God Without Religion

by Michael Arnheim

  Perhaps most important to individuals and families in the Roman religion was the devotion to the Lares and Penates, the tutelary domestic and household gods, coupled with worship of the spirit of ancestors, the Di Manes and Di Parentes.

  At national level there was a whole pantheon of gods to choose from — some of whom have given their names to planets: Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter — with a rich mythology detailing their often less than admirable qualities and adventures.

  As the Roman Empire expanded to cover the whole of the Mediterranean basin with its multiplicity of peoples and races, so more and more foreign cults and religions were absorbed into the Roman state religion, which became more and more syncretist. Among the most popular of these religions were the cult of Isis from Egypt, the worship of Cybele, the “Great Mother” (Magna Mater), and the religion of Mithras, which was a particular favourite of soldiers all around the Roman world, as may be seen in the Mithraeum, or the ruins of the Temple of Mithras, in the City of London. The Roman state religion was not antagonistic or hostile to these religions but instead embraced them and enabled people to worship these foreign cults side by side with the traditional gods of the Roman pantheon. This is also evidenced by the London Mithraeum, which contains not only votive offerings and representations relating to the cult of Mithras, notably a marble relief showing Mithras slaying the astral bull, known as the Tauroctony, but also examples of the harmonious syncretist blend of that cult with the traditional Roman state religion, represented by marble statues of Minerva, Mercury and Venus.

  A particularly important aspect of the Roman state religion was the imperial cult, or emperor-worship. The imperial cult began as the worship only of deceased emperors who had been declared “divine” by the Roman senate. The Emperor Vespasian is said to have joked on his deathbed, “Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.”179 As time went by the imperial cult came to apply to living emperors as well. This was particularly the case in the eastern half of the Empire, where there was a tradition of worshipping living rulers which long predated the Roman Empire.

  The Jews first came under Roman influence in 63 BCE, when the Roman general Pompey sacked the Temple in Jerusalem. Judaea as a whole finally came under direct Roman rule in 6 CE. In the ancient world, of course, communal religions were the rule. Every nation had its own god(s) and its own religion. But once a people was conquered by another state or nation it was expected to accept the religion of the conqueror as part of becoming absorbed into the conqueror’s state and society. This is where the Jews differed from most of the other peoples conquered by Rome, most of whom had no difficulty in settling down after a while as obedient Roman subjects and worshippers of the Roman state religion, very often in harmonious combination with their own gods.

  This path was simply not open to the Jews, who stuck doggedly to their own ancestral communal religion and, although conquered by Rome, remained aloof from the melting pot that was the Graeco-Roman Middle East. In short, the Jews continued to regard themselves as an independent nation and community with its own communal and religious institutions, and they were allowed a good deal of latitude by the Romans, who gave a free hand to the Jewish authorities, notably the High Priest and the so-called Great Sanhedrin, over a wide range of matters both religious and political.

  By the time of the destruction of the Temple the Jews had been under direct or indirect Roman rule for 130 years, during which time they had not suffered any religious persecution. In fact, King Herod (73–4 BCE), who ruled over the Jews as a Roman client king, dying 70 years before the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt, had actually rebuilt the Temple on a grander scale than before as part of a huge building programme throughout his kingdom, including the construction of the port at Caesarea and of fortresses at Masada and Herodium. None of this would have been allowed by the Romans if they had wanted to stamp out the Jewish religion. It was only in 66 CE when the Jews rose up in an attempt to overthrow the (actually very mild) Roman yoke that the Romans took military action against them. As the centre of Jewish life, the Temple naturally became the prime target.

  The Roman state religion has had a bad press for a very long time in regard to persecution of the Jews. But even the destruction of the Temple, the centre of Jewish life, was not an act of religious persecution but a political and military response to a serious Jewish revolt against Roman rule.

  That is why Johanan ben Zakai (30–90 CE), a leading Jewish rabbi, who was secretly smuggled into the Roman camp hidden in a coffin, managed to persuade Vespasian, who was at that time the Roman general in charge of putting down the Jewish Revolt of 66–70 CE, to allow him safe conduct to Yavneh and to establish a yeshivah or rabbinical seminary there on condition that it steered clear of politics. This enabled Yavneh to become a major centre of Jewish life, even to the point of becoming the seat of the Sanhedrin, or supreme religious court, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Vespasian, who had by this time become Emperor (reigned 69–79 CE), clearly therefore had no objection to the exercise of the Jewish religion, only to Jewish refusal to knuckle down to Roman rule.

  Christian tradition has long portrayed the Romans as serial persecutors of Christianity, and this theme has played into the hands of Hollywood, which has delighted in showing Christians thrown to the lions or as human torches in the Colosseum. However, recent research published by Candida Moss, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame University (a Catholic school), shows that “The traditional history of martyrdom is a myth.” And again: “The traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons.”180 During the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (284–305) Christianity really was persecuted, but the tradition of wholesale martyrdom over a period of three centuries is clearly largely fictitious.

  Nevertheless, Christians and Christianity do appear to have been regarded by the Roman state with a certain amount of suspicion. The Roman attitude to Christianity was different from their attitude towards Judaism. Although the Jews living in Judea were under direct or indirect Roman rule, they were a self-contained community with its own customs, language — and of course religion. So, although the Jews were under Roman sovereignty they were never absorbed into Roman society and the Romans did not therefore expect them to take on the Roman religion either.

  Christians, on the other hand, who from quite an early date were spread throughout the Roman world, were not a separate identifiable community, did not have their own language, and differed from the rank and file of the general population in one respect only: religion. They were just ordinary members of society in the Roman world, mostly living in the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Empire. However, from the Roman point of view the Christians could be viewed as dissidents or even as traitors because, although they did not form a distinctive community, they rejected the Roman state religion, which was part and parcel of being a member of Roman society.

  The main problem that the Romans had with Christianity was the Christians’ refusal to participate in emperor-worship, which was taken by the Roman state as a sign not only of religious defiance but also of disloyalty to the emperor and therefore treason.

  Case Study 3 — Christianity

  The validity of the claims made by Christianity will be put through the wringer in Chapter 6. Here I just want to summarise briefly how this creed religion came into existence as a breakaway from a traditional communal religion. It is important to realise not only that Jesus himself lived and died a Jew but also that he regarded his mission as being essentially to the Jews.

  Jesus is reported in Matthew’s Gospel to have been approached by a Canaanite woman for urgent assistance with her daughter. Jesus at first waves her aside saying, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of Israel.” When the woman came closer “and worshipped him”, begging, “Lord, help me�
��, he repeats the same point in an insulting manner: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it to dogs.” “The children” clearly refers to the Jews, while Gentiles or non-Jews are described as “dogs”. The point is not lost on the Canaanite woman, who remarks: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.” Needless to say, the story goes on, Jesus then relents and the woman’s daughter is immediately healed.181

  Elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is quoted as saying:

  Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.182

  Far from wanting to abolish the requirements of Jewish law, Jesus is here portrayed as seeking to out-Pharisee the Pharisees.

  The architect of Christianity was not Jesus but Paul, probably the greatest PR man in history, the self-styled “apostle to the Gentiles”,183 who recognised that in order for his new religion to take off it had to attract non-Jews, and for that policy to succeed it would be necessary to free converts from the onerous obligations of Jewish law, including the dietary laws and above all circumcision.

  It was over this that Paul had a major clash with the leaders of the so-called Jerusalem Church headed by Jesus’s brother James. The turning point came at a meeting in 50 CE, about twenty years after Jesus’s death, when Paul reported back to the so-called Jerusalem Council of the movement. After what appears to have been a heated debate, James settled the issue by deciding “that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God” except with the most basic Jewish obligations to abstain from idol-worship, from “unchastity” and from eating blood.184

  Freed from its Jewish trammels, Christianity was now able to take off on its own as a creed religion. Circumcision, Paul preached, is irrelevant. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.”185 A more conservative view is expressed in another of Paul’s Epistles: “For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumscision, but keeping the commandments of God.”186 God, wrote Paul, “will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.”187

  Instead of circumcision and other Jewish practices, the test for joining the new faith was simply acceptance of Jesus as the Christ — plus a growing body of dogma eventually formalised in the Nicene Creed adopted in 325 CE by the first ecumenical council. The Nicene Creed is the profession of faith that is still the most widely accepted in Christian liturgy today, but it has not prevented numerous doctrinal disputes, schisms, persecutions and even intra-Christian religious wars from taking place over the centuries.

  A Quick Glance at Some Other Religions

  As we have seen, there is no shortage of evidence for the binary communal/creed classification of religions. But not all religions are easy to pigeon-hole in this way. Among the factors which muddy the waters are internal variations, syncretism, hybridisation, imperceptible historical changes and propaganda.

  Let us just take a quick survey of religions that may pose a problem in terms of their classification:

  Buddhism: This is one of the great religions of the world, with between 350 million and 1.6 billion adherents. It is sometimes doubted, however, whether it is a religion at all, as it does not really include belief in a God but is instead based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or “the awakened one”. Does this make Buddhism a creed religion? In a sense, possibly, as may be seen, for example, from the “five precepts” of ahimsa (non-violence), refraining from theft, refraining from sexual and sensual misconduct, refraining from lying and refraining from alcohol and drugs. Unlike most other creed religions, Buddhism is not a proselytising religion and tends not to be intolerant of other religions but has the capacity to coexist harmoniously with other religions, notably in Japan.

  Zoroastrianism: An ancient monotheistic Iranian religion, which was the official state religion of Persia for about 1,350 years, from 705 BCE to 651 CE, when Persia was conquered by the Arabs. As a result of persecution at the hands of their Muslim rulers the majority of Zoroastrians moved to India, where they still exist as a community largely separate from their neighbours. Because of their Persian origin, instead of being termed Zoroastrians they are now called “Parsees” or “Parsis”. Besides being monotheistic the religion is a communal religion typical of the ancient world, and it retains this quality today despite no longer having its own separate state. Like most communal religions, it has always been tolerant of other religions — so much so that after conquering the Neo-Babylonian Empire the Persian King Cyrus the Great (reigned c. 560–530 BCE) issued an “edict of toleration” in the form of the famous cuneiform cylinder now housed in the British Museum in London in which he expressed reverence for the gods of his defeated enemies, notably Marduk, the chief god of Babylon.188 Even more remarkably, Cyrus allowed the Jews, whose Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and who had been taken to Babylon as captives, to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.189 This became the Second Temple, which survived from 535 BCE until its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE.

  Yazidis: Adherents of an ancient monotheistic Kurdish communal religion found mainly in the Nineveh Province of Iraqi Kurdistan. Although almost all of them speak Kurmanji Kurdish, the largest of the Kurdish languages, they tend to regard themselves as distinct from the Kurds and are recognised by the United Nations as a separate ethnic group. As is the case with most communal religions, their religious identity is subsumed under their communal identity — they are non-proselytising, tolerant and peace- loving. At the time of writing they have come into the news as targets of the self-styled “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”, ISIL or ISIS, who have reportedly threatened them with death unless they convert to Islam, as a result of which a number of Yazidi men have been killed and women and children abducted.

  Conclusion

  In the ancient world, when communal religions prevailed, there were no wars of religion. Every nation had its own religion, which formed an integral part of its identity as a community. It would have been as unthinkable for, say, a Hittite to convert to the Jewish religion as it would have been for that Hittite to take on Jewish nationality, or vice versa. Communal religions tend therefore to be tolerant of other religions. There was no shortage of dynastic wars, wars of conquest and wars for other political or economic motives, but no religious wars. And it was only when one nation was conquered by another that religious conversion took place. The conquered people would be expected automatically to adopt their conquerors’ religion when they became absorbed into their conquerors’ state and society.

  Creed religions, by contrast, tend to be intolerant of one another and even of divergent branches of their own religion. In Christianity the persecution of “heretics” by the Roman Catholic Church over many centuries followed by the wars of religion of the 16th and 17th centuries are paralleled by the more recent conflicts between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims.

  Religious conflicts often have political, ethnic or economic origins, but their expression in religious terms only exacerbates the hostility and makes an amicable solution all the harder to achieve.

  So, what’s the solution to all the religious rancour that we see around us today — including the New Atheists’ hostility to religion in general? The first step must be to understand the true basis of the conflicts arising out of the intolerance of the various religious — and anti-religious — organisations concerned.

  Communal religions tend to be more tolerant than cre
ed religions, but the most tolerant “religion” of all is belief in an impersonal deist God. (See Chapter 3.) The great minds who have this kind of belief do not display the arrogance of either believers in a conventional personal theist God or of their detractors, the New Atheists. On the contrary, these great minds, like Einstein and Darwin, are exemplars of modesty and humility.

  Review of Chapter Four

  The belief peddled by Christopher Hitchens that “organized religion” as a whole is intolerant is incorrect. Creed religions have tended to be intolerant while communal religions are generally tolerant — and degrees of toleration have fluctuated over time.

  The classification of theistic religions into communal religions and creed religions is my own classification, which cuts across the conventional classifications.

  Why does the classification of religions matter? Chiefly in order to test whether there really is any correlation between a religion’s classification and its degree of toleration both of other religions and also of other denominations and groupings within itself.

  Christianity and Islam are the two prime creed religions in the world today.

  Hinduism, Japanese Shinto and Judaism are essentially communal religions. In the ancient world communal religions, like the “pagan” Roman civic religion, were the norm.

  A creed religion is one which is based on a set of beliefs. Practically every creed religion — and every denomination, group or sect within each creed religion — tends to believe that it alone embodies the “truth” and holds the key to “salvation”.

  Membership of a communal religion, by contrast, depends not on acceptance of any particular creed or set of beliefs but on membership of a nation, society or community. Communal religions were the norm in the ancient world. The Roman state religion is a good example. Until the advent of Christianity and other creed religions, everyone living in the Roman Empire was automatically a member of that religion by virtue of being a member of Roman society. That is why the Roman state religion does not even have a specific name. This is a common feature of communal religions.