What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?

By Terrence McNally and Robert Wright, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2009.

RW: People do it for free, and I want them to enjoy it, so I don't impose a strict time limit. The whole thing is there unedited, but we also make it accessible, sorted by topics. You'll find five-, six-, seven-minute clips on the site.

TM: Why did you write The Evolution of God?

RW: I guess I had it vaguely in mind for a long time. Well before 9/11, I'd been interested in relations among the world's religions -- how they were going to modernize and try to stay compatible with the scientific world view and all that.

After 9/11, the question of how the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- were going to reconcile themselves with one another acquired a new urgency.

Asking whether Islam -- or any other faith -- is a religion of peace or of war, is just a dumb question. I don't want to offend anybody, but all religions have their good moments and bad moments. In the scriptures of all of them you see belligerent passages and you see tolerant passages. I wanted to look at what circumstances gave rise to those two kinds of scriptures.

What was going on on the ground when, in the book of Deuteronomy, God tells the Israelites to annihilate all nearby people who don't worship him? And what's going on in other parts of the Hebrew bible, when the Israelites say to a neighbor, "You've got your God, we've got our God, can't we get along?"

You see the same kind of variation in all the Abrahamic scriptures. I wanted to know how you account for the difference, hoping that would tell us something about what circumstances bring out the best and worst in a religion today. That's the basic mission.

TM: Religion has to do with building constituencies, survival, expansion, so the political, economic and cultural circumstances of the moment mean a lot.

RW: To a large extent, the mood of a religion is a function of the material, political and economic facts on the ground. It's a little Marxist, not in the sense of anticipating the triumph of communism, but in the sense of seeing a material basis for a lot of what happens in the world of culture and ideas.

This is a more important issue than I think people realize. On the right in particular, you hear that religions have an eternal character; Islam is a religion of violence; there's no point in making concessions or addressing grievances. This is a consequence of viewing a religion as unchanging, with an intrinsic and essential character, impervious to changes in the material world.

In fact, I object when some of the so-called New Atheists talk as if religion is an intrinsically bad thing, because I believe they're giving aid and comfort to the right.

TM: How so?

RW: Chris Hitchens, who favored the invasion of Iraq and is to the right on some foreign-policy positions, talks as if religions have this eternal character. Sam Harris may not consider himself on the right, but he has written that there is no point in looking for the root causes of terrorism because it flows through religion, and so on.

I'm very much against this idea and very much for the idea that you can change the mood of a religion and relations among religions by addressing issues on the ground. Judging by the speech he gave in Cairo, President Obama clearly buys into this idea as well.

TM: I interviewed Reza Aslan recently regarding his book How to Win a Cosmic War. He's referring to a religious war that is ultimately unwinnable because it pits good versus evil. His final message: You cannot win a cosmic war, so don't engage in one. Instead, address the actual grievances that fuel conflict, and you can make progress.

RW: I found a basic pattern in ancient times, as well as now: When a group of people believes they can gain through peaceful interaction with others, it brings out the tolerance of their culture and their religion.

Imagine you're competing with somebody for a job or a mate. That's a zero-sum game -- one of you is going to win, one of you is going to lose. You tend to evaluate them not very favorably; you're looking for flaws. That's the way rivalry and competition works. Whereas if you look at somebody and believe you can do a deal or you can work together, then you want to find reasons to like them, you want to judge them tolerantly.

I think that's the basic dynamic that brings out the best and the worst in a religion, and I found it in all three scriptures, the Hebrew bible, the New Testament and the Quran.

TM: The game theory terms zero-sum and non-zero-sum appear fairly central to how you approach things.

RW: There are two basic kinds of games: the zero-sum game is the kind most of us are familiar with, where there's a winner and a loser. When you play tennis with somebody, every point is going to be good for one of you, bad for the other. Your fortunes are exactly inversely correlated.

See more stories tagged with: religion, christianity, evolution of god, robert wright

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit his Web site,A World That Just Might Work, for podcasts of all interviews, and more.

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