Josiah Royce Book

Books of this genre have become very popular since the last decade for obvious reasons, and i wasnt prepared for anything new. Was expecting something along the line of either catherine catherwood on one hand or probably karen armstrong on the other.

But this book has pleasant surprises installed for me… well at least in the first section.

Defenders of religions have always harped on this particular fact when faced with allegations of their beliefs causing violence: history has shown that violence in the past is mostly caused by non-religious proponents.

Which is true – from maoist regime to hitler’s third reich to the two world wars, the ugly historical episodes in human history were indeed enacted by perverted ideologies and personal political agenda which made use of people’s ignorance and prejudices.

Yet this has never been a satisfactory answer for me.

Of course no one can deny the fact that the worst atrocities at least in terms of numbers were caused by non-religious socio-political interest groups, but this does not dismiss the fact that some wars in history were indeed caused religiously – be they inter-religion or intra-religion strifes.

Using one to defend the other is just like telling others, though i stole an apple, i am still good compared to another who stole a truckful. In my opinion, by arguing this way, a defender of religions has not even presented a valid case.

But am glad the author did – the gist of his position is this: religious or non-religious, violence is the result of perverted human nature. Religious or secular ideologies, due to the power associated to them, were unfortunately abused by human beings- which is the same line as saying the love of money and not money itself is the root of all evil.

This line of argument takes the platform of discussion one level down to address the root of the issue – instead of stopping at the surface and commenting on phenomenal ones, commonly addressing the problem by either (1) going through the history of religions; and (2) examining the correct interpretation of religious doctrines.

And this step, although often considered most natural on retrospect, seldom cross the minds of many people when they examine the role of religions in the human history of violence (though this approach has its naiveness too – we will come to that.)

But this is for the first section only. The rest of the book went back to the same track of discussing religions again, which i think is inevitable, with the second section discussing the rationality of religious beliefs and third part on its relation to morality. Well to be fair, it might be interesting to some – but there is really not much new – or so i think.

The book ends with the good brought about by religions, and we know the rest of the story.

In an interesting way, the author is very much like russell when he talks about the objective goodness of life. The only difference is that he thinks this can only be brought about by a Being who is the source of it, the reasons being man can never rationally desire goodness beyond himself.

Which is in line with his starting point of a perverted human nature - and in this aspect, he is perfectly consistent.

Though i must also add that by pushing the reponsibility of violence from seemingly harmless and phenomenal religions to the underlying perverted human nature, his weakness lies in giving less emphasis on the intrinsic evil within certain religious doctrines and painting a much too rosy picture of religions as a whole.

It is just like philosophy – we can always say it is not philosophy that leads mind astray but the mind itself that distorts philosophy. But we cant deny the fact that there are bad philosophies as well (in fact, this is why good philosophies must exist.)

And for that matter, this book has to be read together with others which examine religions phenomenally, and this is where people like catherwood comes in.