This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time once again for Monday School. It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” And it STILL doesn’t require you to drop to your knees and unthinkingly accept everything it says if you want to avoid a hellish detention.

*Brief pause so you can alert the neighbors and bring a friend*

Today’s Lesson: True Religion Can Only Inspire Peace, Love, Sunshine, And Gumdrops – Right?

Umm, noooo…. But an awful lot of people seem to think otherwise.

Consider an editorial that I clipped from the Columbus Dispatch. After listing many of the religious-inspired conflicts raging around the world today, the editors go out on a limb and courageously encourage their readers to embrace religion anyway. Why? Partly because they say religion inspires many good things, too, but mainly because they refuse to admit religion is really responsible for anything bad at all.

“Hate and fear, cloaked as religious belief, fuel extremist movements….” the editors declare, apparently denying the possibility that at least some sincerely held religious beliefs might in fact be inseparable from hate and fear.

“Religion reinforced by fear and colored by intolerance, especially when its adherents crave political power, is disastrous,” the editors also declare, ignoring the fact that some religions insist that adherents are the only ones worthy of political power and that those adherents who resist or ignore this demand are the ones we should properly consider to be the imperfect followers of that religion.

The editorial concludes by boldly asserting that “The problem in the world today isn’t religion. The problems are ignorance and intolerance, whether in the believer or the heathen.” These assertions fail to recognize that religion itself flows from ignorance (otherwise it would be a science) and that many religions embrace intolerance as a core value. Few, if any, non-religious belief systems are as dependent upon ignorance or lead to as much intolerance as religious belief systems. To look at today’s world and imply that believers and “heathen” are equally at fault when it’s the atrocious acts of the believers that fill the pages of my newspaper seems to require a willful blindness I’d find troubling in anyone but find especially troubling in the editors of that very newspaper. I suggest they spend some time reading their own publication more closely, then revise their opinions accordingly.

They (and others) might also want to consider the following facts and observations that I think reveal religion to be a much less positive force for good than so many people think it is.

Let’s start with my dictionary’s definition of religion: “Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe; a system grounded in such belief and worship; a set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader; a cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.”

Nowhere does my dictionary say the power or creator religious people worship must be good, loving, or non-violent. Nowhere does it say that religious beliefs must promote peace, brotherhood, or tolerance. Those people who want to limit “true” religion to humanistic beliefs and practices are in effect putting humanistic beliefs above religion as defined by the dictionary, as understood by many people around the world today, and as it’s been practiced for thousands of years. And because humanistic beliefs are derived from reason and experience, these people are in effect putting reason and experience above divine revelation and what many holy books themselves say. It is a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) attempt to unfairly limit religion to a very narrow range – a narrow range that not coincidentally correlates with what the people who do this want to believe on the basis of non-religious reasons. In other words, those who hate and kill in the name of religion often seem to be more in tune with their religion than those who condemn them. Those who believe religion must express pleasant, healthy, humanistic values, in contrast, are often the ones who seem to be perverting a very bloody religious tradition by imposing their personal beliefs and desires on it or twisting it into something the founders of that religion might well have looked upon with abhorrence.

Are these just my opinions, no better and perhaps worse than those expressed by the editors of the Dispatch? No. They are the logical, fact-based conclusions I’ve come to after years of study.

My belief that religion in general has historically tended to be a force for violence and intolerance rests on the research presented by such books as God: Myths of the Male Divine by David Leeming and Jake Page; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue; Maurice Collis’s Cortes and Montezuma; Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son; Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer; and many others. Although Western religion may have once exhibited mostly positive, life-affirming elements back in the days of pagan goddess worship (as Leeming and Page suggest), that quickly changed with the rise of nations and empires. Deity became both a reflection and a tool of human leaders and kings, and religion quickly came to serve as the social glue which helped to bind societies together while simultaneously demonizing other societies and justifying war against them. According to scholars like Diamond, it’s precisely because religion was intolerant and justified war that it fulfilled the needs of people and societies and thus survived. Modern Americans who prefer to think of religion as a kind of divine sanction for their post-Enlightenment humanistic proclivities would probably have been condemned as irreligious heretics by the religious leaders who have held power for most of human history. To say that those religious leaders who continue this tradition today are the ones who have perverted or are out of touch with the “real” meaning of religion is to (knowingly or unknowingly) misrepresent the truth in a manner worthy of Orwell’s 1984 or Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

As Diamond and others have pointed out, the monotheistic religions of the West have been especially devoted to promoting hate, war, and intolerance. These religions, of course, continue to reign today. A close examination of what they say reveals just how embedded violence and intolerance are in them.

Consider Judaism – a religion which includes as holy scripture divine sanction for war, genocide, slavery, and rape. Exodus 15:3 explicitly says “The LORD is a man of war….” Many passages insist that this lord is a jealous lord, intolerant of other lords and of those who might worship them. Deut. 13 explicitly says that if a contrary prophet or “dreamer of dreams” shows up, kill him. It goes on to say that if any relative tries to introduce you to any other religion, kill him, too. Again and again, intolerance and violence aren’t condemned, ignored, or meekly accepted by the authors but alleged to be vociferously mandated by gOd himself. If you believe in the truth of the Jewish scriptures and you condemn intolerance and violence, YOU’RE the one who has some explaining to do – not those who say your scriptures clearly demand both.

Consider Christianity – a religion which includes as holy scripture passages which clearly present Jesus as the only way to gOd; which repeatedly tell Christians to preach the “truth” to those willing to listen while abandoning those who disagree to a hellish fate; which claim that a warrior Jesus will one day return to earth and battle his enemies – not win them over with love, logic, or by turning the other cheek; and which claim that this morally perfect prince of peace will one day condemn the vast majority of people who have ever lived to eternal hellfire. It’s a religion that has historically been spread abroad by the sword and defended at home with the rack and the stake. It’s a religion that presents the alleged founder of its church (Peter) as killing those Christians who refused to turn over all their wealth to him (Acts 4 & 5). As Sir Arnold Lunn once said, “The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with respect finds no support in the Gospels.” One manifestation of this intolerance can be found in Mel Gibson’s belief that his own wife is destined for hell simply because she’s an Episcopalian and not the “true” Christian he is. Pat Robertson summed things up quite nicely when he said, “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” This isn’t some sort of historical aberration – the liberal Christianity that has abandoned these views is.

Consider Islam – a religion which includes as holy scripture very harsh condemnation of unbelievers. (A search for “unbelievers” at one Quran site produced over 200 hits.) For more details on how violence and intolerance have been an essential part of Islam from the very beginning, check out Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim. To see that intolerance in action, just look at the laws that are in effect in most Islamic countries – or follow the news.

Polytheistic religions, while less commonly practiced in the West, fare only somewhat better. Hinduism is the most notable of these, of course, and it includes as holy scripture the Bhagavad-Gita – an extremely twisted defense of violence and war by the very important gOd, Krishna. Hinduism is also notable for inspiring one of the cruelest and most intolerant class systems in all of human history. As a Feb. 29, 2004 ABC News report entitled Still Untouchable? explained, “According to Hindu legend, the world is ordered in the image of a cosmic giant. From its head come the Brahmans — the priests and teachers. From its arms, the rulers and soldiers. From its thighs, the merchants. From its feet, the workers. And beneath all are those considered too impure to be called human beings. Many Hindus believe the last group, with a modern-day population nearly half the size of America’s, does not deserve to own property, run businesses or participate in most aspects of society. The Indian government has outlawed the discrimination, but 1,500 years of tradition do not disappear easily.” Bottom line: Well over 100 million human beings are living hellish lives in India right now because of the hateful, intolerant dogmas of one of the world’s oldest and most popular religions.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. The claim that religion cannot promote hatred and violence has already been revealed to be nonsense. The claim that ignorance or intolerance is the real problem, not religion, is clearly misguided given that ignorance and intolerance are (and apparently always have been) an essential part of the major monotheistic religions. The claim (or unstated assumption) that ignorance and intolerance are as dangerous in “heathens” as in religious people ignores the fact that “heathens” are NOT the ones who have the world in turmoil today, and it ignores all the studies that reveal a correlation between ignorance, intolerance and theistic religion. Such ignorance and intolerance does NOT correlate with humanism or atheism.

It’s not a coincidence that books like the Bible and the Quran inspire conflict, hatred, and violence in a way no math or science book ever has. It’s not a coincidence that religions based on such “holy books from the one true gOd” have a tendency to inspire Very Bad Things – not because those books are so easily misinterpreted but because these Very Bad Things flow from them as naturally as blood from a wound.

Newspaper editorial writers who suggest otherwise are like heavy smokers who refuse to see the connection between tobacco and disease, or who respond to every new medical study by saying, “Hey, non-smokers get cancer, too!”

They owe it to themselves and their families to finally face the facts and kick their disgusting addiction.

And the rest of us owe it to ourselves and the human family as a whole to refuse to any longer put up with the many dangers associated with the second-hand smoke.