The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (34 page)

Europe was a religious continent until WWII. Church attendance was high in almost all countries as was participation in religious organizations of all kinds. Secularism may have been present for two hundred years, but most people maintained a deep belief in the supernatural. Then came WWII. It was a watershed event in religious history. The war seemed to do what no other event could. Religious attendance dropped and never recovered. The Netherlands, where religion had been the reason for many wars and strifes, suddenly didn’t care any more. Belgium, where Catholics and Protestants had been at odds for centuries, lost most of its religious fervor. Germany, where the Catholic Church celebrated Hitler’s birthday through WWII, experienced a tremendous loss of religious involvement and participation.

Religious communities in Europe that kept apart for centuries now mingle and intermarry with impunity. Church attendance and giving, as a percent of disposable income, is a fraction of what it is in the United States. Italy now has the lowest birth rate in Europe – a curious fact in an officially Catholic country where the Pope preaches abstinence and the
sin of contraception and abortion. Throughout Europe, the god virus that infected the minds of millions of people for centuries has seemed to almost disappear.

The people of Europe who fought so many religious wars and experienced extreme Christian fundamentalism today cannot fathom the evangelical mentality in the United States. It is like the European continent awakened from its virus-induced trance and forgot all the passion, anger and self-righteousness.

If there is hope for the environmental and political future of our civilization and planet, it will come from the uncoupling of religion from culture. Getting the holy ghosts of religion out of government will allow for rational discussion about the real challenges we face.
Those who are waiting for heaven don’t focus well on the problems of today.
Their attention and energy are constantly diverted by the preachers and priests who keep them entranced in the make-believe world of gods, angels, demons and saviors and drain their pockets for propagation.

Europe has largely unbound religion from culture. The next step is for the United States to do the same. Hopefully, it will not take a major war. In other parts of the world, India may manage to uncouple Hinduism and its dangerous fundamentalism through its democratic processes. China seems to be in the act of uncoupling the Marxist virus, but who knows what the outcome might be?

Last will be the Islamic countries. Having the most advanced viral form, they are also the most infected and culturally bound. Uncoupling in the west will do more to uncouple Islam than any other force as Christian fundamentalism is a major contributor to Islamic fundamentalism. When the Christian fundamentalist virus expressed itself through the president of the United States saying, “We are on a crusade” after 9/11, there was a huge response from Islam to this inflammatory statement. Clear-headed thinking about how to deal with the virus in other countries (Iraq and the Middle East) can only come if we are clear about how the god virus is manipulating our own political system.

There are many powerful threats to religion today. First is the great interest in books like this one. The excesses of the religious right have awakened many to take a hard look at their beliefs. Also, the Internet has
allowed people of like minds to find one another and spread information outside the influence or control of religion.

The second threat to religion is the continual march of science. While the god virus has often focused on Darwin, the advances in genetics have created a vast amount of supporting evidence for all aspects of evolution. Other branches such as geology, astronomy, psychology, neurology and anthropology have advanced in ways that continue to undermine the god virus’ claims to everything from creation to human relationships.

Psychology is a third threat. Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses both prohibit members from seeing psychologists. Fundamentalist religions are often suspicious of psychology. Many psychologists can see what religion does to people. How it destroys relationships and families, forces people into self-defeating beliefs and creates guilt and anxiety. Religion is a major contributor to mental illness. Religion is not responsible for all mental illness, but it plays a part in a great many cases. These abuses are revealed in the psychologist’s office. Few others will ever hear about them. Who would they go to? The minister or priest? An elder or official of the church?

How many thousands of people have been emotionally and mentally damaged by pedophile Catholic priests in the last 50 years in just North America? The scope of the problem is only recently being revealed in this country, but it continues to be well hidden in Latin America and in Catholic countries around the world. How many thousands of people have been abused by predator Protestant ministers? From 1960-1970 in seven churches of my denomination in Wichita, Kansas, eight different ministers were caught in adulterous affairs (some multiple times). What was going on in all the other Protestant churches? The Scoutmasters of the local Baptist church molested several of boys in the troop. The church board and minister ignored the complaints for years and then quietly asked them to leave. They moved on to another troop. The god virus blinds people to the truth about the behavior of their leaders and blames the victims. Families, friends and society as a whole suffer.

The
www.stopbaptistpredators.org
website documents dozens of churches that have protected ministers and vilified victims of many different sexual crimes. The common theme is the protection of the vector and the denigration of the victims. The Catholic Church has behaved in the same way for decades, a pattern of behavior that has been well established in the court records and settlements for the victims.

But sexual abuse is only a part of the mental health issues caused by religion. Each god virus seeks to ensure the person hosts only that particular virus. Strongly infected people tend to see those who are of a different infection or no infection as enemies or dangerous. Baptists see Jehovah’s Witnesses as evil. Nazarenes tend to see Catholics as misguided. Mormons see Scientologists as an evil cult. And all of them see Muslims and Atheists as dangerous. How much hatred, suspicion, conflict, strife, even violence and death, is caused by the battle for viral supremacy? How many families are torn apart by a god virus? How many children are terrorized by the demon-haunted world – to use Carl Sagan's term
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– they are forced to inhabit?

While respecting confidentiality, psychologists can be a voice to educate people on how the virus works to infect people. It is not the job of the mental health professional to talk someone out of religion, but we cannot deny the role religion plays in creating irrational thoughts and self-defeating behavior.

We are in the middle of an explosion of knowledge and technology. Religion has been an impediment to science throughout history. While religionists argue that science without religion is dangerous, I would argue that religion uses the fruits of science to make the world far more dangerous. Religionists use the scientifically developed weapons of war and electronic communication to propagate their god viruses. They do not hesitate to rail against science even as they use the tools science gave them. True, we need open discussion about ethics with respect to science and its application. I cannot see where religion advances that discussion. Each god virus has its propagation strategy, and that is the primary guide to its ethical contribution.

5
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
(Ballantine Books, 1997).

The Catholic Church ignores the spread of AIDS in Africa in favor of its prohibition on condoms, birth control and abortion. A humanist approach would look for the greater good, the most effective and humane approach to preventing the spread of AIDS. A Catholic approach looks for the greater good of the god virus. Baptists tend to focus on the evils of sex education for teenagers and promote ineffective and counterproductive abstinence programs. The Baptist virus looks for the greater good of the virus, not of teenagers. Jehovah's Witnesses see blood transfusion as immoral, preferring to see someone die rather than accept blood. The humanist perspective would be an easy decision – do the transfusion if it creates greater good and life.

By exposing the manipulations of a god virus, an opportunity for greater choice and freedom is opened. Martin Luther’s reformation in the 1500s led to an exposure of the Catholic virus as an oppressor of political, economic and religious freedom. In turn, the Anabaptist movement revealed the complicity of Lutheranism in suppressing conscience and political freedom. The English Civil War and 30 Years War demonstrated the destructive power of a god virus without regard to human suffering and led the framers of the U.S. Constitution to ensure separation of church and state.

Local god viruses have justified slavery throughout the world. The Southern Baptist church was born to justify slavery. Abraham Lincoln, a non-Christian and probably a deist, was able to play the virus against itself in a way that allowed him to guide the country through a civil war and out of slavery. Nevertheless, as soon as the war was over and Lincoln had died, god viruses went to work to repress those who were once slaves. The virus was just as active in the North in maintaining discrimination and withholding full citizenship to blacks.

The Christian god virus provided all the justification necessary to commit genocide on virtually every native group in the western hemisphere. Every major church in Germany supported Hitler. No effective opposition to genocide came from the churches. The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia were all too often clergy preaching ethnic hatred. From Catholic priests in Rwanda to Orthodox priests in Serbia, there were pitifully few religious leaders putting their lives on the line to stop the murder. Several religious officials were actually involved in the persecution.
⁶

6
BBC News,
Rwanda priest tried for genocide
[article on-line] (20 September 2004, accessed 23 November 2008); available from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3671464.stm
; Internet. For an unblinking account see Carol Rittner, John K. Roth and Wendy Whitworth,
Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches?
(Paragon House Publishers, 2004).

Where is the religious moral leadership? Our viral metaphor explains the lack of powerful and effective moral leadership, the god virus is most concerned with survival, not with leadership. Leadership requires risk and creates opposition; neither is good for propagation. One does not need a god to oppose such atrocities. Those who have a god all too often are a part of the problem. Jim Crow was supported and preached from thousands of pulpits in the South as recently as the 1970s. Where was the religious opposition? Pointing to the few religious leaders who did oppose Jim Crow or genocide ignores the thousands who did not.

The ethics discussions in theology schools are designed to ensure the propagation of the virus, but add little or nothing to addressing poverty, racism, discrimination, militarism, etc. Those who claim that religion has brought about great change often point to people like Martin Luther King, Jr. I would suggest that Dr. King was a pragmatist who used religion as his method of communication. His ethics were more informed by Mohandas Gandhi (a Hindu in India) than by Jesus. His reading of the Bible was extremely selective and in strong opposition to many other Christian experts. White supremacists have many more scriptures to quote than Dr. King. His genius was his ability to play the virus against itself. Through speeches and actions, he illuminated how religion maintained oppression. His followers were from many different churches, and a surprising number were non-religious or Atheist.
⁷

The poor ethical and moral record of religion does not bode well for religious leadership in today’s world. Science is moving forward. Fundamentalist resistance in Missouri will not stop stem cell research in Korea, China or even California and Massachusetts. Nuclear proliferation will not be controlled by prayer in a church. The question is beyond religion’s ability to stop or even influence on a global scale. Religion provides little or no guidance that a rational person could not determine without religion. There is still a need for moral and ethical debate, and non-theists are in a position to influence that debate.

Religion had little or nothing to do with preventing nuclear war during the cold war. Cold, hard geopolitical analysis on both sides allowed the world
to prevent such a holocaust. Religion had nothing to do with the major discoveries in physics, medicine, biology, genetics and other fields, but it has tried to impede or prohibit their use at times. From early opposition to in-vitro fertilization to opposition to birth control, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to the Dover, Pennsylvania, intelligent design trial, religion has been an impediment to science, and it shows no signs of stopping. In almost every case, religion has lost, but as long as children are deeply exposed to the god virus and science education is curtailed, ignorance will continue.

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Atheist and white postal worker William L. Moore marched many times for civil rights in the south. On April 23, 1963, he was murdered on his last march. The murder weapon was identified and its owner, Floyd Simpson, was charged. Witnesses said he had argued earlier that day with Moore. See Mary Stanton,
Freedom Walk: Mississippi Or Bust
(University Press of Mississippi, 2003).