1 00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:10,019 War and peace. And we are really fortunate to have a very interesting collection of individuals to to discuss this, to launch a discussion of this. 2 00:00:10,020 --> 00:00:17,429 So what I'm going to do is just introduce each of them, and then I've asked them each to speak for about ten or 15 minutes, 3 00:00:17,430 --> 00:00:24,600 and then we can open it up to discussion, perhaps let them at the end, also make some reflections. 4 00:00:25,440 --> 00:00:29,489 So immediately on my right is, is professor Professor Nigel Biggar, 5 00:00:29,490 --> 00:00:35,219 who's probably known to many of you the readings professor of moral and pastoral theology here in Oxford, 6 00:00:35,220 --> 00:00:42,960 based at Christchurch College, previously at Leeds, the Chair of Theology and at Trinity College Dublin, 7 00:00:44,010 --> 00:00:50,370 who I've had the chance to interact with a couple of times on the subject of war and peace, but who also, of course, 8 00:00:51,270 --> 00:00:57,690 works more broadly on the contribution of religion to liberal democracies, theories of natural law, 9 00:00:58,050 --> 00:01:01,710 and the theology and ethics of national identity and loyalty and forgiveness. 10 00:01:02,940 --> 00:01:11,490 I won't go into everyone's individual publications, of which there are many, but of course he's written widely on all of these topics. 11 00:01:12,390 --> 00:01:21,660 Then we are lucky to have Tony Coady, who's visiting Oxford for a six month period, who again may be known to many of you, 12 00:01:22,440 --> 00:01:30,960 a very well known Australian philosopher who writes on epistemology, political violence, political ethics. 13 00:01:31,950 --> 00:01:38,130 He has also been, in addition to writing on violence, working on political philosophy more broadly, 14 00:01:38,730 --> 00:01:44,010 and he was the founder of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues at the University of Melbourne, 15 00:01:44,640 --> 00:01:48,510 really the first centre in Australia to become concerned with those issues. 16 00:01:48,840 --> 00:01:53,340 What later became absorbed into Cappie, which some of you will know about? 17 00:01:53,850 --> 00:02:01,920 Well, I'm a man, Marnie. Thirdly, who is a research fellow, visiting research fellow, both with Iraq and the Centre for International Studies, 18 00:02:02,370 --> 00:02:12,000 who's worked for a number of years on peace, justice and human and human security, both as an analyst and scholar, but also as a practitioner. 19 00:02:12,660 --> 00:02:18,030 She's been the executive director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, 20 00:02:18,570 --> 00:02:25,080 as well as Senior Advisor to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, where she now lives. 21 00:02:25,080 --> 00:02:29,430 She's worked with Oxfam Africa and she also worked interestingly, 22 00:02:29,430 --> 00:02:36,239 I didn't know this on the Commission for Global Governance and managed the launch of their report, 23 00:02:36,240 --> 00:02:41,580 which many of you will remember our global neighbourhood. And she's recently been working quite a lot on, 24 00:02:41,730 --> 00:02:48,000 on the principle of the responsibility to protect from a variety of perspectives and non-Western perspectives in particular. 25 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:52,830 And she worked with Tom Weise on a publication which we launched here last year. 26 00:02:53,850 --> 00:02:59,700 So that is our panel. And as I say, a very illustrious one and a good one for discussing the issues today. 27 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:05,850 So I'm going to let Nigel begin and then we'll just go and turn before we open it up to discussion. 28 00:03:07,740 --> 00:03:18,480 Thank you very much. It seems to me that a lot of the public discussion of the role of religion in relation to peace and war is simplistic. 29 00:03:19,800 --> 00:03:27,390 And sometimes that simplistic discussion even takes place within the walls of universities. 30 00:03:27,390 --> 00:03:34,690 So I'm going to begin by complicating matters. First of all, I want to complicate peace. 31 00:03:37,910 --> 00:03:41,750 Peace can mean basically or tolerably just peace. 32 00:03:43,310 --> 00:03:49,550 It can mean a peace which establishes the conditions for social and individual flourishing. 33 00:03:51,140 --> 00:03:57,890 And where conflict is managed politically, that's optimal peace. 34 00:04:00,500 --> 00:04:03,830 Or peace can mean simply the absence of war. 35 00:04:07,230 --> 00:04:14,940 Or it can mean not the absence of war, but our not fighting it. 36 00:04:15,650 --> 00:04:23,670 And so in that last sense, in the sense of peace, meaning we're at peace. 37 00:04:25,950 --> 00:04:37,530 France and the UN remained at peace in 1994, which left the U2 at peace in Rwanda to slaughter 800,000 Tutsi. 38 00:04:41,410 --> 00:04:47,560 In other words, what was peace for us? For the lives of us? Wasn't peace for the Tutsi? 39 00:04:50,130 --> 00:05:00,600 Likewise, Europe and Nito remained at peace in 1995, which left the Bosnian Serbs, or some of them of peace, to slaughter 70,000 Bosnian Muslims. 40 00:05:00,600 --> 00:05:05,970 And for a breach of peace for us didn't mean peace for them. 41 00:05:06,780 --> 00:05:17,130 So the first point is peace. And when we talk about peace, we need to be discriminant and clear about what we're talking about. 42 00:05:18,240 --> 00:05:25,020 Some peace is good, unequivocally just peace where everyone flourishes and conflicts are resolved politically. 43 00:05:25,050 --> 00:05:30,720 It's good, unequivocally, that some other kinds of peace may be more morally ambiguous. 44 00:05:33,780 --> 00:05:38,280 So if peace is complicated, if you agree with me that peace is complicated, then so is war. 45 00:05:40,740 --> 00:05:45,690 Now, no sane person would dispute that war causes terrible evils, 46 00:05:47,700 --> 00:05:54,299 and by evils I mean non moral evils in the sense of damage or destruction that kills people. 47 00:05:54,300 --> 00:05:57,750 It names people, it destroys infrastructure. 48 00:05:58,800 --> 00:06:03,209 It's that evil, whether it's right or wrong. 49 00:06:03,210 --> 00:06:16,110 We get to decide to decide, but it's certainly evil. Some people believe that war causes such evils, that it can never be right to wage it. 50 00:06:19,300 --> 00:06:21,040 Those people we would call pacifists. 51 00:06:22,150 --> 00:06:33,309 Pessimists believe that war has always and ever were wrong and either that there are other sufficiently effective ways of dealing with, 52 00:06:33,310 --> 00:06:39,820 for example, the machete wielding Hutu mobs and ruthless Bosnian Serbs. 53 00:06:42,650 --> 00:06:46,000 Or they believe that there aren't effective alternatives. 54 00:06:46,780 --> 00:06:50,110 But the going to war would still only make things worse. 55 00:06:51,340 --> 00:06:58,660 But by the way, perfect pacifists reckon that going to war not only causes evils, but is always in the very wrong. 56 00:07:02,590 --> 00:07:12,910 However, if you're not if you're not a pacifist and I'm not, then going to war, notwithstanding the evils it causes, might be morally right. 57 00:07:14,380 --> 00:07:23,050 It might be morally justified depending upon the circumstances, and depending, of course, on what criteria of justification you use. 58 00:07:25,480 --> 00:07:33,640 So second obligation is that war is not simply evil in the moral sense of wrong unless you are a pacifist. 59 00:07:36,610 --> 00:07:45,280 Lots of my my my complications of religion. So I'm covering all three times and I'm talking just to make sure everything's properly complicated. 60 00:07:46,330 --> 00:07:55,210 But any student of religion knows that one of the most basic problems in the field of religious studies is how to define and identify religion. 61 00:07:55,870 --> 00:08:06,640 What is it? For example, is Buddhism, which is atheist, a religion, Buddhist, don't believe in a in a divine being. 62 00:08:07,810 --> 00:08:11,560 It is a fact of the atheist. Is it a religion? And if so, why? 63 00:08:13,540 --> 00:08:26,200 Or is Marxism, with its biblical faith in the assuredly upward, if not straightforward, march of history toward the communist social utopia? 64 00:08:28,030 --> 00:08:38,650 Is that religious? Is Marxism religious? So how we define what religion is is problematic. 65 00:08:41,870 --> 00:08:49,340 And even where we identify two phenomena that fall directly into the category of religion, 66 00:08:51,230 --> 00:08:56,360 how much does that allow us to presume that these two phenomena have significant things in common? 67 00:08:56,960 --> 00:09:04,940 For example, what exactly has a blood soaked Aztec priest got to do with a mild mannered Oxford Quaker? 68 00:09:05,940 --> 00:09:11,210 They're both religious. So to do that is an interesting and common. 69 00:09:14,100 --> 00:09:22,400 So the very concept of religion is difficult and elusive. What's more, any long standing religious tradition, 70 00:09:23,480 --> 00:09:29,180 especially if it's taken root in a variety of parts of the world, is going to be internally plural. 71 00:09:30,020 --> 00:09:37,840 So, for example, Christianity embraces, on the one hand, the anti militarism of the first three centuries A.D., 72 00:09:39,470 --> 00:09:47,120 the clerical and monastic issue of violence and the pacifism of the Mennonites and the Quakers. 73 00:09:48,890 --> 00:09:49,760 That's all on the one hand. 74 00:09:50,570 --> 00:10:02,420 On the other hand, Christianity also embraces the just war tradition that runs from Augustine in the early fifth century through Aquinas and Grotius, 75 00:10:02,840 --> 00:10:06,320 and right up to the present day, both the Christian. 76 00:10:10,160 --> 00:10:13,020 Both sides are Christian. And finally, 77 00:10:13,020 --> 00:10:24,120 any longstanding religious tradition that had has had the opportunity to shape public policy is likely to have had to have a mixed historical record. 78 00:10:24,780 --> 00:10:28,680 So on the one hand, for example, Christianity's record includes, of course, 79 00:10:28,890 --> 00:10:35,040 the Crusades and the Inquisition and the so-called religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. 80 00:10:37,020 --> 00:10:46,860 But then, on the other hand, there's also the tradition of just war thinking, which in tends to limit and moderate the use of violent force. 81 00:10:48,360 --> 00:11:01,019 And in that tradition is, for example, the courageous stand against the complicit Goodall's war on the Amerindians in the 16th century, 82 00:11:01,020 --> 00:11:07,020 taken by the likes of Bartolomeo de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, 83 00:11:08,100 --> 00:11:16,980 Victoria argued out of the Just War petition that the complicit laws justification for waging war on the Amerindians, 84 00:11:18,390 --> 00:11:25,950 namely that they would benefit from the imposition of the Christian Gospel. 85 00:11:26,820 --> 00:11:29,880 Vitoria said, according to just war principles, that is unjust. 86 00:11:34,520 --> 00:11:40,879 So all three terms of our discussion religion, war and peace are complicated and intelligent. 87 00:11:40,880 --> 00:11:51,020 Discussion of them will not permit I very much generalisation in the brief rest of what I have to say, 88 00:11:51,020 --> 00:11:54,290 I'm going to focus on the Christian tradition of just war thinking, 89 00:11:55,580 --> 00:12:01,720 whose first major proponent was a bastion of hippo in North Africa in the early fifth century A.D.? 90 00:12:01,730 --> 00:12:07,490 No. I mean, there's a whole industry working on just war doctrine. 91 00:12:08,590 --> 00:12:16,340 I'm going to limit myself to making about 3 minutes worth of remarks, but it'll get us going. 92 00:12:17,150 --> 00:12:25,280 So the first the first thing to say is that the theory of just war was born during the period when having 93 00:12:25,280 --> 00:12:32,450 spent the first three centuries of their existence on the social and political margins of the Roman Empire. 94 00:12:33,410 --> 00:12:36,890 And often, often at the sharp end of it, literally the sharp end. 95 00:12:38,270 --> 00:12:45,890 Christians in the fourth century A.D. for the first time had the opportunity to hold positions of political responsibility, 96 00:12:47,150 --> 00:12:58,700 and that included responsibility for maintaining law and order. So in the early four hundreds, Christian tribunes such as Marcellinus and Boniface, 97 00:13:00,050 --> 00:13:05,300 who had responsibility for keeping the peace by means of force if need be, 98 00:13:06,590 --> 00:13:17,209 wrote to Augustine of Hippo in North Africa to ask how their political responsibilities were compatible with their Christian 99 00:13:17,210 --> 00:13:27,200 profession and some of the earliest expressions of just war theory emerge in Augustine's pastoral response to them. 100 00:13:29,640 --> 00:13:43,230 That's where it started in Christian tradition. Here are a few highlights of what the just war or Just War Thinking consists of. 101 00:13:43,240 --> 00:13:47,550 First of all, the paradigm of a just war is not self-defence. 102 00:13:49,350 --> 00:13:52,350 Indeed, Augustine regarded self-defence as morally suspect. 103 00:13:53,730 --> 00:13:59,280 The paradigm of a just war is intervention to rescue the innocent from unjust aggression. 104 00:14:02,410 --> 00:14:09,850 So what that means, of course, is that the ethic of Christian just war thinking contradicts what has become 105 00:14:09,850 --> 00:14:14,920 international law and the dominant secular philosophical conception of just war. 106 00:14:15,730 --> 00:14:24,580 The paradigm is intervention, not self-defence. Second point, just war. 107 00:14:24,850 --> 00:14:30,400 Therefore also has the general form of punishment. And this is this is highly controversial. 108 00:14:32,860 --> 00:14:35,440 We need to be careful here what we mean by punishment, 109 00:14:37,210 --> 00:14:45,190 which nowadays is often conflated with retribution, which itself is often completed with vengeance. 110 00:14:46,390 --> 00:14:48,130 Both completions are mistakes. 111 00:14:50,200 --> 00:15:00,460 Just war has a basically punitive form in the sense that it is a negative or hostile response to the perpetrator of an unjust act. 112 00:15:03,550 --> 00:15:06,940 A negative or hostile response to the perpetrator of an unjust act. 113 00:15:07,210 --> 00:15:11,260 A just war, therefore, can't be basically about imperial expansion. 114 00:15:12,070 --> 00:15:16,450 It can't be basically about spreading the gospel to the Indians of the Caribbean. 115 00:15:17,410 --> 00:15:22,810 Nor can it be basically about compelling the Chinese to open up their markets to the sale of Indian opium. 116 00:15:25,000 --> 00:15:28,060 It can only be about responding to an act of grave injustice. 117 00:15:29,950 --> 00:15:34,270 The basic form of this war is punitive. That tells us nothing. 118 00:15:34,360 --> 00:15:40,900 Nothing about what punishment is for, but what it's what it ends or what its goals are. 119 00:15:41,890 --> 00:15:50,710 What should these be? Certainly the goals of punishment should be to halt the perpetration of injustice, 120 00:15:51,970 --> 00:15:56,950 to persuade the perpetrator not to resume it, and to deter others from pursuing it. 121 00:15:57,340 --> 00:16:02,320 In other words, defensive and deterrent. Those are those are the purposes. 122 00:16:03,940 --> 00:16:07,660 What the goal of punishment should not be is the annihilation of the perpetrator. 123 00:16:10,320 --> 00:16:17,040 Christian punishment may not be vengeful, and since there are international courts available, 124 00:16:17,430 --> 00:16:24,629 just war should not be retributive in the narrow sense of assessing the culpability of 125 00:16:24,630 --> 00:16:29,310 the main perpetrators of injustice and apportioning proportionate punishment to them, 126 00:16:30,210 --> 00:16:33,600 or as too blunt and indiscriminate an instrument for that. 127 00:16:35,400 --> 00:16:39,090 But it is punitive in defensive and in deterrence. 128 00:16:39,120 --> 00:16:47,540 Answers, finally. My final point, just war from a Christian point of view is war that is justified. 129 00:16:47,840 --> 00:16:56,299 All things considered, it is not war that is just in the sense of morally pure or holy just. 130 00:16:56,300 --> 00:16:59,300 War is not a crusade. It is not a holy war. 131 00:17:00,860 --> 00:17:07,490 It is only ever waged by one set of sinners against others, not simply by the righteous against simply unrighteous. 132 00:17:08,330 --> 00:17:16,070 It is absolutely not Manichaean. It does not distinguish sharply between the children of light on the one hand, and the turn of darkness on the other. 133 00:17:16,940 --> 00:17:22,640 And it is important to remember that Manichaeism was a Christian heresy, which Augustine repudiated. 134 00:17:23,660 --> 00:17:30,140 He wasn't out of here for a while, so he knew what he was talking about, knew what it repudiating, and which the church ever since has contradicted. 135 00:17:32,150 --> 00:17:36,350 We human beings are often bound up in each other's wrongdoing to some extent. 136 00:17:36,350 --> 00:17:41,270 For example, the victors of 1918 gave rise through the Treaty of Versailles to the rise of Nazism. 137 00:17:42,320 --> 00:17:49,340 But that isn't to say that France and Britain were wrong to go to war in punitive response to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1949. 138 00:17:50,270 --> 00:17:53,990 We went to war then with an appropriately heavy heart, and rightly so. 139 00:17:55,280 --> 00:18:00,300 So no simple, righteous against the unrighteous. Most of them. 140 00:18:01,470 --> 00:18:05,250 Thank you so much. Tony, over to you here. 141 00:18:05,280 --> 00:18:08,610 I've got to think we have so much to stand up on the podium. 142 00:18:08,730 --> 00:18:14,060 Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Delighted. Dominating perspective on. 143 00:18:17,460 --> 00:18:25,350 And I should say we need to be a bit kind to Tony because we've got a bit of a call. So I think you'll you'll manage to detect that as I go. 144 00:18:25,350 --> 00:18:28,530 And it may affect my timing. I've got this down 30 minutes, I think. 145 00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:40,440 Every era has assumptions of the past, of the mirror's positive and onwards, social, political outlooks and programmes of independence. 146 00:18:40,800 --> 00:18:42,030 Until recently, for instance, 147 00:18:42,030 --> 00:18:48,030 this apparent incapacity of women for the sort of reasoning required from political participation was one such assumption. 148 00:18:48,990 --> 00:18:55,380 The premises of the pervasive managerialism that in fact that has infected so many institutions of democratic societies, 149 00:18:55,770 --> 00:18:59,130 including Santa Fe universities, provide another example. 150 00:18:59,910 --> 00:19:07,469 The apparent business of widespread instinctive acceptance of such assumptions make them hard to expose to 151 00:19:07,470 --> 00:19:14,520 critical evaluation or to have such evaluation taken seriously in our own time and for some time earlier. 152 00:19:14,640 --> 00:19:20,430 Another such assumption has been that which assigned to religion and religious difference an inherent tendency to violence. 153 00:19:21,300 --> 00:19:25,110 It seems to me that this assumption is wrong, or at least sufficiently wrongheaded, 154 00:19:25,500 --> 00:19:30,420 to distort our understanding of both religion and the resort to violence such as warfare. 155 00:19:31,650 --> 00:19:35,520 In this short talk, I went directly to discuss religion and peace, 156 00:19:36,330 --> 00:19:41,730 but a critique of the assumption about the tendency to violence should remove some obstacles to that discussion. 157 00:19:42,990 --> 00:19:46,680 Recently, the assumption and its implications have started to come under stringent scrutiny, 158 00:19:47,130 --> 00:19:52,710 most radically in Bill Kavanaugh's writings, culminating his book The Myth of Religious Violence. 159 00:19:53,670 --> 00:19:57,000 Kavanaugh's thesis, to summarise his thought all too simplistically, 160 00:19:57,480 --> 00:20:04,680 involves two separable but supporting arguments to the effect that claims about the inherent tendency of religion to promote violence, 161 00:20:05,310 --> 00:20:07,050 to open up, to be taken seriously. 162 00:20:08,670 --> 00:20:16,470 One is the sharp separation of religion from other areas of human life is peculiarly modern emotion and a mostly Western phenomenon. 163 00:20:17,220 --> 00:20:22,080 Consequently, much of the evidence for the violent propensities of religion is drawn from context in 164 00:20:22,080 --> 00:20:26,550 which motivations for violence multi-faceted and what would now be called religion, 165 00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:29,370 merely one integrated element in a motive set. 166 00:20:30,780 --> 00:20:36,960 This integration continues today in societies that have not embraced secularity in the way that most European society have. 167 00:20:38,100 --> 00:20:42,900 The second argument is that the repeated failures by theorists to provide a satisfactory definition of religion. 168 00:20:43,440 --> 00:20:49,260 So the idea, which has already been mentioned by Nigel, shows that the idea of religion is too muddled, 169 00:20:49,740 --> 00:20:54,450 even incoherent, to support the claims about religion's tendency to promote violence. 170 00:20:56,160 --> 00:21:00,960 Kavanaugh does not, of course, deny that there are particular faiths such as Christianity and Islam. 171 00:21:01,710 --> 00:21:05,640 But he thinks that the construct religion is a sort of vague portmanteau into 172 00:21:05,640 --> 00:21:09,660 which all sorts of old fashioned things are put by the modern secular mind. 173 00:21:10,800 --> 00:21:12,900 The advantage for that secular mind, according to him, 174 00:21:14,250 --> 00:21:22,290 is to facilitate a sharp contrast between its own benign prominences and the potential dark savagery of those who don't conform to its prescriptions. 175 00:21:23,940 --> 00:21:26,040 I think Kavanaugh's critique is very valuable, 176 00:21:26,310 --> 00:21:32,100 but some of his claims about how difficult it is in past cultures to find a phenomenon like what we call today religion, 177 00:21:32,670 --> 00:21:37,500 and how distinctive is our current separation of religion from other aspects of life are disputable. 178 00:21:38,370 --> 00:21:45,900 Although pre-modern societies did not place such a wide gulf between the domains of religion or those of politics and other particular activities, 179 00:21:46,530 --> 00:21:49,080 there is plenty of evidence that they distinguish between them. 180 00:21:49,950 --> 00:21:57,390 Indeed, Christ's dictum the of the things of the seasons of God, the things that are God already contained such a distinction. 181 00:21:58,620 --> 00:22:01,839 Martin Rees spoke about the new book, The Promise of Salvation. 182 00:22:01,840 --> 00:22:05,250 The Theory of Religion provides plenty of counterexamples as well. 183 00:22:06,540 --> 00:22:14,130 Moreover, it's plausible that a broad, though no doubt fuzzy definition or general account of religion can be serviceable, 184 00:22:14,460 --> 00:22:17,550 though it will no doubt contain some element of stipulation. 185 00:22:18,270 --> 00:22:25,800 Read about provides an interesting such account predominantly in terms of characteristics of characteristic action rather than belief. 186 00:22:26,250 --> 00:22:31,829 It concentrates on practices that quote aim at establishing contact with superhuman 187 00:22:31,830 --> 00:22:36,840 powers with the purpose of averting or mitigating misfortune and securing salvation. 188 00:22:38,790 --> 00:22:43,320 Well, what do we think of that? Or of canon, of analytic rejection, of the religion concept? 189 00:22:43,890 --> 00:22:49,920 The integration argument that Kavanaugh announced is detachable from his more sweeping claim and initially more plausible 190 00:22:50,760 --> 00:22:56,459 to take the terrorist activities of contemporary Islamic fundamentalists as simply manifest manifestations of religion, 191 00:22:56,460 --> 00:23:00,900 for instance, is to ignore the way that their religious commitments complement and intersect with 192 00:23:00,900 --> 00:23:05,340 political outlooks and grievances that would make perfect sense to non-religious people, 193 00:23:05,610 --> 00:23:12,150 even though they seldom bother to examine such motivations, convinced as they are that the cause of the violence is wholly religious. 194 00:23:13,140 --> 00:23:19,890 But as a lot of papers argue, an examination of the motives and background of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2003, 195 00:23:19,890 --> 00:23:23,250 a total of 315 attacks excluding those commissioned by states. 196 00:23:24,150 --> 00:23:29,340 An examination that shows that religion is seldom what he called a significant factor in the motivation. 197 00:23:29,880 --> 00:23:37,350 Papers recently upgraded his day. Buddhism is now examined over 2000 suicide bombing cases with similar conclusions. 198 00:23:37,530 --> 00:23:41,610 He sums up his conclusions as religion is rarely the root cause, 199 00:23:41,790 --> 00:23:48,870 though it's often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. 200 00:23:49,950 --> 00:23:53,160 Inevitably, work and methodology have come under criticism, 201 00:23:53,520 --> 00:24:00,240 especially regarding his strong claims about the unique role of foreign intervention of occupation in provoking terrorist attacks. 202 00:24:01,440 --> 00:24:01,919 Nonetheless, 203 00:24:01,920 --> 00:24:09,690 his basic claims about the relatively slight or secondary nature of religious motivation in most suicide bombings compared to the mundane, 204 00:24:09,960 --> 00:24:14,670 earthly ones is, I think, accurate enough to be instructive for my purposes. 205 00:24:15,930 --> 00:24:22,050 So I would say there are three things with the focus on religion's supposed spatial and adherent tendency towards violence. 206 00:24:22,530 --> 00:24:28,800 Violence tends to obscure one that there are many dreadful outbreaks and then justify violence. 207 00:24:29,220 --> 00:24:32,670 The cause or motivation of origins of which have nothing to do with religion. 208 00:24:33,180 --> 00:24:39,749 Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin, they are only right are responsible for staggering massacres that cannot be attributed to their orders, 209 00:24:39,750 --> 00:24:46,170 religious implications, or that they follow it. Followers war in spite of Richard Dawkins claim to the contrary. 210 00:24:46,710 --> 00:24:50,070 Is it credible that Hitler's murderous campaigns had a religious motivation, 211 00:24:51,030 --> 00:24:55,469 even in less dramatic conflicts than these factors like nationalism, border disputes, 212 00:24:55,470 --> 00:25:00,840 great power ambitions, imperialism and racism have been significant factors in outbreaks of violence, 213 00:25:00,840 --> 00:25:04,890 including wars, often with little or no influence from religion. 214 00:25:06,210 --> 00:25:10,980 Secondly, but the simple credo of religion causes violence like Christopher Hitchens 215 00:25:10,980 --> 00:25:15,850 ludicrous subtitle of his book God Is Not Great How Religion Poisons Everything. 216 00:25:15,870 --> 00:25:22,859 It ignores too many distinctions. There are and have been all sorts of religions with a great many different practices, 217 00:25:22,860 --> 00:25:26,190 ethical commitments and changes over the course of their history. 218 00:25:27,090 --> 00:25:32,340 It may well be that some religions or versions of the same religion are prone to further violence, 219 00:25:32,340 --> 00:25:39,090 towards violence where other religions or other versions of the same religion and no such tendency, 220 00:25:40,290 --> 00:25:45,990 even if it could be shown that Islam, such as Osama bin Laden, had a commitment to unjustified violence. 221 00:25:46,410 --> 00:25:51,510 This would have no relevance, for instance, from the Sufi version of Islam, nor the Quaker version of Christianity. 222 00:25:53,070 --> 00:26:02,670 Three That the focus on religion as a major cause of wars, terrorism or other forms of political violence obscures many of the more mundane, 223 00:26:02,760 --> 00:26:09,720 specific causes of violent conflict that political leaders and the rest of us often find inconvenient to acknowledge. 224 00:26:10,410 --> 00:26:15,390 This is true even when there are issues of religion invoked by the leaders of the campaigns of violence. 225 00:26:16,230 --> 00:26:20,700 Even Osama bin Laden's various diatribes, referring to holy duties and caliphate, 226 00:26:21,270 --> 00:26:24,300 contained numerous claims about straightforward political grievances, 227 00:26:24,630 --> 00:26:31,740 such as Israel's occupation of Palestine, land and military policing and political persecution. 228 00:26:31,740 --> 00:26:36,090 As he saw the Palestinian people claims about past and present Western support for 229 00:26:36,090 --> 00:26:39,660 Middle Eastern dictatorships and Western exploitation of Middle Eastern assets. 230 00:26:40,380 --> 00:26:47,850 The United States historic deployment of troops throughout Arab lands and of course, more recently, the US led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 231 00:26:49,050 --> 00:26:54,340 A fascinating example of the complexity I been trying to point out is Peter Wilson's new book, 232 00:26:54,340 --> 00:27:01,500 A History of the 30 Years War, which argues that this war so often invoked as the typical religious war, 233 00:27:01,800 --> 00:27:07,020 the duration of which was caused by religious fanaticism in the common understanding, 234 00:27:07,380 --> 00:27:11,280 was it, Wilson says, quote, Not primarily a religious war at all. 235 00:27:12,270 --> 00:27:15,209 There were, of course, religious elements that could hardly have been otherwise. 236 00:27:15,210 --> 00:27:21,570 In 17th century Europe, when Christian fight was an aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects. 237 00:27:22,080 --> 00:27:30,360 But most contemporary observers, he says, quote, spoke of imperial, Bavarian, Swedish or bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant, unquote. 238 00:27:31,260 --> 00:27:38,460 The war, indeed, began with a somewhat religious episode, the famous defensive defenestration of Prague, 239 00:27:38,700 --> 00:27:46,440 in which a Protestant Protestant gang threw three Catholic imperial officials out the window. 240 00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:55,680 They fell from the height, appealing to the Virgin Mary, and landed in the sun almost entirely unarmed. 241 00:27:56,580 --> 00:28:05,880 No doubt those youth will think that is nothing to do with you, but I'm rather impressed by that. 242 00:28:06,120 --> 00:28:10,320 Beginning with that, the ferocity and duration of the war was not you. 243 00:28:10,350 --> 00:28:14,790 Argues Wilson, to religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure. 244 00:28:15,210 --> 00:28:22,980 As one reviewer of the book summarises the argument, quote, The empire's hundreds of small territories were able to fight. 245 00:28:22,980 --> 00:28:27,060 They assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages, and triggered a ruinous inflation. 246 00:28:27,450 --> 00:28:31,410 Unpaid armies could be neither supplied, and then they thought remained in. 247 00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:39,030 The field nourished on plunder. A crucial point in unlikely three considerations is that a primary factor in outbreaks of violence? 248 00:28:39,420 --> 00:28:44,160 Is attachment to identity and Balaam a perceived threat to it? 249 00:28:44,730 --> 00:28:50,760 Religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment alone, but so do a great range of other things. 250 00:28:51,210 --> 00:28:56,490 Identity is closely related to power, self-respect and perceived culpable positioning, 251 00:28:56,940 --> 00:29:05,190 so that religion will often be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant identities by those who have or want power. 252 00:29:05,910 --> 00:29:09,090 I think probably the relation between the sexes is important. 253 00:29:09,600 --> 00:29:15,959 Is important. The fashioning of a male identity was often dominant overall, as we thought, 254 00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:22,290 with often dominant roles over and against female has been a feature of history because religion has contributed. 255 00:29:22,290 --> 00:29:26,640 But it seems to me to be even deeper sociologically than any religious influence. 256 00:29:28,140 --> 00:29:31,950 I was going to finish with a brief word piece, but go ahead. 257 00:29:32,430 --> 00:29:39,180 It's very brief and probably not very helpful, but I just thought I would cover the ground. 258 00:29:41,310 --> 00:29:45,030 I've said very little about religion and peace, so I'll conclude with a brief comment. 259 00:29:45,630 --> 00:29:51,870 Peace is a complex concept that with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages, 260 00:29:52,170 --> 00:30:01,380 I dealt with some of these complexities in my book Morality and Political Violence, available at all good bookshops for a very reasonable price. 261 00:30:03,030 --> 00:30:05,640 I would conjecture without being that what I had to get into, 262 00:30:07,890 --> 00:30:14,040 I would conjecture without being an expert on comparative religion that there are very few religions that don't make the value of peace. 263 00:30:14,040 --> 00:30:21,600 A significant part of it, not a garden, for instance, places at the heart of his Christo's intricate ethical system along with love. 264 00:30:22,380 --> 00:30:25,500 It's true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians, 265 00:30:25,770 --> 00:30:31,830 he thought it compatible with the idea of just war and extremists, though other Christians have required pacifism. 266 00:30:32,460 --> 00:30:39,900 Certainly there's room for peacemakers and activists to build upon the doctrines of priests, at least in many religions. 267 00:30:40,230 --> 00:30:44,240 And that's why I thought it might be a lot of fun. 268 00:30:44,760 --> 00:30:48,690 Thank you very much. It's great, Grandma. 269 00:30:50,130 --> 00:30:54,750 You're going to stand as well. Are you going to sit? Whatever you like. I'll stand so I can see everyone. 270 00:30:54,750 --> 00:30:57,930 Should they stand here, they may be a stand that they have something for something. 271 00:31:00,020 --> 00:31:10,370 Lucky thanks to Ella somehow managing always to pull together occasions like this so we can get into a real debate having the argument. 272 00:31:10,370 --> 00:31:16,910 And I'm very happy I come third and it's very tempting to jump right into the debate with all of what you put on the table. 273 00:31:17,240 --> 00:31:21,530 I'll start with the points I wanted to make, because it fits in very well where Tony left off, 274 00:31:21,890 --> 00:31:25,640 where I would agree that we need to move away from the simplifications, 275 00:31:25,880 --> 00:31:31,700 the simple causality that is drawn all too often since especially the end of the Cold War between religion and war, 276 00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:42,740 the simplicity around peace and war and the moral goodness of badness, and whether or not religions are simplistically drawn towards violence. 277 00:31:43,490 --> 00:31:50,899 What I would say is, while deferring to the fact that religions have managed in many of religious leaders, religious movements, 278 00:31:50,900 --> 00:31:58,600 religious initiatives have managed to make extraordinarily inspiring contributions to peace in many different ways. 279 00:31:58,610 --> 00:32:03,319 We won't go into that right now from kind of individual examples like Sant'Egidio to Occupy. 280 00:32:03,320 --> 00:32:05,600 The whole time I started speaking, what is it, 281 00:32:05,600 --> 00:32:16,820 one of seven or so in Mozambique or to movements like peace movements to a religious leaders of different faiths in the Great Lakes region. 282 00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:29,510 On the whole, I would be still inclined to argue that religions remain today a greater malady, a greater cause of violence than a cause of peace. 283 00:32:29,900 --> 00:32:37,070 And the problem, I feel, is that we as academics, have jumped on to the bandwagon of looking primarily at extremism and extreme 284 00:32:37,190 --> 00:32:42,709 religious fundamentalism as the cause of such violence that deflects attention, 285 00:32:42,710 --> 00:32:47,480 as you very rightly pointed out, for what I think is much more serious, which is right under our feet. 286 00:32:48,110 --> 00:32:55,580 It was found in the year 2000 and the Millennium Survey that was conducted by Gallup, that contrary to our belief in secularism, 287 00:32:55,760 --> 00:33:00,520 actually something close to 90% of the world's population claims to be fearful, 288 00:33:00,920 --> 00:33:06,350 or possibly a maximum of about 14% would define themselves as atheists. 289 00:33:06,350 --> 00:33:11,270 Everyone else is agnostic. Plus the vast majority still remain Christian and Muslim. 290 00:33:11,270 --> 00:33:14,300 But for those Hindus also very, very a major. 291 00:33:14,600 --> 00:33:24,829 And I would say that what we really need to be looking at is the mainstream beliefs and unexamined practices of the mainstream believer. 292 00:33:24,830 --> 00:33:30,670 So it's not those few extremists at the fringes of the Islamic and other, you know, 293 00:33:30,740 --> 00:33:35,840 cultish movements who suddenly have explosions of violence here and there, including terrorist violence, 294 00:33:36,110 --> 00:33:40,550 but actually mainstream beliefs and practices, because these are accepted, these are not examined, 295 00:33:40,760 --> 00:33:45,380 and they are the cause for, if not both current violence and potential violence. 296 00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:52,459 Let me highlight some of the reasons why I believe religion for these respects to be peaceful does involve invited, 297 00:33:52,460 --> 00:33:58,370 has been called upon to examine and possibly conclude by seeing what could change or how could this be changed? 298 00:33:59,060 --> 00:34:00,830 What are these common beliefs and practices? 299 00:34:01,790 --> 00:34:07,240 Many religions will come back, hopefully in the discussion to discuss what are religion them talking about the principal, the media. 300 00:34:07,490 --> 00:34:11,630 There are something like 2500 religions out there. No, 12,000. 301 00:34:11,960 --> 00:34:18,350 But the five major ones have the majority of of people adhering to them. 302 00:34:18,590 --> 00:34:22,610 So the major religions the first one is the belief in singularity. 303 00:34:22,880 --> 00:34:33,020 My religion is the best we can see how easily it has in the past and continues to at present lead to divisions within society, 304 00:34:33,170 --> 00:34:39,920 domination within society. Which leads to the second problem, which is many of these religions have proselytising tendencies. 305 00:34:40,190 --> 00:34:46,490 Even religions which were originally not proselytising like Buddhism, have become major proselytising. 306 00:34:47,060 --> 00:34:50,210 Many reasons why proselytising is going on across the world. 307 00:34:50,390 --> 00:34:55,040 We now know the majority of Christians and Hindus are not in their countries or regions of origin, 308 00:34:55,250 --> 00:34:59,390 but in Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. Why is this a problem? 309 00:34:59,630 --> 00:35:00,770 The kinds of incentives, 310 00:35:00,770 --> 00:35:08,780 including financial incentives given across that is privatisation leading to a huge cleavage in haves and have nots within these societies, 311 00:35:09,020 --> 00:35:13,309 a change in religious demographics within one generation. 312 00:35:13,310 --> 00:35:21,710 And the consequences of that, the fact that we know that recent converts are much more prone to extreme behaviour in their religious view. 313 00:35:22,970 --> 00:35:29,690 And so all the reasons why Protestantism is an ongoing cause of concern practised by religions. 314 00:35:30,050 --> 00:35:36,920 The third one is anthropocentric system, the belief central in Abrahamic religions, but community picked up by others. 315 00:35:37,190 --> 00:35:40,639 That man is the apex of creation and that all of creation, 316 00:35:40,640 --> 00:35:48,920 all of nature is at his I his deliberately disposal to use and get rid off which has led throughout history and right now. 317 00:35:48,920 --> 00:35:58,610 I mean are the centre of a kind of rapacity that we simply of exploiting nature and exploiting lesser beings believing that he is the cream of. 318 00:35:59,180 --> 00:36:08,540 Male authority, which to already referred to the exclusion of women from positions of authority and extraordinarily by extraordinary violence, 319 00:36:08,750 --> 00:36:14,570 which religion has condoned or sometimes exhorted against women within the community, 320 00:36:14,750 --> 00:36:19,010 which is directly related to the kind of violence we've seen in the Democratic 321 00:36:19,010 --> 00:36:23,570 Republic of Congo in all these conflict against women outside the community. 322 00:36:23,810 --> 00:36:28,730 If religion is so permissive about violence within two women, within your own family. 323 00:36:28,940 --> 00:36:31,980 Well, where are the bounds when it's outside force? 324 00:36:32,240 --> 00:36:38,750 Again, referred to by my colleagues the North connection nexus between religion and power, 325 00:36:40,070 --> 00:36:49,070 bowing very often not to the dictates of the founding fathers or mothers of religion being at the service of justice in this world, 326 00:36:49,070 --> 00:36:57,140 as in the universe, but rather of consorting with power to the negligence of issues of injustice. 327 00:36:57,950 --> 00:37:03,650 And then this issue, which is completely overlooked, the attention given to form over substance, 328 00:37:04,010 --> 00:37:08,930 the predominance of gradualism and maintaining the institutions, 329 00:37:09,140 --> 00:37:15,799 often not simply ignoring but actually contradicting the fundamental values underlying that religion, 330 00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:23,000 the founding of universal principles of that religion, the imperviousness to change in. 331 00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:32,990 If we go back and look at how all major religions had built into them very, very deep practices of debate, critical inquiry, discussion. 332 00:37:33,230 --> 00:37:35,809 You know, the Socratic debate was not limited to Socrates. 333 00:37:35,810 --> 00:37:42,620 It was at the core of even Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam was all about that which has disappeared. 334 00:37:42,620 --> 00:37:52,430 And now there's a rigid appearance to the rituals, the practices, but not actually examining the fundamental truths and and debating them, 335 00:37:53,090 --> 00:38:00,739 which has meant that all of this has led to religions becoming the opposite of what they were meant to be and defined as being, 336 00:38:00,740 --> 00:38:04,640 which is the degree which ought to have been a triple linkage, 337 00:38:04,820 --> 00:38:09,889 really taking human beings to ourselves through the internal debate to each other 338 00:38:09,890 --> 00:38:13,850 within society and our societal dealings with each other and us in the universe, 339 00:38:13,850 --> 00:38:23,450 and how we deal with this creation of which we are part. And I would say these are the reasons why these unexamined beliefs and practices, 340 00:38:23,450 --> 00:38:30,829 which most of us are somehow involved with one way or another on most religions and religious believers are involved with these 341 00:38:30,830 --> 00:38:39,650 other causes for violence deserving as much attention now as the extremist fundamentalist actions that we tend to study much more. 342 00:38:40,010 --> 00:38:42,920 What could be the way out? A few simple steps. 343 00:38:43,310 --> 00:38:53,120 One would be for all religions, religious institutions, religious believers and individuals to systematically prioritise justice over power, 344 00:38:53,390 --> 00:39:00,860 to return to the kind of commitment that one finds in traditions like like the theology, 345 00:39:01,190 --> 00:39:04,430 liberation theology of Latin America, which spread across the Global South. 346 00:39:04,850 --> 00:39:13,520 The second would be to integrate everything that has been excluded, divided, marginalised, of course, starting with women. 347 00:39:13,700 --> 00:39:16,249 But all of the other kinds of discrimination, 348 00:39:16,250 --> 00:39:22,340 often very violent that goes on and is justified by religion and thinking of gays and thinking of minorities, 349 00:39:22,340 --> 00:39:27,860 of lower caste in my own country, of origin, of undertaking critical inquiry, 350 00:39:27,860 --> 00:39:34,160 bringing that back into the core of religious practice, not resort learning, not practice of rituals, 351 00:39:34,340 --> 00:39:41,000 but critical inquiry of bringing together religion and bringing together the rationality with faith, 352 00:39:42,680 --> 00:39:50,959 moving off the high pedestal of believing that monotheism is somehow the pinnacle of human development and evolution and bowing, 353 00:39:50,960 --> 00:39:57,440 deferring to the wisdom of so-called costal religions at this age of ecological devastation, 354 00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:06,290 recognising what they were seeing of our place very humbly as a small part of an interdependent universe, which we are rapidly destroying. 355 00:40:06,500 --> 00:40:12,260 So bringing in this value of cosmic pandering and turning towards self-examination, 356 00:40:12,470 --> 00:40:19,310 contemplation and conscious evolution rather than the triumphalism that tends to go with religions, 357 00:40:19,880 --> 00:40:24,980 I end up as I can't help it with two wonderful women and their quotes from Teresa of Avila 358 00:40:24,980 --> 00:40:34,160 Such a champion for introspection in the world gone crazy in Spain with the Inquisition, 359 00:40:34,160 --> 00:40:39,650 who said Why this great war between the countries, the countries inside of us? 360 00:40:40,130 --> 00:40:44,570 What are all these insane borders you protect? What are all these different names for? 361 00:40:44,570 --> 00:40:47,570 The same church of love you live together for? 362 00:40:47,570 --> 00:40:58,340 It is true. Together we live on only at a shrine where all are welcome Will God sing loud enough to be heard and on many centuries before her her. 363 00:40:58,730 --> 00:41:03,620 So the Sufi in in Basra, Rabia is on his sleeve, too. 364 00:41:03,620 --> 00:41:09,650 And Singh said, in my heart there was a temple, a church, a synagogue. 365 00:41:10,700 --> 00:41:20,450 What is that? A mosque where I knew prayer should bring us to an altar where no gods and no needs exist. 366 00:41:20,840 --> 00:41:22,460 And if we could return to that. 367 00:41:22,970 --> 00:41:31,490 Religions, all religions, the believers and the non-believers and the agnostic could become actually champions of building peace in our society. 368 00:41:31,880 --> 00:41:35,450 Thank you. And I hope that leads us into a lively discussion. Thanks so much. 369 00:41:36,740 --> 00:41:43,879 Grateful everybody stuck fairly well to time. So I opened up to the questions. 370 00:41:43,880 --> 00:41:44,420 Comments.