On reading books about war and religion.
Jul. 12th, 2021 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungTwo books that have been on my mind recently.
I have slowly been working my way through Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood, which is about the degree to which religions advocate for or support violence. It's basically an in depth "it's more complicated" rebuttal to the Islamophobic claim that Islam is a warlike religion, as well as to the atheist talking point that Christianity has been the cause of innumerable wars through the centuries.
Armstrong starts by noting that civilization, as traditionally defined, is founded in violence - the expropriation of food and labour from the poor by the ruling elite, on the one hand, and the destruction of the poor by the elite's soldiers in wars of conquest, on the other. Armstrong's expertise is the history of the major religions of Eurasia, but I found myself arguing with the book quite a lot in the early chapters where she relied on some out of date archaeology to talk about the origins of agriculture and cities.
Cities and civilization did not have to be founded on violence - we have the peaceful, undefended ruins of Catal Huyuk, an ancient city built without fortifications or other defences against attack, which also seemed not to have a ruling class of haves who stood above the have-nots. Kingdoms and empires, and the wars they engaged in, dominate traditional world history lessons because the warmongers conquered everyone else and got to write the histories. But they're not the only way our ancestors did civilization.
Recently I took a break from Armstrong to re-read another book on religion and war: Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Ehrenreich is a journalist rather than a scholar, and as a historian I found things to disagree with all the way through her book, but the core thesis seems pretty solid:
1. War is an ancient activity, but not universal - it seems to be a cultural disease, a meme that infects cultures. Once one group arms itself and attacks its neighbours, those neighbours have to follow suit or be destroyed. And thus the war disease spreads through the world. Always, however, humans seem to talk and think about war in religious terms, especially calling the death of soldiers "sacrifice."
2. Sacrifice, in turn, while not much practised by modern monotheistic religions, was the bedrock of all worship, including monotheistic worship, throughout the ancient world, and (often in a tamed and vegetarian form), still is the bedrock of polytheistic worship everywhere. The gods demand not prayers but fresh blood and meat. They are envisioned to actually be feeding on the meat that is burnt upon their altars. Gods are carnivores.
3. The gods of the ancient world were not humanity's friends, but rather dangerous and cruel beings with violent and destructive inclinations. Gods do not protect humans from natural disasters, they are the cause of those disasters. Worship and sacrifice is all about appeasing them and preventing them from destroying humanity.
4. Humans are prey animals: our distant ancestors often ended up as food for leopards, and even in the era of agriculture and civilizations, big cats continued to hunt and kill farmers and shepherds as well as their livestock, until humans exterminated enough of them that the threat became rare. (Ehrenreich speculates that the architecture of ancient settlements that had holes in the roof accessed by ladders instead of doors - eg, ancestral pueblo cultures in the US Southwest and the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk - was about reducing the threat of predators coming into people's houses at night).
5. Our gods are predators, and the original sacrifice to them, before domesticated animals were a thing, was human sacrifice. Whatever it might have become since then, religion started out as an attempt to prevent disasters (including predation) by appeasing predator-gods with gifts of fresh meat.
6. Naturally the best human sacrifices are people who don't belong to the community making the sacrifice. And thus, war began, in the distant past, as a religious activity, as raiding parties that enabled one group of hunter-gatherers to appease their gods with the blood of members of another group of hunter-gatherers. While everything else about war has changed beyond recognition, the religious language used for it, and quasi-religious way of thinking about it, remain unchanged from its roots as a religious practice, raiding one's neighbours in order to feed one's gods.
Religion has of course since then become a lot of other things: returning to the themes of Armstrong, the core of most of today's major Eurasian religions (Armstrong sadly has never written about precolonial religions of Africa or the Americas, this is her great failing) is a quest to ameliorate human suffering, to fight against the grim truth that life is full of suffering and ends in death.
All through the founding documents of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc, are exhortations for people to help the less fortunate, be kind to their fellow humans, and to treat others as they would like to be treated. And those exhortations coexist uneasily with passages that depict the gods who are supposedly asking us to be nice to each other as violent, abusive, capricious beings that would just as soon destroy us if we don't feed them plentifully and regularly with sacrificial meat.
There's a huge gulf between religious institutions, which, in cahoots with the rich and powerful, seek to suppress dissent and keep the common people from disrupting the rapacity of elites; and spiritual movements, which have always been about helping the downtrodden and demanding that the rich share their bounties with those who have nothing.
Ehrenreich's book has a lot about warmongering elites who delight in war. Some of it falls afoul of her lack of expertise in the history she's covering, but I think it's interesting that while sacrificial religion seems to predate agriculture and the creation of "civilizations" which divide people into elites and commoners, the main proponents and perpetuators of war-based worship over the past 12,000 years have been those elites, while the main proponents of being nice to each other have been common people.
The elites of the ancient world delighted in being "hunters" - of literal animals, including big cats who prey upon farmers, and of their fellow humans, through war. Instead of worshipping predators, they became them. Blood sacrifice to capricious gods became monetary sacrifice to overlords who held all the wealth and power in society.
I have slowly been working my way through Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood, which is about the degree to which religions advocate for or support violence. It's basically an in depth "it's more complicated" rebuttal to the Islamophobic claim that Islam is a warlike religion, as well as to the atheist talking point that Christianity has been the cause of innumerable wars through the centuries.
Armstrong starts by noting that civilization, as traditionally defined, is founded in violence - the expropriation of food and labour from the poor by the ruling elite, on the one hand, and the destruction of the poor by the elite's soldiers in wars of conquest, on the other. Armstrong's expertise is the history of the major religions of Eurasia, but I found myself arguing with the book quite a lot in the early chapters where she relied on some out of date archaeology to talk about the origins of agriculture and cities.
Cities and civilization did not have to be founded on violence - we have the peaceful, undefended ruins of Catal Huyuk, an ancient city built without fortifications or other defences against attack, which also seemed not to have a ruling class of haves who stood above the have-nots. Kingdoms and empires, and the wars they engaged in, dominate traditional world history lessons because the warmongers conquered everyone else and got to write the histories. But they're not the only way our ancestors did civilization.
Recently I took a break from Armstrong to re-read another book on religion and war: Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Ehrenreich is a journalist rather than a scholar, and as a historian I found things to disagree with all the way through her book, but the core thesis seems pretty solid:
1. War is an ancient activity, but not universal - it seems to be a cultural disease, a meme that infects cultures. Once one group arms itself and attacks its neighbours, those neighbours have to follow suit or be destroyed. And thus the war disease spreads through the world. Always, however, humans seem to talk and think about war in religious terms, especially calling the death of soldiers "sacrifice."
2. Sacrifice, in turn, while not much practised by modern monotheistic religions, was the bedrock of all worship, including monotheistic worship, throughout the ancient world, and (often in a tamed and vegetarian form), still is the bedrock of polytheistic worship everywhere. The gods demand not prayers but fresh blood and meat. They are envisioned to actually be feeding on the meat that is burnt upon their altars. Gods are carnivores.
3. The gods of the ancient world were not humanity's friends, but rather dangerous and cruel beings with violent and destructive inclinations. Gods do not protect humans from natural disasters, they are the cause of those disasters. Worship and sacrifice is all about appeasing them and preventing them from destroying humanity.
4. Humans are prey animals: our distant ancestors often ended up as food for leopards, and even in the era of agriculture and civilizations, big cats continued to hunt and kill farmers and shepherds as well as their livestock, until humans exterminated enough of them that the threat became rare. (Ehrenreich speculates that the architecture of ancient settlements that had holes in the roof accessed by ladders instead of doors - eg, ancestral pueblo cultures in the US Southwest and the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk - was about reducing the threat of predators coming into people's houses at night).
5. Our gods are predators, and the original sacrifice to them, before domesticated animals were a thing, was human sacrifice. Whatever it might have become since then, religion started out as an attempt to prevent disasters (including predation) by appeasing predator-gods with gifts of fresh meat.
6. Naturally the best human sacrifices are people who don't belong to the community making the sacrifice. And thus, war began, in the distant past, as a religious activity, as raiding parties that enabled one group of hunter-gatherers to appease their gods with the blood of members of another group of hunter-gatherers. While everything else about war has changed beyond recognition, the religious language used for it, and quasi-religious way of thinking about it, remain unchanged from its roots as a religious practice, raiding one's neighbours in order to feed one's gods.
Religion has of course since then become a lot of other things: returning to the themes of Armstrong, the core of most of today's major Eurasian religions (Armstrong sadly has never written about precolonial religions of Africa or the Americas, this is her great failing) is a quest to ameliorate human suffering, to fight against the grim truth that life is full of suffering and ends in death.
All through the founding documents of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc, are exhortations for people to help the less fortunate, be kind to their fellow humans, and to treat others as they would like to be treated. And those exhortations coexist uneasily with passages that depict the gods who are supposedly asking us to be nice to each other as violent, abusive, capricious beings that would just as soon destroy us if we don't feed them plentifully and regularly with sacrificial meat.
There's a huge gulf between religious institutions, which, in cahoots with the rich and powerful, seek to suppress dissent and keep the common people from disrupting the rapacity of elites; and spiritual movements, which have always been about helping the downtrodden and demanding that the rich share their bounties with those who have nothing.
Ehrenreich's book has a lot about warmongering elites who delight in war. Some of it falls afoul of her lack of expertise in the history she's covering, but I think it's interesting that while sacrificial religion seems to predate agriculture and the creation of "civilizations" which divide people into elites and commoners, the main proponents and perpetuators of war-based worship over the past 12,000 years have been those elites, while the main proponents of being nice to each other have been common people.
The elites of the ancient world delighted in being "hunters" - of literal animals, including big cats who prey upon farmers, and of their fellow humans, through war. Instead of worshipping predators, they became them. Blood sacrifice to capricious gods became monetary sacrifice to overlords who held all the wealth and power in society.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-13 01:22 am (UTC)In Judaism, the idea that God wants our prayers rather than a dead goat or sheep or bull is a function of the destruction of the (one!) temple in Jerusalem. “Oh no! We can no longer do the sacrifices in the Torah. We’ll give our prayers instead and hopefully that will suffice.” There are kooky fundamentalist Jews who want to rebuild the temple and do sacrifices again, but the vast majority are repelled by the idea and prefer our current system.
(Christianity is Judaism’s sister and they never actually had a temple but use a lot of sacrifice language, of course. Christianity holds that Jesus was the last sacrifice God demanded.)
So. A couple of things with that in mind.
As a convert, my rabbi and other rabbis I’ve studied with are usually “Well, that was what religion was at that time, all religions did it, they just didn’t know better and thank goodness we’ve moved past that.” That said—and also I’m a vegetarian so I find animal sacrifice talk even more twitch-worthy than average—it wasn’t just the God(s) who ate the meat. If you look at Prometheus, the thing he did that pissed off the gods so much was to trick them into saying “No, the gods want the shitty leftovers and humans should eat the good stuff.” This is why the Torah has all those passages about not eating meat offered to idols.
In other words: animal sacrifice was basically a church barbecue. Sure, the little sacrifices mostly fed the priests, but the big ones fed everyone.
It’s not completely unknown in modern times, either. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha
(Also, again, vegetarian, don’t want to do temple sacrifices. Feel a little awkward feeling like I’m defending the practice.)
Also, well. Oral Torah.
So, Jews tend to feel a bit awkward about descriptions of G-d being an asshole for two reasons. The first is that there’s lot of Christian antisemitic rhetoric past about how until Jesus the Jewish deity was mean and vengeful and scary and the Jews still worship that guy. Yikes. In context of what was going on around during the sacrifice era, Jews insisted their God loved them, in contrast to some other religions that saw sacrifice as a crass commercial transaction. (Of course, this could also be unfair and maybe I shouldn’t speak for faiths gone by.) Their deity is most often scary to people who treat others poorly.
Example: Jewish oral Torah, backed up by the actual Torah, is that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not Teh Gay!!!!! but that they were wealthy and refused to help the poor and needy (and also treated strangers terribly).
Jewish oral Torah is actually a whole body of literature arguing with the Torah. Like, there’s a passage about how the penalty for breaking kosher is death. Well, they didn’t like that, so they were like, “What does that mean? Well, death is pretty extreme, so there have to be several witnesses, and the several witnesses have to walk up to the person in the act of eating their ham and cheese sandwich and say hey, did you know that’s not kosher? And if the person said 'Oh shit no I didn't realize!' they were fine, they would have to say 'yes and I don’t care!' And 'Yes and I don't care!' in the face of a death penalty would mean they’re crazy and suicidal and you can’t hold an impaired person responsible! You can’t hurt a poor crazy person!” Ditto for the passage about killing your disrespectful son; he has to be eating ham and cheese in the village square and see above. In short, any passage that makes G-d sound like a jerk has clearly been misinterpreted and needs this kind of argument.
(Er. That’s very much a Conservative/Masorti/Reform point of view and the Orthodox position is that these are more rules given at Sinai that just weren’t written down at the time. Same effect.)
Anyway. I digress, probably. Yeah. Armstrong’s book was fascinating. I liked her book on fundamentalism, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-13 11:33 am (UTC)It's pretty clear that what gods are has evolved over time - lots of formerly carnivorous gods in India have become vegetarian, for instance. And ancestor worship in China consists of putting out tiny symbolic servings of whatever the humans are eating. Monotheism has really dramatically altered the definition of its single God because you can no longer blame bad stuff on those other gods that our god protects us from if we follow the rules and feed it enough.
There's a really fascinating blog "Is that in the bible" that looks at specific stories and shows how they've been concreted from disparate, contradictory versions of the story. A recent entry looked at the Flood, and how the source material had a hostile god and a friendly god, but when that got put in the Torah it turned into a single god that one minute wants to kill everybody and another minute wants to save humanity. That's here: https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2021/04/07/noahs-flood-competing-visions-of-a-mesopotamian-tradition/
"Does god love human beings" is a very vexed question if you insist on revereing the entire corpus of sacred texts, because the answer varied over the centuries during which those texts were being compiled and varied even more if you took into account older sources that the compilers included without thorough editing. If you're willing to say many of the texts reflect a distant era that had a very different understanding of the relationship between gods and humanity, and worship evolves as human culture evolved, etc, etc, it gets a lot easier.
Armstrong is one of those writers where I have just about all of their books. I just wish she would broaden her horizons to include Africa and the Americas before colonialism.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-13 08:40 pm (UTC)I’ve read quite a bit of Karen Armstrong and yeah. I mean, she’s pretty Abrahamic-focused but her books are really good!