Good people and evil acts

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Steven Weinberg

For many years this was a favorite quote for me. Religion, particularly the monotheism of the Jewish / Christian / Muslim traditions, demean humanity as failed and fallen, with most of us destined to an eternity of torture at the hands of a loving, but vengeful, god. This view has validated much of the evil that people do to one another. In our time Islam is the poster child for murder in the name of god, but they are just the latest to join the party. Christianity has a 2000 year history of war, torture and murder that lasted right up until the 1990s battles in Northern Ireland. Before them, at least according to the Old Testament, the Jews were ordered to put entire civilizations to death - well, sometimes they got to keep the young girls for their own amusement. Jews are still killing Muslims. Muslims are still killing Jews (and other Muslims and Christians). Thanks to Misters Bush and Obama many Muslims are convinced that the Christians are on another Crusade, this time using drones. Though the violence of the god of Abraham is most familiar to me, stories of Hindu and Buddhist violence make the news as well. Mr. Weinberg's quote would seem to find support in at least one headline a day.

Yet my fondness for his observation has faded. It is certainly true that good people do good things and bad people do bad things, with or without religion. That is, after all, how we tell them apart ... the good and the bad that is. And clearly religion muddies the water when it comes to what is good and what is bad. Religious leaders of every stripe continue to demand that denying civil rights to gay people and restricting the freedom of women is what god demands of human kind. Suicide bombing is an exclusively religious exercise at this point in history. Racism is alive and well in many religious traditions, as are calls for ethnic cleansing and the ritual mutilation of babies. Without religion all of these would be considered evil by any normal human being.

Mr. Weinburg's quote would suggest that there are good people doing these evil things, good people who think they are obeying the dictates of a god when they kill, maim, and demand discrimination for this group or that. But are they good people who have been fooled into doing evil things, or are they evil people doing an evil thing using religion as a cover?

The older I get the more I think it is the latter.

I know good people. I know of and have, on occasion, gotten cross-wise with evil people. It seems to me that the two groups are mutually exclusive. It isn't that no good person has ever done anything wrong or no evil person anything right. Human beings are not two dimensional cardboard creatures. But at the point of doing real evil, of doing actual harm to another human being, good people will hesitate and then back away. God or no god they will find a way to sidestep the demand. I think that's one of the main causes for the rifts inside religion, good people seeking to find a doctrine that provides a path away from what (it must be admitted) would appear to be clear calls to do evil. Slavery is a good example, as was (and is) demands for civil rights. More esoteric fights (at least to this unbeliever) include arguments over hell and what, precisely, it takes to be "saved." And esoteric though they might be, these still appear to me to be efforts of good people trying to avoid the evil inherent in very idea of "hell" and the tribalism and conflict born of the claim to being "god's chosen."

Good people who chose to remain religious fight a continuous battle against the evil inherent in the ideologies. I'm not sure why they cling to the religions in the first place, but I cheer their constant efforts to limit the evil that religion tries to do. To a large degree though, I fear they are fighting a losing battle. In the thousands of years that organized religion has bedeviled human kind the good people in religion have never managed to limit the evil very much at all. Millions of good Catholics can't convince the Church that women are equals or that birth control is not only a civil right, but the only moral choice in a world currently trying to carry more than 7 billion of us around the sun. Millions of Christians of all sects have been unable to drag Christianity away from its stand against gay people. An admittedly smaller portion of American Christians have failed to save the church from various "prosperity" doctrines or driven the hucksters from the TV and radio airwaves.

Millions upon millions of Muslims have failed to prevent Islam from decaying into a death cult.

The evil that religion does continues to expand in spite of the best efforts of the good people in religion to do the right things. Why is that?

Religion's major flaw is that it can so easily be manipulated by evil people. Once wrapped in the mantel of the authority of a god they can find a myriad opportunities to practice evil without being caught, condemned or punished. They can hack away at the vagina's of screaming baby girls, rape and abuse as many woman as they please, profit from the slave labor of orphans, stir up war and hatred and watch cities burn, and send children wearing bomb vests into stores to kill other children. They indulge in the evil like any other addict, and no one does these things who can be thought of as "good".

Religious leaders can live in the finest palaces, eat the best food, and have the best health care all paid for by the back breaking labor of others; all "tax free", and all without having to do any real work themselves. They get to dictate how people live, who they are allowed to love, what they can eat, where they can go, and what they can wear. They can picket funerals and heap verbal abuse on mourning families. None of these are the acts of good people either.

The good people in a religion don't take advantage of these opportunities, something that must be okay with the evil people. The good people do a lot of the grunt work required to keep the whole operation running and financed. They make good cover. Often they are well aware of the evil but "faith" blinds them and keeps them from speaking out. But there is nothing special about that. Good people don't take advantage of opportunities to do evil outside of religion either.

I don't think religion takes good people and makes them do evil. I think the religions are primarily designed by and run for the advantage of evil people from the very start. A lot of evil people know a good thing when they see it.

And I think the good people are not doing themselves any favors by staying involved. In fact, if there were a just and caring god out there, it would certainly not tolerate much of what passes as religion among human kind.