Religion and Ethics

George H. Smith once posed this scenario (I'm paraphrasing):

Imagine if an American general in Iraq were to order his troops to capture a city and slaughter all of the men and boys in the city, as well as all non-virginal women, including all pregnant women, with the troops free to do with the virginal girls as they wished. There would very likely be a great deal of outrage on the part of the entire world that such a terrible thing had taken place. Now, imagine if the American general, in responding to this outrage and the inevitable court marshal, said something like "I did it because God commanded me to do it, and as a faithful Christian, I simply carried out his command".

This probably wouldn't sway very many people to the general's side, would it? (If you think it would, I'm eager to hear from you too.) Most people would probably be disgusted and outraged, not just by the general's actions but also by his invocation of the most holy God in defense of his terrible act. But why not?

After all, when the Israelites, those with whom God Almighty formed a covenant naming them as His chosen people, were conquering the Holy Land from the Philistines, God frequently ordered His chosen people to conquer cities and slaughter all the men, boys, and non-virginal women - including the pregnant ones - and to enslave the virginal girls.

Smith argued that religion followed ethics, and not the other way around. This was his way of establishing that leading an ethical life did not require religion - that, in fact, ethics were divorced from religion. We know that followers of the same religion once believed it was ethical to murder pregnant women, and we know that this is now considered unethical. The text of the religion has remained static, yet people believe now believe that text implies the opposite of what it once did. Either people have gotten much better at understanding the Bible, or ethics are divorced from religion.

Similarly, one late night, I was speaking with a friend who is an Evangelical Christian and is also in the Army about the enemy he might have to face someday - the mujahideen, we called them.

The mujahideen wouldn't hesitate to kill us, he said. They are cold-blooded murderers.

Yes, I said, but - just to be contrary - imagine what it would be like if you thought your God had asked you to murder innocent people for Him.

I know, he said, that my God would never ask me to murder an innocent person.

Ah, I said, but your God does ask such things of his believers. He told Abraham to kill Isaac - so you know that God orders those who have faith in Him to kill innocent people. Do you claim to know the mind of God, and that He will never again ask this of his followers?

My friend quickly changed the subject.

Which leads me to this: one of my commenters, in response to my post about al Qaeda as vanguard party, has argued that the problem is with Islam itself, that violent jihad is integral to Islam and that Islam is, structurally, designed to produce the sort of conflict we are currently fighting:

Got it? Straight out of the Koran. Straight from the "prophet's" mouth. But no - the Koran has nothing to do with it at all. It's all just one big misunderstanding on the part of a tiny minority of extremists who have hijacked the religion of peace.

Islam is not a religion of peace. There is no such thing as a religion of peace. There are things in the Koran, as there are in the Bible, which are terrible, and there are things which are wonderful.

And just as every Christian chooses what to believe and what to reject from the Bible, every Muslim chooses what to believe and what to reject from the Koran. And every single one of them believes that he or she has stumbled across the one true interpretation of those texts.

Many Christians have chosen to ignore the violent, wrathful God who ordered those conquests and murders, or the God who ordered Abraham to kill his only son. Not all of them have - how many people have been killed in the name of a God who ordered his followers not to kill? One would think that the commandment - "thou shall not kill" - is pretty straightforward. No, some will tell you - it's not "thou shall not kill", it's "thou shall not murder", it's ok to kill as long as the person deserves it - and the speaker is usually the one qualified to make the decision as to who deserves it.

If a line as simple as "thou shall not kill" is so open to interpretation - and so easily ignored - then what hope do we have for the rest of these texts?

Let's use another example, homosexuality. Homosexuality is condemned in the Bible, and by modern religious authorities - but so are a great many other things. Andrew Sullivan quotes Chuck Muth:

Now that the Pope has spoken, let only those Catholics who are without similar sin cast stones on gay marriage. If you wish to rely on the Pope's decree with regard to gay marriage, you MUST also support what ELSE the Pope said in the same speech. In addition to condemning gay marriage, the Pope also condemned DIVORCE, ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL and TRIAL MARRIAGES. If you're Catholic and relying on the Pope's condemnation of gay marriages to support your own opposition to same-sex nuptials, you had better not be ... divorced, have ever used condoms or birth control pills and never have "shacked up" with a lover who was not your spouse. If you have, you have NO moral authority, at least based upon your Catholicism, to attack gay marriage without being considered a complete hypocrite.

And that's just it - homosexuality is forbidden by the Bible, but so is divorce. Many Christians condemn homosexuals, citing the Bible as reason, but many continue to get divorces (I've read that, by religious group in America, the highest divorce rate is among Evangelicals).

There is a disconnect: the Bible condemns both homosexuality and divorce, but many Christians condemn one and do the other. These Christians have chosen that some words in the Bible - those about divorce - are unimportant, irrelevant, acceptable to ignore, while others - those about homosexuality - must be adhered to.

Now, let's look at an example from Islam: the appropriate dress for women. The Koran states that clothing has been provided for men and women to cover their bodies, and for luxury, but that the best garment is righteousness. Further, the Koran calls on both men and women to dress modestly - women are told to cover their breasts in public, but not their hair.

And yet, there are groups such as the Taliban who claim to want to return to an older, purer form of Islam than exists today. The Taliban, claiming to have the one true interpretation of Islam, felt that it was necessary to throw acid into the faces of women who did not cover every inch of their bodies. Likewise, the Koran says little about homosexuality, yet the Taliban could never quite decide which punishment was most Koranic - burying alive or being dropped of a building or being crushed by a collapsing wall.

In other words, there are Muslims who claim to have the one true interpretation of the Koran, and who claim that the Koran is the only guide for life, yet they make up rules and punishments which are nowhere to be found in the Koran.

Just as Christians interpret the Bible in ways that suit their needs and desires, so do Muslims. The Bible forbids murder - yet countless people have been killed, whether by the Inquisition, the Wars of Reformation, or Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons (to name a few), in the name of a God who said "thou shall not kill". The Koran forbids the murder of innocent people, the killing of women and children, and the mutilation of one's enemies - yet al Qaeda has no problem doing any of these things in the name of Allah.

The Koran commands Muslims to engage in jihad. Muslims are free to interpret this as they wish - as a violent and bloody confrontation with the infidel, as an internal struggle for purity, or as something that can be as safely ignored as the Bible's prohibition of divorce. Most Muslims have chosen the latter two paths - the average Muslim is not engaged in terrorism, or actively trying to conquer the world. The average Muslim does pretty much what the average Christian and the average Hindu and the average Jew does - try to live his or her life.

Or are we to believe that while Christians are free to interpret the Bible as they wish, Muslims are incapable of interpreting the Koran any differently than al Qaeda and the Taliban have chosen to interpret it?

That’s why all this talk about Islam being the problem bothers me so much: it implies that a Muslim is incapable of making a choice that a Christian is capable of making. As far as I’m concerned, as an atheist, you’re all a bunch of nuts, but this strikes me as painfully bigoted.