Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion, art, science, food, and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. For many religions, particularly those based on monotheism, one of the important concepts is a belief in good/evil duality. In these religions, the role of religion is to help people in the war or struggle between good and evil. The idea is that religion creates or increases good in the world by defeating evil. In these religions, warfare metaphors are commonly used.
In Christianity, the mythological being known as Satan personifies evil. Non-Christian religions, such as the Native American religions of North America and the traditional religious practices of Africa, are often seen as forms of Satan worship, therefore allied with evil. Such religions, according to many Christians, should be battled, not tolerated, and their followers killed.
British philosopher A.C. Grayling, in his book Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God. writes:
“‘Evil’ is first and foremost a religious notion. It means whatever a religion dislikes. Christianity assimilated various pagan deities and practices when obliged to make concessions to stubborn peasant predilections (hence the incorporation of Diana worship into Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary), but it otherwise proscribed all other and earlier deities as devils.”
A.C. Grayling goes on to say:
“As the Green Man, satyr, or any supernatural figure not sanctioned by orthodoxy as angel or saint, Satan represents forces of nature and aspects of the world which the church wishes to suppress, chief among them the appetites for sex and pleasure.”
Long before European Christians encountered the native people of the Americas, they were waging war against two other religions: Judaism and Islam. In his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris writes:
“Anti-semitism is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral, and this terrible truth has been published in Jewish blood since the first centuries of the common era.”
In 1095, Pope Urban issued a call for the First Crusade to battle against Islam. In his book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, Paul VanDevelder writes:
“This call to the First Crusade was a volatile interweaving of the secular and the religious, the political and the theocratic, an alchemy that sounds remarkably consonant with contemporary political thought nine centuries later.”
In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong reports:
“It had never occurred to Urban that the Crusaders would attack the Jewish communities in Europe, but in 1096 an army of German Crusaders slaughtered between four to eight thousand Jews in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.”
Karen Armstrong goes on to report:
“The Crusades made anti-Semitic violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned, Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were involved.”
The theological logic and quasi-legal reasoning used in the call to the Crusades led to the idea that the Pope, and Christian governments, have the right to rule over non-Christians and force them to convert or die in a just war. This reasoning formed the basis for American Indian law in the United States.
Christianity is, of course, a patriarchal religion with some branches of this religious tradition more aggressively and vehemently patriarchal than others. When women have questioned, and sometimes defied, their subservience to men, they have been branded as witches, as the handmaidens of Satan.
Sex is also associated with Satan. In an essay republished in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, British philosopher, historian, and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) writes:
“Although there are many kinds of sin, seven of which are deadly, the most fruitful field for Satan’s wiles is sex.”
In order to battle Satan, and the heresies which he had introduced into the Church, Pope Lucius III created the Holy Inquisition in 1184.
Open Thread
This is an open thread—all comments are welcome.