roachboy

since there is a history debate that runs alongside the question of wy conversations about religion can become socially toxic, i figure it's other than a threadjack to run with it a little.

a sociology of religion would start from the assumption that a religion is basically a displacement of the social order onto that of the cosmos, onto history, etc. so understanding something of collective history as it is routed through patterns of spirituality can be a fascinating entrance point into the complexity of social practices, the types of conflict that arise within these patterns of social practice and the attempts at resolving these conflicts.
similarly, the history written into these practices is usually taken as the backwriting of the particular social logics that obtained at the point of the origin of the texts into the distant past. of course, seeing religion in this way relativizes it, and so causes trouble for believers, who prefer to relativize all traditions except their own. call it a byproduct of belief.

if you play this game, you quickly find yourself more or less forced to go further and wonder about the notion of religion itself, whether it is entirely a western construct that reconfigures a huge range of modes of thinking and interacting with dimensions that exceed the physical in the image of christianity, with its particular modes of separating types of activity, etc.--and with particular assumptions concerning belief, what it means, what is entailed by it. you could also say that this category "religion" is a particularly protestant construction in its assumptions concerning the priority of individual belief over collective practices---this shift does not really describe modes of interaction with "god" in catholicism even (in which individual belief and collective pratice are more symmterical--it matters almost as much what you do as it does what you believe---going further with this would require thinking about the implications of the reformation--we could go there, but it wold be long)--it creates trouble for thinking about judiasm, trouble for thinking about islam--and constitutes the basis for a wholesale distortion of other types of spirituality (false separation betwen spheres of activity in the case of "primitive" societies, for example, evidence of which you can find in any african art museum of an appropriate age) and the posing of false problems historical (have a look a paul veyne's book "did the greeks believe their myths" for a great dismantling of these problems)

behind this is the assumption that all spiritual traditions amount to variations on christianity--which is a legacy of 19th century colonialism.

it is a simple fact that christianity and imperialism are closely intertwined: christianity assumes that other types of spiritual practice are inferior to itself, repetitions of its own (largely mythological) history that need to be "updated" by conversion, preferably voluntary, but violent if need be (unbelievers are evil after all)---the ideology of euro-colonialism is difficult to even imagine without its christian assumptions. it is typical within the marxist tradition of historiography to see the late 19th century colonial takeover of subsaharan africa (for example) as a response to monopoly capitalism--the centralization and rationalization of industrial production and the pressures for new an cheaper soures of raw materials that came along with it--but the ideology of colonialism was the "white man's burden" or "the civilizing mission"---which amounted to conversion to christianity, which was taken as identical with "civilization". seen from the outside, that equivalence is insane--but from within, apparently it made sense...in a sense, the history of european colonialism is the history of the implications of this kind of belief, and much of the violence of colonialism can be laid at its feet.

but i dont think you could say that christianity *caused* colonialism---i am not sure that you could point to a single cause--but you can't get around its centrality as an ideology of colonialism, a rationalization/justification of it on the one hand, and an ideological grid that extended its reach and violence on the other.

so you have all kinds of problems with simplistic narratives about the role of "religion" in history--and much of the above that speaks to history and religion above is just that--simplistic---so much so that the statements are more about the strange way in which history is recieved as a body of infotainment today than they are about the past.

sometimes i wonder if the line that "religion" is at the source of all or most human conflict is anything other than an attempt to spread out the problems created by the white man's burden ideology across the 19th and 20th centuries by making all of it into a particular manifestation of a universal problem. if all "religions" generate violence, then colonialism is just a particular instance of that and there are no particular problems to be associated with that particular instance that do not obtain for all other instances.

and with that this rant reaches its end.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite