The Arc of History

We live, undoubtedly, in an age of religious and cultural strife that in terms of sheer numbers of victims has never been equaled. Hundreds of thousands of lives are destroyed every year as a result of religious disagreements, whether in Iraq, The Netherlands, Somalia, Afghanistan, or the United States of America. Even as progress is made in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or the American heartland for progressive and secular causes, seemingly endless tales of misery and pain waft from the vast regions of darkness and intolerance that seem to spread like spilled ink on a map. It would be easy, even understandable, to lose hope; to claim that hatred and dogma are a fundamental characteristic of mankind. However, I think this is a mistake. History shows us a picture of a humanity struggling relentlessly toward understanding, universalism, and respect for human rights. By respecting civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights, the modern liberal democracy provides the groundwork for a free a prosperous society with a profound capacity for self-correction and advancement. However, there is perhaps no more integral and important ideal than that of secular governance. To borrow from Martin Luther King, Jr.: The arc of history is long, but it bends toward reason.

Truly, the freedom to worship and the prohibition of government endorsement of religion provide a bulwark of protection for individual belief and free expression. The pluralistic society demands the constant search for truth as society and individuals constantly challenge the received wisdom of prevailing views. Free speech in a society dominated by one faith cannot truly be free. This truth, of the necessity of secular governance for the development of a truly free society, only serves to make the current religious struggles even more sorrowful. Nevertheless, the future favors liberalism and humanism.

The earliest belief systems were largely similar to modern shamanism or animism. People, unable to understand the great cosmic and geological forces shaping the universe, were forced to explain reality with what limited means they could. This lead to myriad variations of ancestor worship and spirits inhabiting every physical process imaginable. Wind moved, so something must be blowing it. Fire burned, so something must make it hot. The sun rose, so something must hold it up. The simplest explanation was often to ascribe souls to the processes. Just as humans have a mind and desires, so too must everything in the universe. How else to explain the fickle and capricious nature of reality?

We see among the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Sumerians, and other ancient civilizations a similar attribution of divine or supernatural causes for natural occurrences. Fully fleshed into Gods and given more abstract and cultivated powers, these ancient deities were both similar to shamanistic spirits while far more distant. The Gods general resided in a temporal location, Mt. Olympus for the Greeks, and were imagined in a form almost identical to humanity. Nonetheless, when compared to spiritualistic religions that came before, the role of the Gods in the lives of average Greeks or Romans was a far less active affair.

Still, to imagine the ancients as secular humanists with a large backlog of quaint myths to entertain themselves with is highly misleading. Certainly, the Romans were famously pious, with extremely precise rituals for nearly every occasion. The Athenians, those forebears of modern democracy and science, planned to execute the philosopher Socrates for defaming the Gods, forestalled only by his suicide. More accurately, the ancient conception of divinity added a layer of abstraction to the shamanism of the past. Rather than the wind being a conscious being, the wind was controlled by one. They added a curtain in between the process and the controller.

Nonetheless, the Greeks and Romans, by discovering certain natural causes and ever so slightly taming the natural world, rationalized religion. They'd created a conception of reality in which the supernatural was less important. While hardly a secular society, reasonable discourse could and did occur as to the nature of the universe, within rigid limits. The transition from a shamanistic to a polytheistic conception coincided with a further understanding of the WHY and HOW of existence. Only with the rise of Christianity, and later of Islam, would this conception of the supernatural fall the wayside.

Of course, many would say the Medieval Period was on of dramatic reversals in reason and science. Rather than a movement toward secularism, there seemed to be a reversal toward dogma and intolerance. The rise of Christianity and Islam, it is true, led to a dramatic culling of other religions. Great violence and suffering resulted from the fierce loyalty demanded by the monotheistic religions. However, though the transition from the ancient religions to the Abrahamic religions often lead to the collapse of entire systems of thought, for the most part Christianity and Islam provided far more room for rational and empirical thought than prior religious ideas.

Rather than being historically notable for his obsessive interference and interest in his subjects' lives, the God of Christianity and Islam is remarkable for the extent to which it's understood he remains aloof from the world. Rather then leaving offerings at altars to receive a good harvest, Christians and Muslims could not expect their God to interfere on their behalf. Though disasters and triumphs were often attributed to God's Will, it is generally understood within those traditions that judgment occurs in the afterlife, and that one's conduct and success on Earth is largely of one's own making.

Even more striking, proof of God's existence is largely accepted in the form of miracles. Rather than every event being a product of supernatural providence, only those events so dramatic and unusual as to defy explanation were deemed divine. Instead, Creation was Designed, and a single God was the steward, rather than the operator or machinery itself. The God of Islam and Christ acted indirectly through his Vicar in Judea or his Prophet in Arabia, rather than responding to burnt incense or sacrificed chickens.

Fundamental to these monotheistic faiths, then, was the concept of personal responsibility. Obviously such a concept existed before. Nevertheless, in the Abrahamic faiths, God's judgement came after death. Success or Failure in this world was a result of personal failure, or circumstance.

In this climate, secularism began to flourish, albeit slowly. In the Islamic civilization of the early Middle Ages, roughly 900-1300 CE, philosophers discovered Algebra, refined understanding of anatomy, blazed new paths in Astronomy and chemistry. Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic theologian, argued for a God who watched rather than prodded. The lack of needing God to explain natural processes eventually led to the Enlightenment, where theistic scientists such as Galileo argued for naturalistic and material explanations of the universe not in refutation of God's existence, but in celebration of it.

In both Islam and Christianity, this flowering of secular explanations for reality eventually led to backlashes by political and religious elites. We live with these backlashes even today. Certainly, the culture wars in America and the ongoing brutality throughout the Muslim world are evidence of this. However, this violence and struggle is not evidence of the power of dogmatic belief. No, the struggles of the intolerant against reason and science and liberalism is instead the futile flailing of those who are unwilling or unable to accept the modern role of God and gods in society.

The existence of explanations for oceans, and stars, and evolution, and myriad other natural phenomenon forced the hand of theism. God could not exist as understood by prehistoric shamans. Wind does not decide to blow, fire does not decide to burn. Lightening is neither the vengeful blows of a capricious god on Mount Olympus, nor the spitefully miraculous punishment of a Creator God. The power of science comes with its remarkable ability to predict and explain ideas, and its incredible usefulness in the creation of technologies.

This is not to say that God is Dead. Personal beliefs aside, though the role of God and gods in modern society is not that which Islamists and Dominionists perceive it to be, the truth is that in our secular society the role of the supernatural for many has become an intensely personal and profound one. God no longer exists to protect us as a nation or to make our crops grow, this is true. However, though divinity has evolved in parallel with our growing understanding of the natural world, we are now able to define for ourselves the meaning of existence, and God/s place within it.

This great existential truth, that in the face of science, existence becomes a personal rather than public question, is why Freedom of Religion remains the most vital freedom we have. Since our understanding of the world has reached a point in which faith in God truly is Faith, all religion must be understood at a personal level. Those of us who are atheists or agnostics cannot be made to reject the evidence we see no more than those Christians or Muslims who have had personal revelatory experiences can be made to reject their own. Likewise, a society that does not publicly function based on objective, rational standards is doomed to fail in a world where our knowledge undermines certain assumptions.

This, I suppose, is my point; without the implicit understanding that one's personally held beliefs shall never be persecuted, a modern and diverse nation cannot survive. Likewise, without a common understanding of reality, interactions between individuals becomes increasingly difficult and more probably violent. Thus, the modern progressive ideal of the Secular government and religious pluralism is the only logical and humane system. History itself lays out this path, from ancient shamans to animal sacrifice to salvation and finally to personal conviction.

So when faced with the terrors and brutality of modern religious conflict, I've chosen to retain my optimism for the future. Rather than succumb to pessimism and refuse to engage the world, I choose engagement and dialogue, promoting firmer scientific standards, resisting attempts to impose religious dogma at schools or withing government, and to respect all those who respect me. Though I do not believe in a god, I do have faith that the arc of history bends toward justice.