At what point does Religon become weapon?
There's a book out by Richard Dawkins called "The God Delusion". In this book he seeks to justify that God is not only a myth, but is such a strong myth that it actually hurts people and thus graduates to being a delusion. I'm not saying I necessarily justify anything in this book (Richard Dawkins is known to be the new Charles Darwin), but he does make one point that I do find particularly interesting. He thinks that children being forced to go to church is a form of child abuse or cruelty.
My parents made me go to church every sunday until I graduated high school. It provided some good, it connected me with people in the community, it helped me to respect my elders more, I established a relationship with God. The only problem was it was so boring! Good Lord, I hated going to church. I had no friends in my sunday school class, and being forced to sit through a sermon was worse than having my heart ripped out by that guy in Indiana Jones. As you can imagine, since I was 18, I've only gone back to church a handful of times. I can tolerate it a little more now since I'm older. The worse part was that during my sophomore year of college I went through a very trying and very painful search into what my spiritual beliefs are. I'm still going through it so unfortunately I have no conclusion, but I can tell you that Jesus Christ is not part of it. But I can tell you that I definately believe there is a difference between church and religion, big time.
So, why then, did the Europeans feel this need to Christianize the indians. During this time period in Europe, many of the governments were sanctioned around the church. And I can only assume that for one to go to heaven, one must accept Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour. So I take it that Europeans wanted to save the Indians so that they would go to heaven. Well, that's good! Isn't it? Isn't it!?
As we know, this wound up being unsuccessful. Missionaries failed, Indians reverted back to their old religions. I think that what I find most intriguing is that even though Europeans saw these people as savages and saw fit to enslave them, rape them, or cut off their nose; there were others who saw the potential in "saving" them. I wonder if Richard Dawkins would see this as cruel. I'm guessing he probably would.
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3 comments:
By no means am I an expert on the Bible, but I do know that Jesus told his disciples to, "go and make fishermen of all men" (something close to that at least). While I am not trying to argue for or against missionary work, I do know that a lot of Christians feel the need/desire to spread the word of God and Jesus Christ to "save" non-Christians.
Personally, I feel that Europeans, Spanish, and French had thier own beliefs and thats what they were trying their best to claim and settle the land the way they knew best. But if you remember from last week, we talked about the Powhatans were teaching the Europeans the way they do things and vice versa and each group were getting upset because neither one were adopting their own ways of living.
The points that you made about the Europeans wanting to save the Indians now makes sense to me. Before I never really connected the dots in regard to the Europeans forcing their Christian ideas upon the Indians so they could convert them. I agree with what someone said in response to your post about how Christians feel that they are to spread the word of god, which is what I believe the Spaniards tried to do. The violence behind their acts did not make much sense though. As we talked about in class, not all Europeans became violent against the Natives (i.e. the French), so why did the Spanish feel as though they need to cut off the noses of the Natives and rape the women?
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