Continuation of Why I do what I do

My friend Heather made some interesting comments in the combox of my past on "Why I do what I do." They were so thought provoking I decided to make them into a post.

Heather said:
I agree with much of what you've said here: It's very important to understand other cultures (other people, really. This also touches on your point about religious people being dehumanized. Nonreligious people also are dehumanized. Human beings are really freaken good at dehumanizing the "other."), in a real way, not some superficial way.

I agree here with you and I think I need to state things more clearly in this regard. I specifically focused on religious people for several reasons. Most of the subjects of my study are religious people who lived at a time when that was the norm so my sources do not lend themselves to focusing on how non-religious people are dehumanized. A lot of my focus is on how one religious group (Confucians) persecuted another religious group (Catholics) so it’s hard to work in the issue of nonreligious people. I think a lot also has to do with audience and experience. Basically, nonreligious people (as nonreligious people) are more likely to be dehumanized in a religious environment but my research and teaching has taken place mostly in secular environments so I have not focused on that issue. I think that if those factors would have been different I might have focused on a different subject. I should have stressed though that I don’t want to only convince people they we should not dehumanize “religious people” but that we should not dehumanize anyone.

I wonder what you mean, though, about the intersection of religion and violence. Are you talking more of a situation where we're looking at people who justify violence with religion in a more rounded way, as opposed to resorting to easy caricature? Or are you saying that sometimes it's OK to use violence in the name of religion? Or are you saying both?

This is a good but difficult question. Basically, I’m a historian of religion, not a theologian or philosopher so I look at the issue a bit differently. I’m not so interested in saying what we should and should not do (though I do sometimes get into that) but in what people do and why. So my goal is to look closely at people who do justify violence with religion to see how they do it. I basically want to make two major points. The first is that we need to look in a more rounded way, not resorting to easy caricature (to use your words). The second is that we often think in terms of specific issues rather than general principles. I think your average American would say religion should not justify violence. However, if I give the American Civil War/Battle Hymn of the Republic example I think in the end most Americans would agree that it was perfectly acceptable for religion to justify violence for the purpose of emancipation. That’s in a large part because today we tend to see religion justifying violence in cases where we don’t think that violence is justified (religiously motivated terrorism for example). So I want us to think more deeply about this issue.

In regards to using violence in the name of religion, that’s a bit more difficult. As a Catholic Christian I believe there are cases where violence is justified (just war theory and self-defense for example). At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of violence taken on behalf of defending Catholicism as a religion (and dead set against using torture and death or the threat of death to such ends). However, I’m still unsure about some issues. For example, religious freedom (at least for Christians) in East Asia basically came because of raw physical force and/or other non-violent forms of coercion. That’s something I need to study more about.

Now as an academic in looking at religion and violence my question would be how a religious believers uses his or her religious tradition to justify violence and whether or not the way they are using it is logically coherent. For example, there are two books by a Zen Buddhist priest named Brian Daizen Victoria in which he criticizes Japanese Buddhists, especially Zen Buddhists for defending the legitimacy of Japan’s Empire (especially the invasion of China) in the 1930’s and 40’s (I think he actually starts as early as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 but he might go even earlier). In any case, Victoria criticizes their doctrinal approach using early Buddhist scriptures that have a more pacifistic approach. The problem is that Victoria, as a Zen Buddhist faces a bit of a problem. I’m not an expert on Zen but my understanding is that it emphasizes direct enlightenment over Buddhist scriptures. Moreover, at least some Zen thought is antinomian, declaring that there is no such thing as right and wrong, that true enlightenment leads us beyond that. In any case, the Zen Buddhists Victoria criticizes would have just pointed out that the scriptures Victoria quotes are inferior to their own enlightenment. The thing is, as far as I understand it, the Japanese Buddhists who justified the empire and its expansion were actually acting consistently with Zen Buddhism while Victoria is not. In other words, it is quite consistent in Zen to allow violence (and historically Zen Buddhists have done just that). If Victoria wants to criticize Zen then he needs to come at it from a different angle (basically he’d have to show that the basic ideas of Zen are wrong which would be difficult for him as a Zen priest to do!). I could be way off here in my example, but my main point is that my interest isn’t so much whether religion should justify violence but how individuals and religions as a whole justify violence and how logically coherent their arguments are.