What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?

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

When Israel is conquered by the Babylonians, Israelite elites are sent to Babylon. Then Persia conquers the Babylonians, and Cyrus the Great of Persia sends them back to Israel. Now, Israel is in a much more secure environment, surrounded by countries that are also part of the Persian empire. So it can trade with them and won't get invaded by them.

I argue that after the exile, you get much more charitable scriptures with respect to people like the Syrians and Molobites, who before the exile are often depicted unfavorably. If you look at the kind of theological language, even the terms they're using for God, I think you get a more inclusive monotheism.

The monotheism that had emerged during the exile had a very belligerent kind of retributive air. In the part of Isaiah that they think was written during the exile, you see tremendous amounts of animosity towards the larger world.

But I think the monotheism acquires a more tolerant spirit after the exile. There's the suggestion in some of the terminology favored by post-exilic authors of the Scripture that they're buying into a notion of "the godhead," where different gods are manifestations of a single God, a unified divinity.

Now that's pretty speculative, but it's been argued by people other than me, and I think it's plausible. There's a very curious fact about the nomenclature for God. There's this term Elohim, favored by an author writing after the exile to refer to Yahweh, and Elohim is a plural noun. No one's ever understood that, but some people think it's a way of saying "these gods," all the gods of the Persian empire.

After the exile, there is still tremendous animosity toward Egypt and Egyptian gods. They're beyond the bounds of the empire, so it's still zero-sum with Egypt.

TM: All of this fits into a bigger picture in which you speak of a direction or an arrow of history. Could you talk about that?

RW: There are two separate issues: whether there's direction in both biological evolution and human history, and whether that direction signifies some kind of purpose. That's one, that's an analytical question.

There clearly has been a direction in the sense of growing complexity through biological evolution. That's not to say that all organisms are always getting more complex, but if you go back to an earlier time and find the most complex organism, the envelope of complexity tends to rise with time.

And since cultural evolution started really moving 10,000 years ago, there's a growing complexity of human societies. You go from hunter-gatherer village to agrarian chiefdom to ancient city-state and so on. Today, we're on the verge of globalized organization. So there's a direction toward growing complexity, that's hard to deny.

It's a separate and much more difficult question whether that signifies something you could in some sense call "purpose." First of all, you can mean a lot of things by purpose.

Then the next question: Is the purpose on balance a good one? In other words, is the direction tending toward the good? And I don't really have a simple answer to that question.

I'm not a technological utopian, but I do think there's one dimension along which human history, broadly speaking, has brought moral progress. That's expansion of the moral compass, in the sense of getting people to acknowledge the fundamental humanity of people of different ethnicities and nationalities.

As far as anthropologists and archeologists can tell, 15,000 years ago, if hunter-gatherers saw somebody they'd never seen before, and you didn't know where they came from, and there were four of you and one of them, you'd probably kill him. Theirs was not a highly cosmopolitan situation.

TM: Within the hunter-gatherer village, it's a different story. Everyone knows each other, everyone's interdependent, and so morality is high.

RW: There can be fierce fighting in a hunter-gatherer village. There can be deaths, and villages even divide sometimes over fighting, but by and large, when you have to live with a small group of people day in day out, there's a fairly simple system of moral self-regulation.

In The Evolution of God, I note that religion doesn't have a big moral component in hunter-gatherer societies. The moral system works very simply, you don't need extra incentives to be nice to people.

TM: So there are spirits, and there might be entities that regulate the sun and the weather and the harvest, all those sorts of things, but religion doesn't need a moral dimension.

RW: But from the very beginning apparently, they do use religion to explain why good things happen and why bad things happen, and to try to increase the ratio of good to bad. From the beginning, religion was fundamentally about that.

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.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »