By Mesha Oh
Conflict in the name of religion between rival sets of religionists has been a pervasive feature of the human condition. Such conflict expresses itself in diverse forms, including as suspicion, scorn and hate for other religions and their adherents, organized efforts to convert others to one’s own religion in the belief that the latter is the only true one, and physical violence—even campaigns of extermination and bloody wars—between adherents of different religions. Today, conflict between rival religionists poses a deadly threat to the very existence of life on Earth, with war-mongering religious zealots wielding immense power in certain countries that possess nuclear weapons as well as with the presence of heavily armed religious-based terrorist groups in many parts of the world.
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The immensity of the problem of hate and violence in the name of religion was possibly one major reason why I spent a significant portion of my life trying to promote what is called ‘interreligious dialogue’, because I then regarded this as a vital and necessary means to overcome conflict in the name of religion and to help promote good, peaceful relations between adherents of different religions. My engagement in ‘interreligious dialogue’ took the form of research, writing and participating in academic discussions on the subject, which took me to many different countries.
The sort of ‘interreligious dialogue’ that I was engaged in was based on the understanding that conflict between different sets of religionists was rooted in exclusivist understandings of religion that denigrated and even demonized the religious ‘other’, and that, therefore, the antidote to the problem was to come up with and seek to popularize alternative understandings of these religions which were less insular and more open to, and embracing of, other religions and their adherents.
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This project of the reform of religious discourses in order to seek to make religious understandings less exclusivist and more appreciative of religious diversity and the goodness in other religions may have been a laudable one in terms of its purpose, but I am not so sure if it was always equally laudable in terms of the claims that were made on its behalf. As I personally came to notice, numerous actors who were engaged in such efforts articulated the claim that the alternate, seemingly universal and benign, understandings of their religion that they championed represented the ‘true’ understanding of that religion at the same time as they branded competing and more dominant understandings of their religion, that were narrow and bigoted, as inauthentic or a false representation of their religion. They sought to convince their ‘dialogue partners’ from other religions that their particular version of their religion—which they presented as peace-loving and the epitome of virtue—was how and what their religion actually was.
However, such efforts to salvage this or that religion and to articulate a sanitized image often came at the cost of truth, I was to go on to discover. The project of constructing a lofty version of a religion in order to make it appear as being peace-loving and warmly welcoming of other religions and their adherents often involved the careful whitewashing of its historical record of hate-driven conflict directed against others (in some cases, even of battles fought against religious 'others' by a religion’s founder), highly selective use of scripture (highlighting bits that appeared universal while ignoring those that were embarrassingly supremacist and therefore ‘inconvenient’ as far as the project of promoting interreligious harmony was concerned), and convoluted linguistic acrobatics that sought to provide alternate, less brutal interpretations of scriptural passages that clearly militated against interfaith bonhomie and harmonious relations between adherents of different religions.
In short, while the intention of many of those who were engaged in this project may have been noble and while they may have been genuinely and deeply committed to working for better relations between diverse sets of religionists through articulating alternative religious discourses, I came to have serious doubts about the worth and value of this project itself in terms of what many (though perhaps not all) of those who were engaged in this exercise were seeking to articulate. Clearly, presenting a carefully sanitized version of this or that religion so as to make it appear as enthusiastically welcoming of religious diversity and peace, including by ignoring, refashioning or editing out inconvenient bits that clearly defied this understanding and then claiming that it represented the authentic version of the religion in question, was being neither intellectually sound nor sincere. The rosy, good-goody image of their religion that many participants in interreligious efforts whom I came across articulated in this way and which they eagerly sought to convince others was what their religion truly was, I came to realize, was often at considerable odds with the reality of their religion as a study of its basic teachings, practices and historical record easily reveals. So markedly different was the version of their religion that some professional interfaith dialogue practitioners sought to promote from the actual version of it as clearly reflected in the life and teachings of its founder that one might even say that they were engaged—perhaps unwittingly—in fabricating an entirely new religion altogether albeit while retaining an old label, which was, honestly, sometimes blatantly dishonest. This realization was key to my growing loss of interest in interreligious dialogue.
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My engagement in ‘interreligious dialogue’ as a means for peacebuilding came to an end with my rapidly waning commitment to religion itself. I had been a religionist for many years (experimenting with several religions over the decades), but then I quit religion altogether after I finally came to the understanding that religions are human constructs.
Since I came to see religions as human constructs, I also came to the understanding that for promoting peaceful and harmonious relations between people from different religious backgrounds, reforming religious discourse or devising more acceptable versions of religion was not necessarily the best means. Rather, what I felt was required for this purpose was to help humanity grow beyond religion (This did not mean promotion of atheism, though. Along with my loss of religion, I came to understand that one can believe in the Supreme Intelligence that has brought the universe into being and continues to sustain it without believing in or identifying with any religion at all—which is what my present position is: a simple Deism, one could call it).
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One would suppose that if people were to realize that religions are human constructs, they would be less likely to hate those who do believe differently. With this, there would also likely be a sharp drop in the number of deranged diehards who are enthusiastically willing to kill and die in the name of religion. Realization of the fact that religions are manmade and not something mandated by God/the gods would also likely result in people increasingly overlooking religious differences that presently stand as a huge barrier in the path of wholesome relations between individuals, communities and entire countries that have come to be defined on the basis of religion. If people come to see that religions are a human construct, they will likely also come to see that the hate and violence directed against people of other persuasions that this or that religion might teach or that might be taught in the name of this or that religion is also the product of mere human hands and is not something that has been Divinely mandated. Hence, they would be less likely to be misled by such teachings.
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For me now, doing my little bit to help address the issue of conflictual relations between individuals and groups defined on the basis of religion and to promote more wholesome relations between them is not through interreligious dialogue of the sort that I was once engaged in but, instead, through helping, in ways that I as an individual can, to facilitate humanity’s evolution beyond religion, based on the realization of religion being a human construct. This is accompanied by highlighting the very liberating possibility held out by a simple Deism that one can be in connection with the Supreme Intelligence that has fashioned the universe and that governs it without identifying with and being bound by this or that religion.
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