is that the prayers, cassocks,
genuflections, bows, yarmulkes, headscarves and all religious rites
have a psychological purpose: disciplining oneself to develop ethical
virtues, which cannot be achieved with abstract knowledge alone.
As this suggests, piety is more about what one asks of oneself
than what one asks of others. Family, community, nation – divine
or secular – are the objects of piety, but it is chiefly concerned
with the subject: making and maintaining a strong, lucid, brave soul,
who can do the right thing in the right time and place. Put another
way, we live piously to serve something better than ourselves, but
we serve best when we are better. Piety is about psychological growth.
Importantly, this vision can be more or less religious. The Stoics,
for example, wrote of piety, but their idea of pietas was often more
directed at worldly moderation than spiritual salvation, however
hallowed by ‘nature.’ Towards the end of his life, facing the end of
republican Rome, Cicero wrote of piety toward the gods. But this was
partly born of political grief and anxiety, as his Rome collapsed. In
this, Cicero’s religious piety was in line with his earlier writings,
which defined pietas typically as that “which warns us to fulfil
our duties towards our country, our parents, or others connected
with us by ties or blood.” Note Cicero’s emphasis: piety is not the
acts, but the outlook that disposes us toward the acts. Piety is
about cultivating good people, not specifying eternal and universal
techniques for this cultivation.
One mistake of the fervently pious is to confuse the two. The result
is a pedantic and paralysing obsession with certain habits of dress
or speaking, which become sanctified. One becomes dutiful in white
cloaks or black fur hats, but not considerate and caring in day-to-day
dealings with other human beings. The Greek or Armenian Orthodox
priest becomes more worried about cleaning his church, and who gets
to sweep where, than he is about his fellow men of the cloth.
Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews spit on little girls, because their
clothing is “immodest.” The outward symbols of religious piety are
favoured over inward gentleness and humility. (This in itself suggests
a particularly Judeo-Christian vice: proudly competing for humility,
a beautiful bit of performative contradiction.)
In short, what begins as a quest for reverence becomes dogmatism and
vice. The good Christian becomes less like Christ, and more like the
priests who judged him: more interested in institutional codes than
virtue. “Those who set up piety as their ultimate aim and goal,”
wrote Goethe, “mostly end up becoming hypocrites.” Habits harden,
and the psyche is left unimproved.
Of course, this fossilisation can occur outside religion: with
philosophical ideas, civic celebrations, and ordinary daily custom.
But metaphysical sleight of hand makes the movement from piety to
hypocrisy more common in religion. Without a naturalistic guide
to human flourishing, the faithful use their own baser impulses
and idiosyncrasies as ideals – each smuggled into an untouchable,
invisible world, and blessed with God’s name. In short, supernaturalism
cripples piety by removing worldly goodness as a criterion for
success. So-called ‘higher’ ideals actually lower the bar.
Ironically, the godless may have a better chance of piety than those
committed to religion. At the very least, real virtue begins with
radical doubt.
Damon Young is an Australian philosopher, writer and the author of
Distraction. View his full profile here.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3805006.html