Session 3: Religion and Politics

Session 3: Religion and Politics
Chair: Rob Fisher

The Myth of Our Righteousness: The Hijacking of Religion in Global Terror
Vincent Pizzuto
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of San Francisco, California, USA

Prior to the hijacking of four American jetliners on 9-11, Islam itself was hijacked by fundamentalist ideologies.  In a post 9-11 world, the classical question of theodicy has thus been overshadowed by the fact that religion is not only being called upon to explain evil in the world, but more so to justify its perpetuation.  In the context of the current crisis of growing Islamic extremists, a Christian fundamentalist response within the US is not only inadequate, it is dangerous, because it shares with the Islamic extremists the presumption of its righteousness, and the divine sanctioning of its acts of aggression.  We are thus ethically required to question whether religion is the victim or perpetrator of evil in the global terrorism crisis?
A critical examination of biblical tradition will yield a needed insight in response to this question.  Namely, a polemic against the divine sanctioning of evil cannot be won on the grounds of proof-texting.  This is because examples of violence and cruelty in the Bible are not tangential to biblical narratives, but intrinsic to them.  One can cite parallels, for example, between the biblical figure of Moses, and contemporary terrorist leaders, whereby both are interpreted as liberators of their people from an oppressive regime, and convinced that God is on their side legitimating acts of terror against their oppressor.
What becomes normative in our interpretation of the Scriptures then, is not the recorded narratives about how God was believed to have acted in the past, but the future direction toward which the universal values in those texts push us. Therefore, the criteria to determine what is ethically demanded by the biblical texts must be sought in the future world toward which biblical narratives point, but which they, themselves do not fully participate.  Only in this can we hope to avoid falling prey to the myth of our own righteousness, seduced into uniting in the name of freedom, justice, and security with the presumption of God¹s favour, while wreaking our own destruction on innocent lives under the guise of all that is good.

The Evil Dictator and the Just God: Theism’s Moral Double Standard
Aaron Rotsinger
The University of Dayton, Dayton , Ohio, USA

In this presentation, I will examine the double standard that Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other Theists hold regarding morality. For example, most theists agree that killing is wrong, but when God commands the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in Canaan , the same act becomes just. This is a dangerous difference, I will argue, because it allows rational, ethical people to justify actions that would otherwise violate their own moral codes. In this way, I intend to demonstrate that religions often promote wickedness and immorality.
My presentation will be framed by a dialogue that I had with a freshman composition class earlier this year. When I asked them what made Americans hate Saddam Hussein so much, they gave me a list of atrocities he had committed. After establishing seven characteristics that made Hussein an evil man, I asked the class to examine those same qualities and determine which, if any, could also be applied to the Christian God. The students, primarily Catholic, nevertheless had to agree that they all could. My presentation, then, will be the story of this dialogue, followed by a reflection on the dangers our conversation uncovered.
Our class discussion perfectly illustrated the double standard within Theism. Certain actions, such as murder, torture, and theft, are considered evil unless the subject of those actions is following “divinely-inspired” instruction, whereupon they are immediately considered just, thus allowing any number of atrocities to be committed and publicly accepted. This presentation will demonstrate that, in a way similar to nationalism, religion allows evil actions to be not only justified, but actually encouraged. This presentation, especially pertinent today with fundamentalism on the rise throughout the world, will seek to expose the dangers of double standards of ethics, as well as the importance of having one’s own overriding moral code.

Were Death Really an Evil Thing: Religion and Political Violence in the Writings of Patrick Pearse
James Heaney
Department of English and Irish Studies at Carlow College, Co. Carlow, Ireland

The paper explicates the concept of evil in the writings of the Irish revolutionary, Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), and considers how this subject impacted on his political actions. Pearse is best known today as one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising in Dublin and, concomitantly, as the First President of the Irish Republic . However, he looked upon himself as primarily an educationalist. Pearse’s pedagogical writings provide keen insights to his thinking on the subject of evil. In The Murder Machine (1916), he describes the educational structures introduced to Ireland by the British colonial administration as ‘the most evil thing that Ireland has ever known.’ My analysis begins with a discussion of this, and other of his educational texts. In particular, I outline the ways in which the idea of evil informed his criticisms of the British administration in Ireland , and of his fellow nationalists. In the latter half of my paper I turn to a consideration of his literary and political writings. Several of his most important plays and speeches draw on the concept of evil in order to legitimate the use of revolutionary violence. In August 1915, for example, he maintained it is ‘a Christian thing […] to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them.’ My paper identifies striking similarities between the treatment of this subject in his writings, and G.K. Chesteron’s 1908 study, Orthodoxy. In the final part of my discussion I consider how Pearse’s attitude towards evil impinged on his revolutionary activities during the Easter Rising of 1916.