LITMIR.BIZ

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movie City of Joy, an old Hindu hotel porter every time he saw me would bow. Eventually he told me I was a god. What he meant was that my being born disabled was not a curse but a divine blessing as I would end this life a spiritually stronger person than someone who didn’t have to suffer as I did, and would come closer to God and end my cycle of lives and achieve Nirvana.¹⁰

      Fertile though our imagination might be in creating scenarios which we hope will give us security, such scenarios always produce as many problems as they were created to solve. The same has happened in the financial world, where ‘products’ were conjured into being to give us financial security – banks, insurance, pensions, futures and options – only to produce new and worse kinds of insecurity.¹¹ Where religion is concerned it would seem best to choose the set of beliefs which would give you personally the greatest chance of happiness – provided nothing happened to you to confound your choice. However, not many of us are given the opportunity to exercise such choice. Jean Said Makdisi, who recorded her life in Beirut during the religious and political war there, was brought up as a Christian but, as she said, ‘I think of Islam as part – a large part – of my inheritance and revere it as such.’ However, as Lebanon was being increasingly segregated according to religion, she wrote,

      I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked like a stamp with which cattle are branded …

      And so are we all, like it or not, branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry. Believers and nonbelievers alike, struggle though we may, we are being corralled into the separate yards of our fellow coreligionists by the historic events of the moment. Belief and political vision have less to do with how one is seen, and then is forced to see oneself, than with external identification – the brand.¹²

      Most of us are born into a religious group and much of our early education is concerned with learning the tenets of that religion. Muslim children have to memorize the Koran while Jewish children study the Torah, and, while they can ask questions in order to increase their understanding of the holy books, they are not allowed to question the veracity of the books themselves. Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian children are taught that God sees everything they do and will reward or punish them accordingly. In those homes where the adults speak of their god or gods in the same way as they speak of a revered but absent grandparent, the idea of a deity can become for the child as firm and fixed as the meanings the child has created about his parents.

      The neural connections which underlie these ideas must for some children at least become firm and fixed. I have met a large number of people who have told me that, although they had been given a religious education, in adulthood they had rejected or drifted away from religion only to find that when they became depressed all the shame, guilt and fear which their religious education brought them in their childhood had returned to haunt them. The brand was still on their hide. Some of these people were determined to resolve the conflict between their sense of who they were now and the demands of their childhood religious beliefs. They challenged these beliefs, changed them into beliefs which gave them courage and optimism, and ended their depression. Others dared not challenge their childhood beliefs and so remained depressed.¹³

      Religion might have had its origins in the search for justice, but it was justice for the tribe, not for all human beings. Religious groups, like all groups, define themselves in terms of who is excluded. Matt Ridley in his study The Origins of Virtue wrote,

      The universalism of the modern Christian message has tended to obscure an obvious fact about religious teaching – that it has almost always emphasized the difference between the in-group and the out-group: us versus them; Israelite and Philistine; Jew and Gentile; saved and damned; believer and heathen; Arian and Athanasian; Catholic and Orthodox; Protestant and Catholic; Hindu and Muslim; Sunni and Shia. Religion teaches its adherents that they are the chosen race and their nearest rivals are benighted fools or even subhumans.¹⁴

      The wickedness of those excluded from the religious group has to be emphasized by the group’s leaders in order to deter any of their flock from straying. During my Presbyterian upbringing I heard much about the wickedness of the Catholics. Nowadays we often hear about ecumenicalism, and in public the clerics of different religions are polite to one another. In private ideas might not have changed that much.

      At a refugee centre in London I met Father Rossi, a Catholic priest from Italy, who told me about the wickedness, not of the Protestants, but of the Italians from southern Italy. I asked him about the current situation in the debate on whether the northern states of Italy should secede from the south. He said quietly but very firmly, ‘It’s not likely but it should happen.’ He told me that he was from the north. He spoke of the south with bitterness and hatred. ‘They should be left to themselves, cut off from the north completely.’ He spoke of the corruption in the bureaucracy, politics and the police. ‘Every manager’s chair,’ he said, ‘is filled with someone from the south.’ (My parents used to talk about how a Catholic church and presbytery always occupied the best land in any Australian town.) He showed none of the tolerance and forbearance which many Christians like to think are peculiarly their own.

      I remembered my conversation with my Italian friends Lorenzo and Magdalena when they, devout Catholics, told me that Italy is no longer a Catholic country.¹⁵ I asked Father Rossi, ‘Is Italy a Catholic country?’ He replied immediately, ‘No, it is not.’ In asking him why it had changed I spoke of how the school system was now predominantly a state system where religion was an optional subject. I saw this as part of the explanation why Italy was no longer a Catholic country, but he saw this as the effect of a deeper cause, which was the work of the Devil.

      I asked him if he was speaking literally or metaphorically. His answer was quite unambiguous. The Devil is real, and the Italian people had been seduced by him. The Devil, he said, cannot make people do things but he can suggest things, and people can be too weak to resist these suggestions. He hated the Devil and he hated southern Italians. His defence against the Devil was exorcism. ‘I am an exorcist,’ he said. So the Devil must be exorcized and the southern Italians driven from the north and confined in the south. Italy should be two nations, north and south.

      The schools, he explained to me, had ceased to teach history, philosophy and religion, and instead taught frivolous subjects like screen printing. Without a knowledge of history, philosophy and religion people were rendered vulnerable to the blandishments of the Devil. I thought, but politely did not say, that the history, philosophy and religion he wanted taught in the schools would be those versions which are approved of by the Catholic Church. In his view, not believing what the Catholic Church teaches is evidence of being seduced by the Devil.

      Implicit in Father Rossi’s definition of Catholics and non-Catholics are ideas which clearly relate to national groups. Indeed, our religious and our national groups can overlap markedly in the characteristics we give them and in what we want to get out of them. Chiefly what we want from our groups is support for our meaning structures. According to Jean Said Makdisi, being forcibly labelled as belonging to a certain group is a terrible insult to a person’s individuality. Mamphela Ramphele found sustenance from both her political and religious beliefs through her darkest days as a political activist under apartheid, but she saw a similarity between religious and activist communities. She wrote,

      As in the case of religious conviction, political activists are moved by something greater than themselves – a belief in a future which might be better than the present, a desire to be engaged in the establishment of a better order, and compassion for the underdog. Secondly, they share a sense of fellowship with others who are similarly committed. The need for renewing such fellowship in ritualized meetings – church services or political gatherings of the faithful – is also a common feature …

      Then again there is a common desire of individual members of such communities to conform to the group. The more fundamentalist the tendency, and the more insecure

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