The primitive mind endows the world with agents, and makes a god or gods the cause of events which affect man. (Joan Symington)
God allowed Katrina to happen to bring attention to lack of preparation for terrorist attack. (Charles Colson)
The discussion down below regarding Huckabee’s sublime appeal to right wing Christian voters reminded me that religion is a powerful force in our lives, and that no amount of reasoning will overcome it. We nonbelievers will always be a minority. But as I implied down in the comments, the job of leadership requires a realistic sense of how the world really operates. For that reason, I suspect that most of our presidents have been either atheist or agnostic, or at least indifferent to Sunday preachers.
The question of evil underlies every debate on religion. The presumption on the believers’ side is that religion is a counterbalancing force to evil, that we are involved in a battle between light and dark. So sayeth the Bible, Pat Robertson, and Star Wars. But it doesn’t take much research to uncover how religion itself has been co-opted into doing evil.
It’s no surprise. Most people are good because good is its own reward. Most people are kind and generous. As individuals, humans have immense capacity for goodwill and benevolence. But as a group, humans can be truly ugly. I’ve often wondered about this – how our capacity for evil manifests in our group behavior. George W. Bush loves his family, will pray over a Christmas turkey, and unleash horrible violence on the Iraqi people. Hannah Arendt referred to it as the “banality of evil”, how kind and caring and generous people become cogs in larger machines that do evil.
I suspect it has to do with a couple of things – one, that human leaders are not chosen, but choose themselves. A person has to want power to achieve power. The very fact that a person wants to be president ought to disqualify him from that office. But that’s now how it works. In the end, we are led by people who are hungry for power. The trilogy of the ring was an illustration of the lure of power, and how power corrupts us. Perhaps our greatest president, George Washington, didn’t want the job. That’s what made him great. He chose not to be king. That quality is extremely rare.
Our inhumanity percolates up into our group behavior. Suppose I have within me a small lust – a dislike of Muslims or blacks – alone I won’t express my inner feelings. But if there are many like me, our groups will give voice to those impulses. The Ku Klux Klan is a perfect example – men hiding under hoods, their anonymity allowing them to express ugly sentiments toward their black brothers and sisters.
So it follows that our leaders can lock into our individual prejudices, and use them to foster our anger and enlist our support in attacking other countries. They create archetypes for us, objects of hatred like Saddam Hussein or Osama. With that object in place, our national hatred is set free, and insanity and violence ensue.
But there’s a counterbalance to this – there are organizations through which our good impulses are expressed. The United Nations is one, as is just about every charity I have ever encountered. The UN operates on a large scale, and though it lacks the power of the United States, it has on occasion counterbalanced the evil that comes from our leadership. It tried to do so before we invaded Iraq, but just didn’t have enough.
Most religious organizations embody individual charitable impulses. Most churches do good work. But this animal called the “Christian Right” is not such a body. Like fundamentalist Muslim extremists, the Christian Right calls upon us to hate other people and invade other countries. Clever leaders have seen their numbers, and have enlisted them in their power quests. The Christian Right gives expression of the evil that lurks in our hearts. As such, we need to call upon the good within us to expel them from our leadership. They are truly dangerous.
Piece of Mindful 