I have been thinking about religion and pain. There was an article in the New York Times magazine recently about a woman who had a problem with chronic pain. She was part of a pain management study, where the therapists sought to teach people how to decrease their pain sensations. For the woman who wrote the article, she could alter how much pain she felt by imagining herself as a religious martyr, a victim of the Inquisition. This image helped her to activate her brain’s natural pain-blocking ability.
So strong religious conviction, or even the imagination of it, has the ability to stop suffering. You know Karl Marx’s famous comment, that “religion is the opiate of the masses”? He meant that religion is the thing that takes them away from reality and sets them dreaming. In his mind, it was not a good thing. But the opium poppy has two uses. Heroin destroys the minds and bodies of its users, drives them to commit crimes, ruins their families. But morphine has the miraculous ability to take away unbearable pain. It’s impossible to say whether the opium poppy is good or evil, it simply is. How you use it determines which face it will show to you.
I think that religion is exactly the same way. I think that religion is often used as a palliative, to ameliorate pain. A few weeks ago, I was walking in the subway and I came across a group of young black men, dressed in robes with the Star of David on them. One was speaking, and calling out Bible verse numbers, and another would read the named verse in a loud voice. I have heard about these groups, who believe that blacks, and not Jews, are the “Chosen People” mentioned in the Christian Bible. They are sometimes on TV but I have never seen them in the flesh, so I stopped to listen.
Mostly when religious people are yelling in a public place, New Yorkers ignore them. So naturally, the one who was speaking and calling verses began addressing his speech to me. Mostly he seemed focused on proving that the “Israelites” in the Bible are black. He would ask for a verse, and when it was read, explain how to interpret it, or simply emphasize something in the text.
Religion in all its forms interests me, but when one claims to apply exclusively to one racial group, of course I smell a rat. I began asking questions. I didn’t want to fight with the speaker, but I wanted to clarify what he was saying. So I asked whether the Bible, in his opinion, had anything to say to white people. He answered me that according to the Book whites would be made to pay for the sins of our ancestors, who enslaved the “black Israelites,” by being enslaved and killed ourselves. This, to him, was the justice of God.
He was careful to point out that merely being born after the crimes were committed against the Africans who were brought here in slavery was not enough to excuse me, and that the sins of my fathers were passed to me in the blood. I asked him if there was nothing whites could do to expunge their guilt, and he was triumphant when he told me “nothing.”
I told him that he seemed very pleased, for someone who was delivering a death sentence to someone who had not harmed him personally. And he just smiled and answered that yes, he was pleased, because he was one of the “Chosen.”
I found this encounter highly disturbing, because it was my first personal taste of how my Book can be twisted. Of course I knew that the Bible has “justified” all sorts of prejudice and horror, but it’s different to have that prejudice look at you in the face. It’s the first time I had a visceral understanding of how a Muslim might see the beheading videos from Iraq, people reading from the Qur’an and then pulling out their knives. What makes it so horrifying is not just that their acts are evil, but that they use something precious to justify them.
Suicide bombing is a less obvious case, because the bomber is so deluded as to be willing to die in commission of his crime. The poor fools who use their bodies as weapons are like heroin addicts, drunk on beautiful visions, running from suffering to the only thing that they think will make it go away. They are not blameless, and what they do is evil, but it is most important to find out what causes their suffering, and repair the problem at its source.
Real life is more than beautiful enough to compete with an opium dream, if you can pay true attention to it, if outside pressure doesn’t make you bitter and filled with anger. And the peddlers of sick, hate-filled religion should be ashamed of themselves, just like any other drug pusher. They prey on the desperate and the weak-minded, and sell only illusions.
