according to tribal rules of behavior, a brawl would result as your relatives jumped in on your side and his relatives jumped in on his side. A death in such a brawl would spark efforts by the victim’s relatives to kill one of the murderer’s relatives in revenge. What’s to save the society from collapsing in an incessant orgy of brawls and revenge murders?
The solution to this dilemma of large societies is the one used in our own society, and documented in all chiefdoms and early states for which we have information. Rules of peaceful behavior apply between all members of the society, regardless of whether some individual whom you encounter is familiar to you or a stranger. The rules are enforced by the political leaders (chiefs or kings) and their agents, who justify the rules by a new function of religion. The gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules, codified in formal codes of morality. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them (because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods). Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments.
In recent secularized societies, such rules of moral behavior within society have moved beyond their religious origins. The reasons why atheists, as well as many believers, now don’t kill their enemies derive from values instilled by society, and from fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God. But from the rise of chiefdoms until the recent rise of secular states, religion justified codes of behavior and thereby enabled people to live harmoniously in large societies where one encounters strangers frequently. Religion’s function in permitting strangers to live peacefully together, and its function in teaching the masses to obey their political leaders, constitute the twin aspects of the often-discussed roles of religion in maintaining social order. As Voltaire remarked cynically, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” Depending on one’s perspective, these roles of religion have been regarded as either positive (promoting social harmony) or negative (promoting exploitation of the masses by oppressive elites).
Justifying war
Another new problem faced by emergent chiefdoms and states, but not by the bands and tribes of previous history, involved wars. Because tribes primarily use relationship by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify rules of conduct, tribesmen face no moral dilemmas in killing members of other tribes with whom they have no relationship. But once a state invokes religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens with whom one has no relationship, how can a state convince its citizens to ignore those same precepts during wartime? States permit, indeed they command, their citizens to steal from and kill citizens of other states against which war has been declared. After a state has spent 18 years teaching a boy “Thou shalt not kill,” how can the state turn around and say “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances,” without getting its soldiers hopelessly confused and prone to kill the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens)?
Again, in recent as well as in ancient history, religion comes to the rescue with a new function. The Ten Commandments apply only to one’s behavior toward fellow citizens within the chiefdom or state. Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that all other religions are wrong. Commonly in the past, and all too often today as well, citizens are taught that they are not merely permitted, but actually obliged, to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals: for God and country,
The Bible’s Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens. Deuteronomy 20:10–18, for example, explains the obligation of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city. The book of Joshua describes approvingly how Joshua became a hero by carrying out those instructions, slaughtering all the inhabitants of over 400 cities. The book of rabbinical commentaries known as the Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill [believers in thine own God]” and “Thou must kill [believers in another god].” For instance, according to some Talmudic commentators, an Israelite is guilty of murder if he intentionally kills a fellow Israelite; is innocent if he intentionally kills a non-Israelite; and is also innocent if he kills an Israelite while throwing a stone into a group consisting of nine Israelites plus one heathen (because he might have been aiming at the one heathen).
In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament, whose moral principles have moved far in the direction of defining one’s dealings with anyone—at least in theory. But in practice, of course, some of history’s most extensive genocides were committed by European Christian colonialists against non-Europeans, relying for moral justification on the New as well as the Old Testament.
Interestingly, among New Guineans, religion is never invoked to justify killing or fighting with members of an out-group. Many of my New Guinea friends have described to me their participation in genocidal attacks on neighboring tribes. In all those accounts, I have never heard the slightest hint of any religious motive, of dying for God or the true religion, or of sacrificing oneself for any idealistic reason whatsoever. In contrast, the religion- supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). That’s what makes societies of religious fanatics so dangerous: a tiny minority of their adherents (e.g., 19 of them on September 11, 2001) die for the cause, and the whole society of fanatics thereby succeeds at killing far more of its perceived enemies (e.g., 2,996 of them on September 11, 2001). Rules of bad behavior toward out-groups reached their high point in the last 1,500 years, as fanatical Christians and Muslims inflicted death, slavery, or forced conversion on each other and on the heathen. In the 20th century, European states added secular grounds to justify killing millions of citizens of other European states, but religious fanaticism is still strong in some other societies.
Badges of commitment
Secular people remain puzzled and troubled by several features of religion. Foremost among those are its regular association with irrational supernatural beliefs, such that each religion has a different set of such beliefs and adheres firmly to them but dismisses most such beliefs of other religions; its frequent promotion of costly, even self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors that would seem to make people less rather than more disposed to be religious; and its apparent basic hypocrisy of preaching a moral code and often claiming universality, while at the same time excluding many or most people from application of that code and urging the killing of them. How can these troubling paradoxes be explained? There are two solutions that I have found useful.
One solution is to recognize the need for adherents of a particular religion to display some reliable “badge” of commitment to that religion. Believers spend their lives with each other and constantly count on each other for support, in a world where many or most other people adhere to other religions, may be hostile to your own religion, or may be skeptical about all religions. Your safety, prosperity, and life will depend on your identifying correctly your fellow believers, and on your convincing them that they can trust you just as you trust them. What proofs of your and their commitment are believable?
To be believable, the proofs must be visible things that no one would or could fake for treacherous gain of temporary advantage. That’s why religious “badges” are always costly: high commitments of time to learn and regularly practise rituals, prayers, and songs and to undertake pilgrimages; high commitments of resources, including money, gifts, and sacrificed animals; publicly espousing rationally implausible beliefs that others will ridicule as silly; and publicly undergoing or displaying signs of painful permanent body mutilation, including cutting and bleeding sensitive parts of one’s body, disfiguring operations on one’s genitals, and self-amputation of finger joints. If you see that someone has made those expensive commitments with lifelong consequences, then they’ve convinced you much more effectively than if they merely told you, “Trust me, I’m with you, I’m wearing the right
