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And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.”
Luke 2:13

Last year there appeared a 323-page Jeremiad against religion entitled The End of Faith.  It came out of the trauma caused by the terrible events of 9/11/2001.  The perpetration in the name of God of acts of unimagineable barbarity led the author, Sam Harris, to pose a stark alternative: if civilization is to survive, religion has got to go. 

This seems a forlorn hope, when we consider that the many attempts to put an end to religion have usually come to naught.  The religious instinct, like the sexual instinct, is irrepressible.  But I would have to agree with Harris that the religious instinct is often more dangerous, and although the focus today is on militant Islam, we must not forget the crusades, the inquisition, the pogroms. 

There is an undeniable connection between religion and violence.  Why is this so?  The reason, I think, is that religious faith, as it is usually understood, is inherently intolerant.  If I know with certitude what must be done and believed in order to be saved, then anyone who disagrees with me is on a slippery slope and will face a severe comeuppance, if not now, then in the world to come, and although Paul cautions, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19), there are plenty of religious zealots who do not wish to wait for divine retribution, and are only too happy to act as God’s executioners here and now. 

There was a group in the early church who seem to have found a way out of this dilemma.  They were the Gnostics.  They found religious truth not in dogmatic propositions about which, under the law of contradiction, if I am right, you must be wrong.  They found it in religious imagery.  In The Gospel of Philip we read, “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images.”  In another Gnostic text holy Wisdom declares, “I am the word whose appearance is multiple.”  The Gnostics mocked the emerging orthodoxy of the Christian church as “dry canals.” 

Understandably, this challenge to dogmatic religion provoked a severe response.   The Gnostics were branded as archheretics and persecuted to extinction.  One modern scholar has dubbed them “the crazies of the 2nd and 3rd centuries.”  But if we are to avoid the stark choice between religion and civilization, then this “crazy” approach to religion deserves a closer look. 

For a religious faith based on imagery is non-violent.  I may not be moved by the ceremonies and symbols of another faith.  I may even be repelled by them.  But I feel no need to attack them.  I simply do not participate.  In the GTA section of the Toronto Star for December 21, under the heading “Merry Un-Christmas,” we find profiles of seven individuals who are not doing what we are doing here tonight.  They include two Buddhists, two Muslims, a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Jew.  But neither are these persons attacking us. 

If, for our part, we find in the babe in the manger, the word made flesh, the heavenly hosts singing alleluia a peace which passes all understanding (cf. Philippians 4:7), then, for us, pace Sam Harris, religion is not an anachronism. 

Christmas Eve, 2006

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