A COMMON MISTAKE.

The common mistake people make when they talk about all the trouble in the world being attributable to one cause is to assume that if that one cause, namely religion, were absent then everything would be fine.

It’s my contention that this is not so. We are a tribal species and there’s a down side to everything – Even the family where, along with all our values and morals, we learn to be tribal. It’s important that we know our roots and distinguish between friends and strangers. For safety reasons parents rightly tell their children not to talk to strangers or go off with those they don’t know and of course, being highly intelligent animals we cannot and do not forsake our animal instincts despite our thin veneer of sophistication. Its important for us to determine who will be our protectors and separate them from our foes who will doubtless hurt us.

The family is a mini version of the world and the world is the family writ large. The trouble is that we can’t imagine large numbers. Even those with vision are unable to do this beyond a certain point so to make us feel safe we need to hive off into small units for this is where we feel most comfortable. I’m sure I’m not telling you something you didn’t know already or couldn’t find out from anthropologists but what you may not agree with is my belief that religion is not the cause of all the wrong in the world but a symptom of it in the same way as a carving knife in a kitchen drawer isn’t in itself harmful but only becomes so in the wrong hands. Often religion leads people to do the right thing even if it’s done out of fear of retribution from an angry god or of not attaining salvation for one’s soul. It is our tribal instincts and inability to embrace difference of any kind which causes trouble.

I was amazed to find that a second generation black person living in the U.K bemoaned the fact that a number of immigrants were still being allowed into the country and that it ought to be stopped. This person had now come to identify herself not with the black settlers with whom her parents would have identified themselves but rather with the indigenous British population to which she felt akin. She didn’t think:

“Come one come all. My parents were given the chance of a better life which is how I came to be born here”.

Instead she had crossed over from the “Thems” to the “Us’s” and felt her position to be threatened just as the white people feel their positions to be threatened by the influx of visibly foreign faces with different customs and language, different diets and values.

Therefore, though not a church goer or an adherent to organised religion, I don’t say “ban it” like many do nor do I, as Richard Dawkins does, imply that without religion there would be less bigotry and harm done to others in the world.

“What about Northern Ireland”?

I hear you chorus. Then there’s the problem between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. True, religion is the means by which each group recognises and defines the other and probably it marks out how each member of either group identifies itself but it’s not the cause of the problem any more than my eyes are the cause of my blindness. It is an extension of our need to belong which like a cancer in a particular individual gets out of control and religion is the particular identifying factor of difference.

I maintain that if the whole world population were atheists and the only difference between us was the size of our hands, there would still be those with bigger or smaller hands, nicely shaped fingernails or chapped hands, who would seek to maintain that those in any of the other “different hand” groups were either inferior or more able at this or that or less trustworthy than they are. I know this from my own experience. For instance, “the blind” are supposed to be gifted with better hearing – A myth that persists no matter who I speak to. How can a whole range of people extending from a tiny blind baby to an old and tottering blind adult all possess better hearing than any one sighted individual? How many blind people have you spoken to in order to test this theory? Like all myths and assumptions it stems from old wives’ tales and the fact that you don’t know what is possible to glean without vision. You can see how easily then it is to construct other falsehoods. “The Japanese are cruel” “Jews are mean” “Blacks are dishonest and will mug you” “Whites are racist bigots”. It’s our tribalism together with our need to belong, coupled with our inability to imagine and embrace large numbers, together with all the prejudices learned at our mother’s knee (and father’s come to that) which informs or distorts our thinking and our own insecurity which makes us think that the “thems” are dangerous. The only thing it has in common with a supernatural deity and therefore the only tie it has with religion is in my opinion, the fact that the same insecurities make us cling for comfort to a parent-like god who will supposedly mop up our tears and kiss us better and restore the justice which we have been denied either through circumstances or by other people who see us as different and deny it to us so they can maintain their authority and power.

I fear that, instead of banning religion or making us all atheists, in order to eradicate our tendency to depersonalise strangers; fear difference and stay cocooned in our ignorance where many find it most comfortable to be, we’d need to dispense with the family which is an impracticality and what some would even consider to be a monstrous and preposterous suggestion. The answer then? I’m afraid we’ll just have to live with our prejudices and tribal natures but we won’t advance while we blame the wrong things for it and think that to ban religion is to solve the problem any more than we’d have advanced if we’d decided that knives were sharp and could be used to stab and kill people so let’s throw them all away.