The Root Causes of Religious Atrocities

Note how the defense now has shifted from what constitute a real Christian to what constitute true Christianity. Here we will see how the acts of intolerance and atrocities are direct consequences of the Christian theological paradigm.[a]

• Monotheism, the belief in one exclusive god, is fundamentally intolerant.
• It is fundamental to Christian theology that God and his purpose are, in the final analysis, inscrutable to finite human minds. However his commandments must be followed.
• Finally, ethics and morality are ultimately rooted in God's commandments, not in a reasoned analysis.
• These three tenets, when applied singularly or as a cocktail, are largely responsible for the atrocities and horror we will be looking at.

Monotheism, by it's very nature, is the antithesis of polytheism. Note that polytheism is the belief in many non-exclusive deities. A person can go to one temple to ask a favour from the goddess of love and go to another the next day asking for help with money issues from the god of wealth. Polytheistic deities offer specialized services and are thus, by their very nature, non-exclusive. Thus there is never a need for adherents to a certain deity in polytheism to actively sought the overthrow or suppression of other gods.

Monotheism, however, is the belief that there exists only one god. All other gods are, by definition, either false or attempts by the devil to fool their adherents. Embedded within this belief is an automatic contempt for polytheistic gods. This tells us why monotheism will always be intolerant of polytheism.

Furthermore, in defining the attributes of their one God, include the concept of immutability, that God does not change. Thus the God of the monotheists comunicates only one consistent message. In this sense, monotheism is also particularistic. Not only is there only one god, there is only one true message and only one true religion. This leads to both internal and external conflicts.

In trying to find and understand the one true message,theologians read and interpret scriptures. Yet this is the very cause of heresy. For heresy, by definition, is an interpretation of the same message in a method different from the group which ultimately won the battle (and the right to call their interpretation "orthodoxy"). All monotheistic religions show this tendency to splinter. In first century Judaism we find such factions as the Essenses, the Pharisees and the Sadducess. The Jewish Talmud noted that there were twenty four different factions altogether. In Islam we have the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Sufis. In Christianity we have from the earliest days various groups such as the Gnostics, the Patripassians, Sabellianism, Dynamic Monarchainism and Arians. Even today we find Christianity splintering into more than 20,000 denominations.

Obviously if monotheistic beliefs could not even reconcile themselves with factions who share the same scripture (but a different interpretation of it), their attitude towards other monotheistic religions with different scriptures are even worse. For if God is said to convey only one consistent message, competing sacred scriptures, with different and sometimes contradictory messages, cannot be reconciled within a particular monotheistic paradigm. Classic examples of these are the various crusades between Christendom and Islam.

For Christianity we find proof of this intolerance within the Christian scripture itself.

While intolerance plays a major role in the historical horrors perpetrated by Christians and Christianity, two more tenets of Christian theology are required to make the cocktail really explosive.

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The Inscrutibility of God's Mind

With the advent of modern science of technology the passage sounds dated to us, but the message to believers in the past must have been clear: who are you to question god's wisdom?

The message was well understood by Christian theologians. Martin Luther (1483-1546), for instance, asserted that if God asked him to go to the field and eat corn, he would do it no matter how ludicrous it would seem.[2]

Luther's Catholic rival, St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), has the same teaching. He thought that founder of the Society of Jesus or Jesuits, in his book Rules For Thinking Within The Church taught a simple rule for believers to follow when their reason contradicts their faith: "If the church should have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appear white, we ought in like manner pronounce it black." [3]

Thus whether god is speaking through the bible or through the church, his commandments are not to be questioned but to be followed.

This is the second item of the explosive cocktail. Now we go to the final one.

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God's Commandment as The Ultimate Moral Yardstick

We know from the Bible that god has commanded actions which under any circumstances would be considered barbaric and rivalling the achievements of Hitler and Stalin. One case to point is the commandment for the Israelites to slaughter the inhabitants of Canaan who were then living in the land promised to the former. Let us see these passages:

This commandment, of course, was faithfully carried out by Joshua. The story of this genocide is given in Joshua chapters 1 to 12. Below are a few sample passages:

It is interesting to hear the comments of the Illustrated Bible Dictionary on the massacre of the Canaanites:

Notice then the actions of Joshua are justified because it was the will of God. Nevermind that the Canaanites were considered "immoral" simply because they worshipped other gods (e.g. Numbers 33:52, Deuternonomy 7:4-5).

This is the third element of our cocktail. We will now see how these elements work whether singularly or mixed together.

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The Consequences of the "Cocktail"

Thus Christian intolerance of outsiders and heretical insiders, mixed with the other two elements, had resulted in: