This is the fourth entry in my guest postings on the topic stated here, the question being, “Does less religious passion equal a more peaceful world?” This question was posed by Ariane Sherine, Bitish comedy writer and atheist. She is behind an ad campaign to “get the word out” about atheism. I am posting answers, written by guests, in the order I received them, unedited except for some HTML tagging. Please feel free to comment at length either here or on your own blog, linking back here if you please. Thanks!

Nobilis, a writer and podcaster of erotica can be found at nobiliserotica.com.

Does passionate religious faith cause violence?

I am of the opinion that people can generally be categorized as follows: those who admit to making decisions primarily based on faith, gut feelings, and intuition, and those who claim to favor a rational, logical decision-making process. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to make all of one’s decisions based on logic; there must be shortcuts, rules of thumb, appeals to authority and snap judgements or else we’d be spending all our time thinking and none doing. Faith, in my opinion, is a part of the human condition.*

We can have faith in people, in ideologies, in writings, and even our feelings and hunches. You can have faith in a deity, of course, but in the end that usually boils down to either one’s personal experience of that deity (which is an awful lot like feelings) or what we’ve read or been taught (which is an awful lot like an ideology). For the purposes of this article, the people who are hearing God’s voice in an intelligible way on a regular basis are a small enough minority that they can be discounted for the purposes of evaluating global social influence. Is faith in religion really all that different than faith in anything else?

And then we have passion. Strong emotions are part of the human condition, just like faith. They can be buried or expressed, they can have rational justifications attached to them, but they remain just that, emotions.

In my opinion, it is not passionate religious faith that causes violence, but rather simply passion. People who are not in the grip of emotion do not commit violence. If you want to get someone to fight, whether it’s a football team or a squad of soldiers, you’re not going to accomplish much with a rational debate.

Religion is just one of the many tools that have been used to stir people into the orgy of mass violence known as “war”. In the 20th century, politico-economic labels of “capitalist” and “communist” took the place of the nationalist labels of the 19th and 18th centuries, which in turn had taken the place of the “Protestant” and “Catholic” labels of the centuries before that. If the 21st century will be dominated by labels of “Christian” and “Muslim” then it will merely be the wheel making another circuit.**

Wars happen when powerful men decide to spend the lives of the people they are charged with protecting toward their own self-aggrandizement. Religion becomes a part of that war when the leader in question uses it that way. It’s not passionate religious faith that causes violence, but passionate faith.

Addenda:

* This is an essentially unprovable statement. Anyone who claims to order their life in a rational manner cannot prove it, because to do so would require seeing their own thought processes. On the other hand, I have arrived at this conclusion based on the analysis of the thought processes of a very small sample group, namely me. As such, you’ll just have to take it on faith.

** I doubt the Christian vs. Muslim meme will hold on much longer. Both sides are too fractured and spend most of their time attacking their own sub-cultures. Instead, I think the dominant conflict of the 21st century will be “information control” vs. “information freedom”. But that’s a topic for a different essay.