Honest Doubt Part 9 - Paying the Price

This program looked at how religion in the west has dealt with opposition by banning books and excommunicating heretics (when they weren't being killed). The program in particular looks at Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch-Jewish philosopher whose radical views caused him to be expelled by Jewish religious leaders and his books placed on the Papal Index of Forbidden Books.

I'm concerned at the "othering" of religion in this program. When we listen to it we are encouraged to think we would never do these things now, how terrible that those in power should physically punish people and materially ban books just because they don't agree with the ruling ideology.

But are we really so different? We don't have a list of banned books which people aren't allowed to read, but we have a list of banned drugs that people aren't allowed to take. The "bad ideas" it was decided would stop people functioning successfully in society and so they should not be allowed to consume them and the books and those who provided the books should be banned. By the same token drugs today - it is decided - would stop people functioning in society and they are therefore banned - are controlling states of mind and controlling ideas really so different? I'm not saying all drugs are good, I'm pointing out that perhaps there is more of an overlap between our ways of thinking and those in the past than the program wants to acknowledge.

The same argument could be made about excommunication and prison. Today we put hundreds of thousands of people in prison, for the same reasons that people were excommunicated - that they would in some way cause damage to society. Indeed it could be argued that in some ways excommunication was better than prison, so again, are we really so different in how we treat those we deem "outside" of society?

Intolerance come from an inability to listen, and to listen we need to identify places of engagement with the person speaking. If we "other" religion and make it something totally alien and different to ourselves then we lose the ability to listen to it, and so become intolerant of it, something I don't think was really the aim of the programme. Religion needs to become more puzzling and fascinating to us before we will discover how to listen to it again.