The Gandhi-and-Hitler Problem (EOF2)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

Sam Harris' recent screed The End of Faith has as its premise that the world can no longer afford religion — any religion.

As I said in The End of Faith?, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deuteronomy 13:10, in the Judeo-Christian Bible) stands for Harris as a sort of précis of what religion, at its very core, is. It is, to Harris, an irrational faith in words supposedly written by the Creator of the universe, and these words unfailingly exhort us to kill those who don't believe them.

There are a seemingly infinite number of possible rejoinders to such a gruesome caricature of religious faith. The one that impresses me as most apt is that which carefully distinguishes between true religion and its demonic parody.


Since I am a Christian, let me adopt a modicum of objectivity by claiming, as a paragon of true religion, someone from a different religious tradition entirely: Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was a Hindu. His Hindu title, Mahatma, means "great soul."

The life of this spiritual leader of India's independence movement from British rule in the late 1940s is portrayed in Richard Attenborough's marvelous 1982 biopic, Gandhi. The film shows Gandhi as insistent on Hinduism's philosophy, religious customs, and precepts ... including that of ahimsa, nonviolence.

Though a committed Hindu, Gandhi repeatedly and consistently attempted to bridge the differences between Hindus and India's many Muslims. Gandhi was vehemently opposed to any independence plan that partitioned India into two separate countries. After independence was gained, India and Muslim Pakistan underwent a bloody partition nonetheless, and Gandhi was assassinated by a radical Hindu who objected to Gandhi's ultimate acquiescence in the partition.

Those Hindus and Muslims who killed one another out of opposing religious convictions were of a mindset diametrically opposed to that of Gandhi. Where Gandhi's mindset was what I would choose to call "true religion," that of the sectarian killers in the former "Raj" of India was its "demonic parody."


Another example of demonic parody, from the recent history of religion, is that of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Nazism in the Third Reich was fed by a selective mixture of faux-Christian theology along with the iconography of ancient Germanic and Roman paganism — see Wikipedia articles Nazism and Religion and Positive Christianity. Into the mix went also a widespread belief in mysticism and occultism, along with a perverted scientific viewpoint which claimed Germans were demonstrably the "master race." Taken together, these beliefs underwrote the Nazis' persecution of Jews and their attempt to conquer all of Europe.

True Christianity, in view of Jesus' admonition to "turn the other cheek" (see Matthew 5:38), has developed a rational doctrine of "just war" which sets out the necessary exceptions to a general rule of Christian pacifism. Among the constraints: "Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations," according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1993.

Accordingly, to the extent the Nazis' hodgepodge of Christianity alloyed with other influences is a religion at all, it is a demonic parody of true religion.

Northrop Frye's Words with Power

By "demonic parody" I mean any perversion of religion to glorify not life but death. I take the term from Northrop Frye's Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature, the late literary critic's second book on how the Christian Bible informs all of Western literature and culture. Frye associates demonic parodies, biblical or otherwise, with such things as the casting of God's creation into the category of an inert, manipulable "object," and also with themes of tyranny and sadomasochistic domination. But the main thrust of demonic parody of religion is to urge us toward what Sigmund Freud called thanatos: the death instinct or death drive.

I hasten to add that, as I admit ought to be quite apparent to all of us who believe in God, Western Judeo-Christian religion has historically come under the spell of thanatos from time to time. Like everything nasty that exists in the unconscious mind, the renunciation of the will to live — another way of referring to the death instinct — can all too easily be psychologically displaced outward onto other human beings, Freud showed. Thus, the burnings at the stake done by the Inquisition to "save the souls" of witches, heretics, and other unbelievers.

Of course, thanatos does not always get fully displaced onto others — thus, today's radical Islamist suicide bombings that claim the lives of countless innocents and make supposedly Paradise-bound martyrs of their perpetrators.


Harris wants to abolish religion because he himself seemingly cannot disentangle it from thanatos. He cannot distinguish what I am calling the demonic parody of religion from the real thing.

Historically, I admit, Harris is quite right to accuse numberless religionists of falling prey to the death instinct, whether displaced outward or not. When they have done so, they have turned God into a killer-by-proxy, and sometimes even a suicide-by-proxy.

I can offer two main reasons why Harris' solution to this historical reality — his prescription of religion-no-more — is a bad idea.

First, thanatos is a powerful instinct. It will never be abolished. It must be fought head on.

Second, fighting it head on requires true religion: religion which gives us a rational basis for rejecting the death drive in all its manifestations.

Yes, I said a "rational" basis. Harris gets religion quite wrong when he calls it fundamentally irrational. It is not fundamentally irrational to take certain things on faith and then use them to extend our understanding of the world. When we do arithmetic to compute a trajectory to the moon, for example, we place our faith in the unprovable axioms of number theory. That's not irrational. No more is it fundamentally irrational to adopt as an axiom that a God who truly exists and is himself rational made the world.

Faith only turns irrational when it glorifies thanatos. Extolling death is wholly incoherent for the living. Thanatos is crazy.

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

As I discussed in several earlier posts on Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, including among others The Self-Contradictions of Liberty, and in posts I made about the Pope's much-maligned Regensburg Lecture (see The Pope of Reason and The Pope and Islam), Christianity is first and foremost a reasonable religion.

By that I mean that it finds the coherence and reasonability of God's created world to be grounded in the fact that reason and logical coherence are core attributes of the divine nature. In his lecture, Benedict took Islam to task for (sometimes) thinking of God as capable of putting on and taking off reason like a mask. Translation: if God tells you to do the irrational, you do it willingly, for the orders come straight from the deity behind the mask.

Christianity says no to that. Christianity has (hopefully) purified itself of any tendency it has had in the past to do the irrational and logically incoherent: kill (or die) in the name of God.


Furthermore, I believe that all true religions are just like Christianity in this regard. They house foreign, impure elements of demonic parody that glorify not life but death. Islam is no exception. Neither is Hinduism.

As for the Nazis' amalgam of religion and racism, it was never a true religion at all. It was a demonic parody from day one.

The antidote to demonic parody is not to jettison religion entirely, as Harris wants. It is rather to use our God-given reason to purify the religions we have.