Religious texts

How seriously should we take the warlike scriptures of any religion? There are no religions whose message is entirely pacifist. Any world religion will contain sacred texts that have seemed to urge its followers on to murder. Christianity, quite as much as Islam, can call on texts that seem to make the slaughter of unbelievers mandatory.

Yet all of these religions and post-religions have another face as well. They really do value peace and brotherhood, and anyone who wants to can find texts just as authoritative that urge believers to kindness and self-sacrificing love. Everything depends on the perspective from which these texts are read. The black slaves of the US and the Caribbean read their masters’ Bibles and found in them a message of hope and liberation, while the slave owners relied on the same book to justify their own behaviour.

The way that the meaning of religious words emerges from their use leads to two conclusions. The first is that hate sites really do spread hate. By presenting their objects only in a context of danger and violence, they form associations that are very hard to eradicate. The second lesson is that integration in daily life really matters. Real people with whom we deal every day can be impossibly frustrating, but they can’t easily be reduced to mere symbols in a clash of civilisations.