Again, in recent as well as in ancient history, religion comes to the rescue with a new function. The Ten Commandments apply only to one’s behavior toward fellow citizens within the chiefdom or state. Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that all other religions are wrong. Commonly in the past, and all too often today as well, citizens are taught that they are not merely permitted, but actually obliged, to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals: for God and country, por Dios y por España, Gott mit uns, etc. It in no way diminishes the guilt of the current crop of murderous religious fanatics to acknowledge that they are heirs to a long, widespread, vile tradition.
The Bible’s Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens. Deuteronomy 20:10–18, for example, explains the obligation of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city. The book of Joshua describes approvingly how Joshua became a hero by carrying out those instructions, slaughtering all the inhabitants of over 400 cities. The book of rabbinical commentaries known as the Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill [believers in thine own God]” and “Thou must kill [believers in another god].” For instance, according to some Talmudic commentators, an Israelite is guilty of murder if he intentionally kills a fellow Israelite; is innocent if he intentionally kills a non-Israelite; and is also innocent if he kills an Israelite while throwing a stone into a group consisting of nine Israelites plus one heathen (because he might have been aiming at the one heathen).
In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament, whose moral principles have moved far in the direction of defining one’s dealings with anyone—at least in theory. But in practice, of course, some of history’s most extensive genocides were committed by European Christian colonialists against non-Europeans, relying for moral justification on the New as well as the Old Testament.
Interestingly, among New Guineans, religion is never invoked to justify killing or fighting with members of an out-group. Many of my New Guinea friends have described to me their participation in genocidal attacks on neighboring tribes. In all those accounts, I have never heard the slightest hint of any religious motive, of dying for God or the true religion, or of sacrificing oneself for any idealistic reason whatsoever. In contrast, the religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). That’s what makes societies of religious fanatics so dangerous: a tiny minority of their adherents (e.g., 19 of them on September 11, 2001) die for the cause, and the whole society of fanatics thereby succeeds at killing far more of its perceived enemies (e.g., 2,996 of them on September 11, 2001). Rules of bad behavior toward out-groups reached their high point in the last 1,500 years, as fanatical Christians and Muslims inflicted death, slavery, or forced conversion on each other and on the heathen. In the 20th century, European states added secular grounds to justify killing millions of citizens of other European states, but religious fanaticism is still strong in some other societies.
Badges of commitment
Secular people remain puzzled and troubled by several features of religion. Foremost among those are its regular association with irrational supernatural beliefs, such that each religion has a different set of such beliefs and adheres firmly to them but dismisses most such beliefs of other religions; its frequent promotion of costly, even self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors that would seem to make people less rather than more disposed to be religious; and its apparent basic hypocrisy of preaching a moral code and often claiming universality, while at the same time excluding many or most people from application of that code and urging the killing of them. How can these troubling paradoxes be explained? There are two solutions that I have found useful.
One solution is to recognize the need for adherents of a particular religion to display some reliable “badge” of commitment to that religion. Believers spend their lives with each other and constantly count on each other for support, in a world where many or most other people adhere to other religions, may be hostile to your own religion, or may be skeptical about all religions. Your safety, prosperity, and life will depend on your identifying correctly your fellow believers, and on your convincing them that they can trust you just as you trust them. What proofs of your and their commitment are believable?
To be believable, the proofs must be visible things that no one would or could fake for treacherous gain of temporary advantage. That’s why religious “badges” are always costly: high commitments of time to learn and regularly practise rituals, prayers, and songs and to undertake pilgrimages; high commitments of resources, including money, gifts, and sacrificed animals; publicly espousing rationally implausible beliefs that others will ridicule as silly; and publicly undergoing or displaying signs of painful permanent body mutilation, including cutting and bleeding sensitive parts of one’s body, disfiguring operations on one’s genitals, and self-amputation of finger joints. If you see that someone has made those expensive commitments with lifelong consequences, then they’ve convinced you much more effectively than if they merely told you, “Trust me, I’m with you, I’m wearing the right sort of hat (but I might have bought it cheaply yesterday and might discard it tomorrow).” For essentially the same reason, evolutionary biologists recognize that many animal signals as well (such as a peacock’s tail) have evolved to be costly, precisely because that makes them believable. When a female peahen sees a male peacock with a big tail displaying to her, she can be sure that such a male, capable of growing and surviving with such a big tail, really must have better genes and be better nourished than a male pretending to be superior but with just a small tail.
An interesting example of how religion fosters group cooperation and commitment comes from survival rates of American communes. Throughout the history of the United States continuing into modern times, people have experimented with forming communes where people can live together with other people chosen as sharing their ideals. Some of those communes share religious ideals, and others are non-religiously motivated; many non-religious communes were formed in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. But all communes are subject to financial, practical, social, sexual, and other pressures, and to competition from the attractions of the outside world. The vast majority of communes disband, whether gradually or explosively, within the lifetimes of their founders. For example, in the 1960s one friend of mine was a co-founder of a commune in a beautiful, peaceful, but remote area of Northern California. Gradually, though, the other founder members drifted away because of the isolation, boredom, social tensions, and other reasons, until my friend was the last person left. She still lives there, but now just as a single person, no longer a member of a commune.