Evil and Religion

My inclination is to say we perceive something is intrinsically wrong or evil because we believe it’s unequivocally known to be harmful or wrong. But the question of what role religion plays is a worthy discussion point because it raises the question of evil and how it arises. The biblical texts give us rich history over thousands of years of good and evil, from which we can understand our roots. What is evident is the changing circumstances and how the expanded ideas on morality developed over time. In the Judeo/Christian tradition is has certainly shaped our democracies far more than is oft realised.  

Of course at various times in history and in our lives certain things were not known that were clearly wrong. That is inevitable, but turning a blind eye subsequently because there are practical difficulties or saying it was accidental, doesn’t excuse us taking any remedial action.   

Professor Raymond Tallis (‘Philosophy Now’) has a mixture of interesting thoughts.    

This is his summary.  

We need to preserve the vast, rich cultural legacy owing to, or inspired by, religious belief. We cannot forget or actively reject this without losing something irreplaceably precious in ourselves. The legacy is not simply out there in the public realm as a collective heritage of art, literature, architecture, and music. It is in the very fibre of our individual and social being. The atheist, existentialist, Marxist, Maoist, Jean-Paul Sartre highlighted this in L’Idiot de la Famille, cited and translated by Robert Cumming in Starting Point (1979, p.225):

“We are all Christians, even today; the most radical disbelief is still Christian atheism. In other words, it retains, in spite of its destructive power, schemata which are controlling – very slightly for our thinking, more for our imagination, above all for our sensibility. And the origins of these schemata are to be sought in centuries of Christianity of which we are the heirs whether we like it or not.”

At the very least, humanist philosophers should spend less time brooding on the wickedness seemingly inspired by religious belief, and more on what religion tells us about our nature. Most importantly, we should consider what we can learn from the history of religions, how a sense of the transcendent – what theologian Hans Kung characterised as “a particular social realisation of a relationship to an absolute ground of meaning”, answering an existential hunger experienced by all humans – can play into our lives for good or ill. In particular, how we can avoid the path that leads from beatific visions to thuggery – a question that is as much a challenge for secular humanism as it is for religious believers.