Religion and the institutions surrounding it have evolved around the world many times and in many places. It is sad to note that the ways in which religion has been used by men are many times very different from the values attributed to it. In the main, religion has been used by men to control the behavior of others while attempting to convince those being controlled that the control is in some unseen way, beneficial to them. I am certain that many readers will not agree with this analysis but, as you will see, the argument here is based on facts and history. Religion has been used and misused throughout history and no amount of equivocation or denial will change that.
One clear example is the actions of the crusades in the Middle Ages. The intent was to rescue the Holy Land and specifically, Jerusalem, from the enemy, the Muslim Caliphate. In the process of liberating Jerusalem from the Muslims, the good Christians killed most of the Jews between France and Egypt. Holy wars were a part of European history from the earliest Christian missionaries very successfully supplanting hundreds of years of “pagan” religion with Christianity to the “troubles” in Ulster in the 1990’s which masqueraded as a war about religion. Like most of the Holy Wars in Europe, it was truly about power and territory: imperialism on the part of one king or another, sold to the populace as a defense of the “true faith.”
In addition to the misuses of religion we have acknowledged, there is another bothersome factor which we encounter when we examine religion and how it has shaped our society and culture. The factor to which I refer is a general lack of understanding of the explicit as well as subtle meanings behind religious belief and practice and within the texts that so many religious people pick out to make points, sometimes using a single verse or group of verses to both prove and disprove the same concept.
This phenomenon has been called “religious illiteracy” by Stephen Prothro (2007), a best-selling author on theology. In his book Religious Literacy, Prothro asserts that Americans are among the populations which claim the highest percentage of people who say they are religious, but who demonstrate at best, a minimal knowledge of the book which they claim is the guide to their faith and practice and which they view as the inviolate word of God. Prothro makes the point that if people profess a faith, they should be expected to have at least a working knowledge of its sacred book. In surveys he cites, a cross section of Americans who have responded had little such knowledge.
If we acknowledge that many people, including the faithful, know little about the religions they profess, and that religion has been often misused by men, we can likely see that methods which can help us reach a better understanding of the chief religions of Western culture might enable us as individuals to become more knowledgeable of the faiths which have shaped our culture and our civilization for between three and five thousand years.
Prothro, Stephen Religious Literacy Harper One 2007
Comments
Post a Comment