Shap Journal 20022003

							Shap Journal 2002/2003

World Religions in Education

Religion: the problem or the answer?

Is Religion a problem or part
of the answer to a problem?

Clive A Lawton

There's an interesting story in the Torah
(Numbers Chap 25). It refers to the time when
the Israelites were wandering in the
wilderness. As they approached the promised
land, they encountered the Moabites whose young
women started to seduce the young men of Israel, invite
them to their rituals and in general lead them to take
their eye off the ball.

Their policy was successful. Soon Israelite young men
were cavorting around with the lusty wenches of Moab/
Midian and had no thought for the future mission of the
Jewish people. And a plague ensued. Israelites were dying
right and left and something had to be done. But what?

One day an Israelite prince and a Midianite woman were
canoodling in a particularly brazen fashion right in the
heart of the Israelite camp. Pinchas (Phineas), grandson
of High Priest Aaron, was so incensed that he seized a
spear, followed them into the chamber they had just
entered in the full sight of Moses and the rest, and ran
them both through with it. (The fact that he appears to
have been able to run them both through with one
thrust gives us some idea as to exactly how brazenly
they were cavorting!) Later rabbis were concerned about
such 'taking the Law into your own hands' and could
only relieve their anxieties because, according to the
text, God approved Pinchas's action and stopped the
plague, the people were shocked into remembrance of
their purpose and God sought to reward Pinchas.

His reward? He was made High Priest, successor to Aaron.
On the face of it, this is pretty shocking stuff. Do we really
want vigilante assassins being promoted for their rash
behaviour? (A question made more forceful and poignant

when you discover that the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin
took Pinchas as his role model.) On the other hand, would
we have condemned or feted the successful assassin of
Hitler? Perhaps it is, as most good moral dilemmas are,
hard to judge until you have all the facts. Due process of
law is an important principle, but not when law has
broken down or is in itself being undermined.

But what of the nature of the reward Pinchas gets? This
passionate activist, this man of action gets rapidly
promoted to High Priest. Indeed, the next time we meet
him in the narrative, he is accompanying the Israelites
into battle as... Army Chaplain! What a double edged
reward! For ever after, this impetuous man of action will
be trammelled by the most ritualistic and uninstinctive
role in the entire Israelite community. Never again will he
be able to just do as he feels. Never again will his own
personality matter as much as the demands of his job.
Religion, in the guise of a very hefty job description, stops
him from his tendency to take the law into his own hands.

I must stress this is not the conventional way to
understand Pinchas's story, but I don't mind. It brings me
to my point. We often think of religion as a field for either
fanatics or liberals. Fanatics are scary-eyed loonies who
have no sense of moderation or limit and bring disaster to
others who don't agree with them. Liberals on the other
hand are reasonable people who realise that nothing
much is absolute, things are often somewhat relative and
we must all rub along together somehow.

But those who are deep adherents to a tradition might
also be operating within a system that demands of them
levels of selflessness, self-discipline and allegiance to
higher principles that are unimaginable in a more
'liberal' lifestyle. Liberals are often deeply intolerant of
the specificities of others.

Commitment and conviction are not necessarily dirty
words and a religious commitment can teach young
people a kind of sense of themselves in the wider context
that modern materialism has difficulty doing. (This is of
course not to say that only religious people are moral
people. That is self-evidently not the case.)

But I am still puzzled by how anyone can really argue
for Universal Human Rights without the doctrine of
universal brotherhood - requiring, if not often
mentioning, universal Fatherhood to make it valid -
otherwise it's just whistling in the dark. Nothing has yet
improved on the sublime teaching that humanity was
created 'betzelem elokim' in the image of God, thereby
requiring a level of equal respect for all human beings
regardless of their nominal differences.

If, however, you want to move Eastwards, from my own
tradition into those underpinned by Hindu origins, you
can find an even broader embracement of living
creatures under a single title. But either way, religions
and their doctrines pose monumental challenges to the
otherwise tendency of humanity to act selfishly and
detect in people their differences rather than their
common humanity.

This is not to say - it would be foolish to try and deny it -
that religion has not been used by many villains in the
past to justify their wickedness at least, and worse still,
actually been the cause of much wickedness too. Indeed,
it is incumbent upon religious communities not just to
disown those who have done so. 'Suicide bombers are not
real Muslims', or 'Northern Irish Protestants are not real
Christians' avoids responsibility for accepting the danger of
our own religious fanaticisms and the manner in which
all great things can be perverted. After all, it was Darwin's
excellent and enlightening theory of evolution which gave
rise to Hitler's screwy racial theories.

But recognising the dangers allows us to address them,
not deny them.

When we teach about religion in school we need to
make sure that we address the dangers of too much
certainty as well as the danger of too little. The 'it all
depends' school of morality which is widely prevalent
nowadays is as dangerous, but no more dangerous, than
the 'I know I'm right' school.

As a Jew, of course, I'm less tuned in to this tendency to
think that my solutions should be everybody's solutions.
While I think I have insights which might be rich for
others, I don't think all my prescriptions for life apply to
everyone. Most of the Jewish things I do and consider
binding on me are for Jews only. But watching little
children grow up in a Jewish community, I notice their
many advantages over their peers outside religious
communities. Firstly, of course, just community. They
learn to interact with adults not in their own family.
They have markers along the way of their growing up,
celebrated and noted by the community.

They are repeatedly called upon to consider - through
the festivals, the rituals, the mitzvot - their
responsibilities and place in the world at large. At its
best, the community serves as a training ground,

bridging the huge gap between relating to one's family
and relating to the world. These young people find
themselves talking the language of moral issues and
dilemmas on a regular basis. They know they are not
the definition of what matters but that there is a God
who thinks they matter very much, enough to take time
out from running the universe to show interest in them.

They learn to read - and value - complicated text. In
Judaism, as in Islam and Sikhism, they learn to read
another language. They learn to appreciate other
people's words. They learn a historical perspective and a
relationship with the past - that is, time - and with the
world - that is, space. We call this 'perspective'. They
learn to appreciate the natural world and its rhythms
even if they live in the heart of a town.

Again, let me reiterate that I am not saying that a religious
community is the only way they can do these things - but
there are not many other systems that do it better.

But for the sake of completeness, I'll mention some of the
down sides. They can become isolated from others,
dividing the world into 'us' and 'them'. They can grow up
thinking that others are 'wrong' and they are 'right'. They
can fall prey to fanatics who promise them 'salvation'
beyond this world so that this world doesn't matter to
them any more, nor do the fortunes and futures of those
with whom they share it. They can become slaves to those
who claim to have God on their side.
But overall, young people with a religion tend to be
more law abiding, less likely to get blind drunk, less
likely to get into drugs, more likely to live in caring
families, work harder at school than their secular
counterparts. In particular, the experience of the Black
Caribbean communities of Britain have demonstrated
that religious commitment often offers them the only
way out of the cycle of deprivation and low achieving
that they seem to be condemned to in the UK for no
apparently decent reason.

Without doubt, sadly misled suicide bombers,
manipulated to their own destruction, poor Southern
Whites done out of their savings by a TV evangelist, or
Yigal Amir who thought he was doing God's work by
killing Yitzchak Rabin, are proof of the terrible damage
that can be done by the passions that religion arouses.

But the world over, there are millions more decent
caring folk doing good, and each of them bears witness
to the value of religion in the world.