Possibly the Most Dangerous Religious Idea

Image credit: apartheidmuseum.org
Religion really should come with a health warning attached to it - even when used in its more mainstream forms it can still be intensely dangerous to you & those around you. It can severely affect you self-esteem, cause you to lose all sense of responsibility, & that's even if you avoid the beatings & abuse. In fact, I'm not sure it shouldn't (considered an addiction - just as there is a difference between one little drink in the evening & waking up paralytic in Broad Street on a Saturday morning, so religion takes you over & causes you to do strange things, if you don't keep that addictive relationship in hand. In fact it's almost exactly like an addiction in all sorts of ways.
Amongst the more dangerous ideas found in religions is definitely the primacy of obedience - it's the Nuremberg defence, 'I was only doing what I was told' - which makes people do all sorts of things. Burying the evidence of child abuse to prevent 'scandal', for example. Sounds bizarre put like that but the sheer level of denial this obedience engenders has actually made religious people have whip-rounds for their clergy after the said clergy have been convicted of child abuse. The insidious effect of obedience makes people only see the priest who was wonderful at Granny's funeral, rather than the monster who spent years strategically grooming & abusing children. The levels of denial & absence of control are genuinely comparable with those found in addiction.
However I think possibly the *most* dangerous religious idea is the one that something is what the deity wants. This works in all sorts of ways. God doesn't do divorce so you have to stay with your abusive spouse. God doesn't do homosexuality, you evil people. As an external bogeyman God is actually extremely effective because he has the power to condemn you to hell for eternity. Used as an external bogeyman this is a 'spirituality' with the maturity level of telling a child the Scissorman will cut off his fingers if he bites his nails.
Internally this can be even more dangerous. Last Friday marked twenty years since I entered a religious community. At the time I thought I had a 'vocation' - that God was 'calling' me to it - I now believe that I had been manipulated into this: the Catholic church's masterstroke of making you think something is God's will then making you have all sorts of shit in the meantime. The novice master was particularly a c*nt about this when I left - imagine my satisfaction years later when, after a simple google search, I was able to give information about his present whereabouts to a website about clergy abuse!
But the reason I think this religious idea trumps all others in dangerousness is that, carried to its extreme, it leads to the idea that God has 'predestined' things to be a certain way. This is the way things have to work out & anything else is against God. In Christian terms this idea takes the form of a theology called Calvinism (in which there are actually multiple different understandings of predestination, which I'm over-simplifying to make a point & this isn't really a blog about Calvinism, but if you want to read Calvin, see http://www.fordham.edu/HALSAll/MOD/calvin-predest.asp) if you're Protestant, & Jansenism if you're Catholic. My opinion is that probably Jansenism (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08285a.htm) is the more insidious & widely-seen of the two, even though its overt expression is condemned as a heresy. However, Jansenism was a very popular notion in the Irish church, & so has tended to have some echoes wherever the Irish have gone.
In Britain there remain expressions of Calvinism - the Church of Scotland is perhaps the obvious example, & also some of the churches that broke off from the Church of England. In fact what got me to thinking about this was a friend's recent visit to Edinburgh. I could almost smell the dour Scottish Calvinism on her - a phenomenon made all the more strange by the fact that she is from South Africa, & I don't normally smell Dutch Reformed Calvinism on her. In fact that is one of the most freaky & scary examples of where a belief in predestination can get you: it's an extreme example of the danger presented by this idea, but perhaps the extremity of it best illustrates the sheer dangerous of saying something is what God wants. An able exposition of the Afrikaners' experience of the trek & sense of being chosen, in addition to some of the complexities of the situation & their excommunication by their mother church can be found at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Calvinism.
As a young theology student, in the absolute dying days of apartheid (see apartheidmuseum.org for some comprehensive downloads on what it was) I wrote an essay on the theology of apartheid. That essay would have to look radically different nowadays, since at the time South Africa claimed to be the only Christian theocracy in the world. No seriously, stop to think about this. Democracy means ruled by the demos, that is the people. Theocracy means ruled by theos, that is God. There was a belief seriously held by some of the population that the apartheid system was ordained by God, that that was how God wanted it to be. 'But that's all over now,' I hear you say. No it isn't. Just google words to the effect of 'better under apartheid'. Hopefully anyone trying to persuade themselves that that isn't so will experience this as a bucket of cold water. In fact there are nuances of this found in any conceptualisation of races as destined to be separate.
There are warning signs here that I think can be used to recognise this view in all sorts of situations. I have been reading about South Africa for some time now. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the history & present situation is incredibly complicated. Actually the historical picture is perhaps slightly easier: the apartheid system was plainly wrong from beginning to end. The present situation appears to me a heavily nuanced set of complicated circumstances, including all of those faced by any post-colonial African country, with a particularly heavy burden because of a history which has been traumatic in a particular way. Along with that goes all the usual opinions, jostling, hero-making, denial, hope, despair, mis- & disinformation, rewriting history, demonisation, ...the list could go on for ever. And here's the warning sign: saying 'God wants X' is to avoid this complex set of events. It's to avoid the heavily-nuanced understanding that has to take in too much information. It is to decide the conclusion before looking at the evidence. It is a larger version of the trap so many journalists & bloggers writing about South Africa fall into: that of only seeing one part of the complex picture.
And that is another warning sign: I have read people saying quite seriously that a complete collapse & descent into chaos is inevitable in South Africa (I quote, but don't have the reference to hand) 'because of black people's mentality'.
The irony is that God isn't really a party to this discussion any more (at least apparently), but I have a funny feeling about this. It's only exactly like any other complicated situation where someone wants to avoid dealing with the issues & so trots out God as an excuse. That's the danger: he can be seen as lending his support to any screwy idea going.
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