Religious Extremism: A Rant
I’m going to do something kind of funny. I’m going to begin a rant on religion by talking about a concept in Tibetan Buddhist theology: the wrathful deity.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Destroyer of Death. Sounds badass, right? He is. Yamantaka, aka Vajrabhairava, is one of several wrathful deities in Tibetan Buddhism. I think of them as representing tough love, though that’s a real dumbing down of their complex symbolism. The idea is that, sometimes the forces of human suffering - hatred, greed, violence, etc. - are so powerful that only an even more powerful force, one rooted in compassion and wisdom, but that is also fierce and terrifying, can destroy them. It’s a kind of enlightened, loving rage that seems valuable to explore right now.
As of writing this, Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza has been going on for more than 100 days. I’m not going to bother with all the horrifying statistics. You can easily find them if you care to.
I want to talk about why this is still going on. The (surface level) narrative is that this is necessary to protect Jews from Hamas. There are many other reasons at play - U.S. interests in the Middle East, maintaining a western stronghold in the region, securing access to natural resources, the unhinged violence of Israel’s far right-wing, supremacist administration, etc. You know, the usual imperialist bullshit. But the PR version is, in the name of defending Jews and the Jewish state, Israel must carpet bomb Gaza.
Now there are obviously thousands of very vocal anti-Zionist Jews bravely protesting the genocide and saying “not in my name.” So clearly, the political state of Israel and its actions are not something all Jews believe in as central to their religion (I can’t claim to know much about this, but the folks over at Jewitches have a helpful blog post about the “Three Israels”).
I’m an atheist, but genuinely interested in and (mostly) respectful of religion. I minored in Religion in college with a focus on Buddhism (hence Yamantaka’s appearance in this essay). There’s valuable wisdom to be found in many religious traditions and philosophies.
But religions, at their essence, are just stories. Some of those stories may have some loose basis in historical events, often embellished and made fantastical in religious texts. They are often intimately intertwined with cultural traditions. They contain useful philosophies about how to live with each other and be good people (so do myths and fairytales, by the way). But they are stories - made up by humans, as is all culture, politics, economics, and nearly every other construct of human life.
Many of these stories were written by men thousands of years ago and have undoubtedly evolved over millennia, along with the human beings who believe and tell them. Religion is not the law of gravity, some immutable force over which we have no control. Religion is not like a tree or a cloud or a river.
It does not exist independent of the minds that bring it into being.
The religion we practice - the story we believe - is the product of a long and complex history of our own ancestry; where the people in our lineage lived, the families they married into, under what political, monarchical, or theocratic regimes they were subjugated, or in which they wielded power.
The story you happen to believe is the product of a million forces, seen and unseen, shaping your personal history over millennia. You do not practice the religion you practice because you are special, because you are chosen, because you are more holy than anyone else. I am not an atheist because I’m better than anyone else.
Religion exists only within our imaginative universe, and we all get to choose what stories we believe.
We also get to decide how we interpret our story. Each and every individual gets to decide how they make their religion manifest in the world. As a human endeavor, religions are subject to as many interpretations as there are humans on this planet. There are those who will show up in the world as a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. and do good. There are those for whom their religion helps them be a more compassionate, open-hearted, loving individual. Fabulous! I love that for all of you!
And then there are those who will interpret their religion from a place of fear, hatred and anger; who will show up in the world brandishing their religion as a weapon to cause harm and seize power.
It’s your story. You choose your own adventure.
So here’s where I’m bringing the Yamantaka energy.
The second you show up using your story to cause harm to other people, as far as I’m concerned, you, my friend, are a religious extremist.
It’s a damn story. And you do not get to use your story to, I don’t know… kick people out of their homes, steal their land, take away their rights, violently oppress them, or slaughter them. Today, we happen to be watching Israel do this. But the United States, UK, Australia, Canada - pretty much all Western imperialists are masters of this extremist ideology. Hello, Manifest Destiny! Nobody has asserted a divine right to the entire world quite the way the West has.
So this is where my tolerance for religion ends.
Although, it’s not really religion that’s the problem. It’s the interpretation of it. So I suppose I should say, this is where my tolerance for your particular interpretation of your story ends.
I can’t believe I have to say this in 2024, but you do not get to claim some sort of divine, exclusive, or superior right to a particular plot of land on this planet based on the Bible, Torah, Quran, or any other religious text.
I recognize that I don’t know what it feels like to have identity-shaping religious beliefs, communities, and traditions. I was raised Catholic. Pretty much everyone on both sides of my family is Catholic. When I was in elementary school, we went to church most Sundays. I even had to go to the Catholic version of Sunday School (where my CCD kids at?!).
But Catholicism was also never particularly important to my immediate family nor to my identity. So (true to my aversion to authority - born an anarchist, baby!) by around age 12, I already knew I didn’t believe in god, I rejected Catholic dogma, I saw the Catholic Church as a corrupt and unethical institution. I was done with it. I still went to church with my family sometimes, mostly just at Christmas and Easter (haven’t even done that for decades now). But I stopped taking Communion and didn’t participate in mass. And never did I worry that my relationships with family and friends might be severed because I decided that, actually, I don’t believe in the story that happened to be handed down to me.
I understand that for other folks, their religious identity is much more central to their sense of self, and that it’s often deeply entwined with a cultural and ethnic identity and traditions. And for some people, there is the very real and painful risk of losing family and friends if you choose a different interpretation of your story, or reject it altogether.
That said, I find it very hard to understand someone who believes their religion makes them better than other people. I cannot imagine believing in the superiority of my story so much that I think it’s okay to harm or kill people over it. I can’t understand claiming such an all-encompassing right to defend people who believe the same story I do, that I get to bomb an entire region off the map. I can not imagine genuinely thinking that, because I believe a particular story, I’m chosen. That some all-powerful force that created everything loves me more because I believe the right story.
It’s not only asinine, but it makes me furious. Because if there’s one thing I feel certain about from studying religions, it’s that most can be boiled down to one core principle: love everybody. That’s it. That’s the north star of basically all the major religions. Some version of the golden rule. It’s pretty simple.
So, if you distort your sacred story to serve your rage, hatred, and fear, you should be ashamed. If you allow your religion to cloud your own humanity and harden you into narrow-minded tribalism, then I hope someday you’re haunted by that. Because when it causes you pain to recognize how you’ve chosen to use your story, then at least it will mean you’ve found your way back to your humanity.
Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians is being led by a far right-wing religious extremist administration that has manipulated a loving and justice-centered religious tradition to enact revenge, terrorize, seize power, and uphold a supremacist ideology. It’s not the first, nor the only state to do this. And this is as much a U.S. genocide as it is an Israeli genocide, with U.S.-based Christian Zionists eagerly supporting it.
But maybe, let’s keep all religion, religious texts, and religious traditions the hell out of domestic policy and geopolitics, shall we?
Ethno-religious states are always a recipe for oppression and violence. We in the West understand this immediately when we’re talking about Islamist states. In the U.S. we live in a functionally White Christian nationalist state - becoming ever more so every day. Most folks in the U.S. who aren’t White, Christian men know exactly how shitty it is to live in a state designed to serve people of one particular ethnic and/or religious identity. Anti-abortion and anti-trans laws are a great example of what it looks like when religion dictates the policies of a nation-state. Nobody wants someone else’s story imposed on them, especially when it means experiencing harm.
When you insist on tying your religious identity to a country, it will lead to state violence in the name of your religion. Nation-states kill people. That’s what they do. States use another imaginary human construct - the border, an invisible line that doesn’t really exist - to decide who is an enemy or terrorist, to “defend” their people, fight for resources, exploit and kill for wealth and power. Do you really want a country doing that in the name of your religion? No. You don’t. Because, inevitably, people start to equate your religion with unjust violence. And then, boom - an explosion of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of religious bigotry.
The story I choose to believe includes the right of all people to live freely and in peace, with equal rights wherever they are. This means I believe firmly in the right of Jews to live on the land that is Israel-Palestine; but do it peacefully and respectfully of all the other people with their own stories and traditions who are already there. You do not get to violently remove those people and create a state designed specifically for yourself and the other people in the world who happen to believe the same story you do. On the land that happens to be the birthplace of all Abrahamic religions, by the way.
We do not use our stories to cause harm. We do not condone religious extremism.
Will this perspective piss some people off? Absolutely. Call it tough love.