Richard T. Hull
The role of religions in the use of torture as a tool of oppression
This small but encyclopedic work provides an astonishingly thorough introduction to the range of world religions,m their histories, their adherents, and their central doctrines. It is a handy reference work for those who have encountered exotic points of view in travels outside of their own culture and system of beliefs. It also can serve as a resource for those who would debate their own views with others that do not share them.
Were those its only virtues, this book would be a valuable addition to any library. It supports interfaith dialogue, jump-starting those intense exchanges beyond initial declarations of beliefs to examination of their history and implications for internal and external relations between cultures and collections of believers. In a world given to increasing cultural diversity within countries, the student fortunate enough to receive a liberal education will find this work broadening in the way travel is said to broaden.
A closer examination, however, reveals a deeper and more revolutionary motive of the author, himself a victim of torture as detailed in his first work, Torture in the Age of Fear. The increase in torture as a political tool is increasing, perhaps exponentially, and Ezat Mossallanejad finds that increase to accompany the powerful draw of religions of nearly every stripe for their adherents to non-humanistic convictions of the certitude that comes from zealous belief in scientifically untested claims about a supposed non-physical dimension of reality. Given human fear of death, any religion that promises some kind of personal survival for those who behave in accordance with its precepts finds a ready flock of desperate adherents willing to commit atrocities upon their fellow humans at the behest of leaders who seek the advantages of wielding power.
Mossallanejad’s inherent humanism drives him to consider each of the nine major religions in terms of the dynamics of belief: identity, receptivity to claims of revelation and miracles, prescription of codes of conduct that are rooted in the objectifying of Others, debasement of humans as demonic or angelic, all driven by doctrines of after-life reward or punishment. The effectiveness of these dynamics is already well understood by science.
Contemporary neuroscience has established that the amygdala, a part of the brain that is interactive with higher cortical centers and regulates fundamental emotional responses to others, enlarges in individuals who have experienced sustained trauma, conflict, punishment and torture, with the result that they despair of effective control over their lives and world and are primed for the promise of power and salvation through belief in whatever religion is most immediate in their situations. This enlargement in turn contributes to xenophobia, or fear of the unfamiliar, selective perception that emphasizes the significance of a small number of violent extremists, and discounting the much wider phenomena of human tolerance and international sisterhood/brotherhood. Examination of the brains of individuals who have during their lives, been subjected to traumatic stress syndrome shows the amygdala to be significantly enlarged, predisposing those individuals to a perpetual attitude of apprehension and aversion to being perceived as “different.”
The cruel return of gods” is Mossallanejad’s phrase for the increasing exploitation by religions and nation-states of this cluster of phenomena, and the exposure of the extent to which otherwise kind and reasonable people may be driven either to commit or to support torture, war, subjugation, practices of rape, genital manipulation, severe punishment for so-called crimes of blasphemy is a deep motive of this work. I had the pleasure of meeting in Toronto in July of 2011 with this remarkable survivor who has struggled to rise above the neurological alteration of his own brain by his experiences, and dedicated his life to helping other victims of torture who have escaped to a country that seems to have resisted the descent into international and internal conflict better than most. Walking with him through the streets of Toronto, I was struck by how many people in that very cosmopolitan city greeted him with the kind of warmth reserved vfor very few wise and very good persons. Ezat Mossallanejad is beloved by the victims of the toxic religious-political complex that, to use Christopher Hitchens’s powerful phrase, “poisons everything.” I do fervently hope that this little book will open the eyes of all of its readers to the dismal effects of religions that so overshadow and overwhelm the goods that they do.
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