The Justification of Religious Violence E-Book

Steve Clarke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Public Philosophy Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 537

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

How are justifications for religious violence developed and do they differ from secular justifications for violence? Can liberal societies tolerate potentially violent religious groups? Can those who accept religious justifications for violence be dissuaded from acting violently? Including six in-depth contemporary case studies, The Justification of Religious Violence is the first book to examine the logical structure of justifications of religious violence. * The first book specifically devoted to examining the logical structure of justifications of religious violence * Seeks to understand how justifications for religious violence are developed and how or if they differ from ordinary secular justifications of violence * Examines 3 widely employed premises used in religious justifications of violence - 'cosmic war', the importance of the afterlife, and 'sacred values' * Considers to what extent liberal democratic societies should tolerate who hold that their religion justifies violent acts * Reflects on the possibility of effective policy measures to persuade those who believe that violent action is justified by religion, to refrain from acting violently * Informed by recent work in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology * Part of the Blackwell Public Philosophy Series

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Public Philosophy

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1: Justification, Religion, and Violence

September 11 (1857)

Religion and Violence

Violence

Justification

Nothing Bad

Between “Anything and Everything” and “Nothing Bad”

Nature and Supernature

Notes

Chapter 2: Religion

Generalizing about Religion

Supernatural Beings

Ritual

The Evolution of Religion

Social Solidarity and Religion

Defining Religion

Notes

Chapter 3: Morality

Introduction

Evolved Morality

Morality, Evolution, and Culture

Consequentialism, Deontology, and the Neuroscience of Moral Cognition

Reasoning and Intuiting

Morality and Religion

Notes

Chapter 4: Justifying Violence, War, and Cosmic War

Justifying Violence

Justice, War, and Just War Theory

Pacifism

Religious War and Cosmic War

Cosmic War

Notes

Chapter 5: The Afterlife

Afterlife Beliefs

Christianity, Violence, and Salvation

Buddhism, Violence, and Reincarnation

Suicide, Suicide Cults, and the Afterlife

Notes

Chapter 6: The Sacred

The Sacred and the Holy

Durkheim

Sacred Values

Sacralization

Justification and the Sacred

Notes

Chapter 7: Recent Justifications of Religious Violence

Introduction

The Gatekeepers and Deific Decree

Aum Shinrikyo

Heaven's Gate

The Killing of George Tiller

Meir Kahane and the Kach Party

Al-Qaeda

Concluding Remarks

Notes

Chapter 8: Tolerance

Liberal Democracy and Religious Tolerance

What Tolerance Is

Justifying Religious Tolerance

Religion, Toleration, and Causation

Violent Religious Groups, Tolerance, and the Liberal State

Notes

Chapter 9: Reducing Religious Violence

Religion, Violence, Justification, and Motivation

Undermining Religious Justifications for Violence

Cosmic War, the Afterlife, and the Opportunity to Make Converts

Avoiding Conflicts over Sacred Values

Tolerating Violent Religious Groups

Concluding Remark

Notes

References

Name Index

Subject Index

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Justification, Religion, and Violence

Blackwell Public Philosophy

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The Justification of Religious Violence

by Steve Clarke

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The Justification of Religious Violence

Steve Clarke

This edition first published 2014

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

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ISBN 9781118529751 (hardback); ISBN 9781118529720 (paperback)

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Cover design by Simon Levy Associates

1 2014

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bullrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.

David Hume

Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?

Brigham Young

Preface

Much has been written about the relationship between religion and violence, and much of what has been written is aimed at determining whether, how, and why religion causes violence. This book has a different goal. Followers of many different religions who commit violent acts seek to justify these by appealing to religion. I aim to understand how such justifications proceed; and how they do, or do not, differ from ordinary secular justifications for violence. I will show that religious justifications for violence generally exemplify the same logical forms as ordinary secular justifications for violence. I will also show that many religiously based justifications for violence are as acceptable as rigorous secular justifications for violence, provided that crucial premises, which religion supplies, are accepted. Religious believers are able to incorporate premises, grounded in the metaphysics of religious worldviews, in arguments for the conclusion that this or that violent act is justified. I examine three widely employed types of premises that appear in such arguments. These are: appeals to a state of “cosmic war,” appeals to the afterlife, and appeals to sacred values.

The first three chapters of the book contain background material. Because my analysis is informed by recent work in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, there is much ground to cover before we analyze religious justifications for violence. In Chapter 1, some violent actions that have been undertaken in the name of religion are discussed and two influential views about the relationship between religion, justification, and violence (or the lack of such a relationship) are considered and rejected. I also discuss and define the key terms “justification” and “violence,” as well as examine the relationship between nature and “supernature,” which underpins many of the metaphysical postulates developed by the religious. In the second chapter, I discuss influential generalizations about religion and assess which of these stands up to scientific scrutiny. I argue that religion has evolved and I consider competing views about how this has happened. I argue in favor of the view that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. I then offer a new, empirically informed, definition of religion. Chapter 3 is about morality. I consider the evolution of morality, the role of culture in shaping morality, and recent work in social psychology and neuroscience on moral judgment. All of this leads up to an overall characterization of the relationship between morality and religion. Readers who are well informed about any of the background topics discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 may safely skip over the sections in which these topics are discussed.

In Chapter 4 I consider ordinary secular justifications for violence and explore how these can be reconciled with consequentialist and deontological accounts of morality. I then look at the ethics of war, just war theory, and pacifist objections to war. I also consider traditional religious justifications for war, many of which involve the supposition that a cosmic struggle is taking place between the forces of good and the forces of evil. I show that appeals to cosmic war make it easy to justify a range of behavior that would be harder to justify in conventional wars by the standards of just war theory. In Chapter 5, the role that afterlife beliefs can play in justifying religious violence is considered. I concentrate on arguments in the Christian tradition that appeal to the importance of salvation to justify violent actions directed at heretics and apostates, as well as arguments in the Buddhist tradition that appeal to beliefs about the cycle of reincarnation to justify violence. I also examine religious justifications for suicide that appeal to the afterlife. In Chapter 6, I consider the role that sacred values play in religious justifications of violence. I look at Durkheim's classic analysis of the sacred, as well as recent work in psychology and negotiation studies on sacred values, along with some contemporary work in cognitive science and neuroscience on sacralization. I end the chapter by arguing that ordinary reasoning about sacred values is a form of ordinary deontological moral reasoning.

Chapter 7 contains a series of recent case studies in which violent action has been taken, and religious justifications for this violence have been offered, either by the perpetrators, or by sympathetic co-religionists. Six case studies are examined. I look at two religious groups from the United States, The Gatekeepers and Heaven's Gate, and also a religiously inspired American anti-abortion activist, Scott Roeder. I consider a religious group based in Japan, Aum Shinrikyo, as well as followers of the Rabbi Meir Kahane, who have committed acts of violence in Israel. Lastly, I consider religious justifications for violence offered by representatives of the international organization al-Qaeda. In all six case studies, it is demonstrated that the justifications offered for violent action carried out in the name of religion appeal to cosmic war, the afterlife, or sacred values, or some combination of these three factors.

Chapter 8 is about religious tolerance. I consider what tolerance is and how religious tolerance is justified in liberal democratic states. I then examine evidence from social psychology about whether religion promotes tolerance or intolerance. I go on to consider whether promoting the value of religious tolerance could be an effective way to persuade those who believe that they are justified by their religion in acting violently to refrain from acting violently. In Chapter 9, I consider some other possible ways to persuade those who believe that violent action is justified by religion, and who are motivated to act violently, to nevertheless refrain from acting violently. I also consider whether, and to what extent, religiously tolerant liberal societies can and should tolerate religious groups that believe that they are justified in acting violently on behalf of their religion.

Throughout the book I follow a common, abbreviated way of writing and refer to attempted justifications simply as justifications. It should be clear enough, from context, when I am referring to an attempt to justify some or other doctrine, or instance of violent action, and when I am referring to justifications that meet the standards that we ordinarily accept as successfully justifying violent action. The justification of any form of violence is a controversial topic and there will be some readers who will not regard the standards that most people ordinarily accept as justifying violent action as sufficiently rigorous. Some readers will hold that we ought to apply more rigorous standards to all attempts to justify violence, including those that appeal to religion. Other readers, especially avid pacifists, will suppose that we can never offer successful justifications for any violent behaviour. Although I discuss pacifist objections to war in Chapter 4, a proper consideration of pacifist objections to the standards that most of us ordinarily apply to justifications of violence is beyond the scope of this work.

The book had its origins in a grant application, on “Science and Religious Conflict'” which I developed, together with Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Institute for Science and Ethics, in the Oxford Martin School, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, all at the University of Oxford. Julian and I wanted to take recent work in social psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology and apply this to shed light on the nature of religious conflict; and also to suggest ways to reduce religious conflict. Our application was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom and ran from the beginning of 2009 to mid-2012 (Standard Grant AH/F019513/1). In addition to this book, the Science and Religious Conflict project resulted in two major international conferences, a number of academic papers, and an edited volume, Religion, Intolerance and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation, edited by Steve Clarke, Russell Powell, and Julian Savulescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013). Julian and I were fortunate enough to have been able to employ Russell Powell to work on the grant. I benefited enormously from the opportunity to work with Julian and Russell, as well as the opportunity to work at the Uehiro Centre and in the Oxford Martin School. Work on the latter stages of this book was generously supported by the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University.

Thanks to Joanna Burch-Brown, Adrienne Clarke, Katrien Devolder, Tom Douglas, David Edmonds, Jacqueline Fox, Guy Kahane, Marguerite La Caze, Neil Levy, Morgan Luck, Kate MacDonald, Terry MacDonald, Francesca Minerva, Justin Oakley, Russell Powell, Simon Rippon, Julian Savulescu, Nicholas Shea, John Teehan, Steven Tudor, Adrian Walsh, and several anonymous reviewers for helping me to improve my draft material. Thanks also to Lindsay Bourgeois, Michael Boylan, Jennifer Bray, Liam Cooper, Jeff Dean, Allison Kostka, Louise Spencely, and Paul Stringer for their editorial help and support.

Chapter 1Justification, Religion, and Violence

September 11 (1857)

At dawn on September 7, 1857, a wagon train of emigrants camped at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah unexpectedly found themselves under attack. The emigrants—the Fancher–Baker party—were making their way from Arkansas to California. They numbered approximately 120, including men, women, and children of various ages, and they had perhaps 700 head of cattle with them. The attackers aimed coordinated barrages of gunfire at the party from different directions and their initial assault is reported to have resulted in seven deaths (Walker, Turley, and Leonard 2008, p. 158). However, that initial attack was soon repelled by the emigrant group who corralled their wagons and proceeded to fight off their assailants over the next five days. The attacking party was dressed as American Indians, and indeed some of them were Southern Paiute Indians. But the majority were white and were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). There were reports of fractious interactions between members of the Fancher–Baker party and Mormons whom they had encountered when passing through Utah (Bagley 2002, p. 98; Walker et al. 2008, p. 87).1 However, the party posed no threat to the Utahn Mormon community and were about to leave Utah for good.

In the late morning of September 11, a sub-group of the assailants removed their disguises and approached the corral, pretending to be representatives of a sympathetic local militia who could broker a deal between the emigrants and their Indian assailants. In exchange for livestock and supplies the representatives of the militia claimed that they would be able to persuade the assailants to cease hostilities and they would provide the emigrants with safe passage to nearby Cedar City. The emigrants were suspicious of the negotiating party, having seen through the disguises of their mainly white assailants; but as they were running low on water and ammunition, they felt that they had little choice but to accept the offer (Walker et al. 2008, p. 196), which was, as they feared, a “decoy.” The remaining members of the Fancher–Baker party, who had managed to survive five days of besiegement, left their corral and were ambushed soon after by other members of the Mormon-led assailant group. Every adult and every child over the age of six was massacred and their bodies hastily buried. The only survivors were seventeen small children and infants, who were adopted into nearby Mormon families, under the erroneous assumption that they would all be too young to remember the shocking events that had transpired.