Multiculturalism attempts to unite people by recognizing their similarities and honoring rather than denigrating their differences. (Not all differences should be honored, but that’s a different subject.) The paradox of multiculturalism is that many of the ways with which we think about differences create presently meaningful but ultimately useless ways of sorting people. Race, for example, is a powerful factor in social interaction, but has questionable roots as a legitimate classification. Categorizing people cannot be the solution to problems created by categorizing people.
Religion is a special case, because religious categorizations are often fraught intrinsically with denigration. Whether it is Jews referring to gentiles as dogs, Christians referring to Jews as murderers of God and drinkers of blood, or Muslims referring to infidels as beasts, the essential problem is not just tribal hatred, but the fact that religion is the way to heaven and an aspect of that way, at least for Christianity and Islam, is to despise nonbelievers. (If you don’t think that telling nonbelievers that they will spend eternity being tortured is an act of despising them, then I’m not sure you know what despise means.)
Religion is different from race because if you are from a white, racist family and you make friends with a black person, your family may call you names and you may suffer a revaluation of values (in Nietzsche’s phrasing) and strangers might kill you, but if you are religious and you make friends with a nonbeliever, you will lose your relationship with God and your family might kill you (depending on the religion). If a white daughter marries a black man, a racist parent may be upset and angry, but if she marries an infidel, she has risked her immortal soul and subjected it to everlasting torture, so her parents owe it to her, as Sam Harris points out, to purify her soul and kill her, to ensure her entry into paradise.
Jesus (quoting Leviticus) said to love thy neighbor, but he meant other Jews (and later was made by Paul to mean other Christians). Those who didn’t love Jesus could rot in hell. To the extent that categorizing people is the problem—we reserve complete humanity for those in the right categories and treat everyone else differently—religion is the ultimate categorizer. This is true because categories largely depend on words rather than on evidence. Verbal categories get us to see the world in terms of those categories, which is why race is still a powerful factor even though it doesn’t exist in nature. Nothing elevates words like religion. Only religion would put something written thousands of years ago ahead of contemporary evidence.
I recognize that not all religious people think nonbelievers are going to be tortured for eternity, or that they should be treated badly while on earth. That’s because they are only semi-religious—they believe only some aspects of the written word, not all of it. It’s not a defense of religion to say that it often doesn’t fully take hold. Their faith may comfort the faithful, but it’s their doubt that comforts anyone who has to interact with the faithful.
It takes a lot of mind-bending to look at a cross and not see Roman torture or the Inquisition or the Crusades or contemporary stupidities about geology and the reason for hurricanes and earthquakes, or to look at Muslim iconography and not see suicide bombers and honor killings and jihad. Only in religion will people hold on to iconography despite such desecrations. Oh yeah, and patriotism too. Both raise the question of whether you are going to believe what you are told or whether you are going to be a critical thinker. As someone once said, are you going to love God and Country the way four-year-old children love their parents or the way adults do? It’s characteristic of four-year-old children not only to revere their parents but also to despise anyone who doesn’t.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 