What does Richard Dawkins mean when he says love your neighbor?
Richard Dawkins discusses the concept of ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ in The God Delusion to debunk the religion’s claim that its primary message is love and compassion. How independent do we think this analysis is? Let’s look at this analysis as objectively as we can.
Dawkins begins with the statement that ‘neighbor’ in biblical terms only refers to Jews, and that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ actually means ‘Thou shalt not kill Jews’. The merit of the ‘Love thy neighbour’ idea itself is, of course, ignored. Dawkins is too concerned about pursuing his agenda. As to the truth of the matter, he draws most of his cited ‘evidence’ from an article by John Hartnung. Dawkins provides no substantive evidence, merely stating that Hartnung’s research shows that this is so. As an example of this ‘evidence’, Hartnung refers to a study of Jewish children’s attitudes by an Israeli psychologist, George Tamarin. This draws a contrast between the group’s attitude toward the death of Jews and non-Jews in the Old Testament. Not surprisingly, children were much more prepared to tolerate the murder of non-Jews than Jews. Dawkins himself concludes that these children have been indoctrinated into a racist attitude because of their religion.
All of this sounds very revealing, but it doesn’t prove much else that things were very different in Old Testament times. Whether we like it or not, God chose the Jewish nation to receive the word that he was the only God. The events of the Old Testament need to be evaluated in the context of that truth. We cannot draw conclusions based on current interpretations of events that happened thousands of years ago, particularly when those interpretations are made by children. Furthermore, Dawkins’s point that the opposite results obtained by the control group (where the mention of Judea was replaced with a fictional Chinese kingdom), showed that religion had affected the children’s morality, is exactly as one might expect. The religious perspective is that morality derives from God. Therefore, no doubt the children believed that ‘God had his reasons’. For my part, I also struggle with some of the events of the Old Testament, but that does not undermine my faith. I realize that we cannot compare current attitudes with earlier times, when ideas, canons and creeds were propagated and enforced exclusively through violence. I trust that if you were to take the historical context out of Hartnung’s study, the results would be very different.
As for the New Testament, Hartnung draws the same conclusions, stating that Jesus was a devotee of the same group mentality and that it was Paul who invented the idea of taking the gospel to the Jews. This seems to me to be little more than wishful thinking on Dawkins’ part, and it is interesting to note that he does not expand on this idea, except to make Hartnung’s unsubstantiated quote that “Jesus would have turned over in his grave.” if he had known that Paul was taking his plan to the pigs. I won’t comment on this except to say that, in my opinion, the language Hartnung uses tells us more about him than his comment about Jesus.
The issue of whom Jesus addressed his message to is addressed directly by Geza Vermes in The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. He considers the question: Did Jesus intend to address only the Jews, or did he expect the gospel to benefit the entire non-Jewish world? (Geza Vermes, by the way, is a former Christian and ex-Catholic priest). He concluded that there were clear statements that Jesus intended only to address the Jews, but equally clear statements conveying the opposite point of view. He therefore, after “having considered all the evidence”, identified the following dilemma:
“Either Jesus took a strictly pro-Jewish stance and the later introduction into the Gospels of pro-Gentile tendencies must reflect the viewpoint of the early church, which by then was almost exclusively non-Jewish. Or it was Jesus who took the universalist position and this was replaced at a later stage by Jewish exclusivism.”
So, according to Geza, one way or another, the gospels have been subject to later revision. Either the almost exclusively non-Jewish makeup of the early church introduced pro-Gentile leanings, or Jesus took a universalist position that was later superseded by Jewish exclusivism. Vermes himself takes the view above, that the verses reflecting a pro-Gentile point of view were introduced to appeal to the non-Jewish early church. Vermes has no evidence (he himself says that, “having considered all the evidence”, there is a direct choice), he simply chooses one over the other based on his own personal inclination.
Vermes is a scholar known for his books on Jesus, but this does not mean that his interpretation is not open to controversy. There are two reasons why we can find faults. First, if the early church was as totally non-Jewish as he claims, then surely the revisions to the text would have been more significant with many of the references to Jewish exclusivity removed altogether. Second, he ignores the possibility that the gospels are, in fact, accurate and simply reflect different considerations at different times. Considered in this light, we can see that although the bulk of Jesus’ ministry was undoubtedly directed largely to the Jews, this does not necessarily mean that he was not intended to bring salvation to all. In undertaking his task, he would have been aware that his message would have to favor the Jews or they would not have followed him. Once Jesus had reached a critical mass in his ministry, the target of his message could begin to broaden. This enlargement was then given to Paul and the other evangelists who took it to the rest of the world. This interpretation is the most consistent with the evidence.
Having dealt with the ‘Jewish’ problem, Dawkins expands on his ideas about group enmity. Although Dawkins acknowledges that violence is perpetrated in the name of countless other ideologies, he argues that religion is particularly pernicious as it is passed down from generation to generation. Without the in-group/out-group enmity labels, he argues that the division would not exist and therefore the reason for the violence would disappear.
Dawkins is right when he identifies group loyalty as a powerful force. However, there is nothing to suggest that the religious divide is more or less pernicious than any other divide. Man has what Dawkins himself calls “powerful tendencies toward ingroup loyalties and outgroup hostilities.” The truth is that it is in the nature of man to band together and fight against other groups, regardless of labels. Much of the fighting and suffering done in the name of religion has nothing to do with God, just as much of the fighting and suffering done in the name of freedom and equality has nothing to do with these ideals. This is explored in more detail in the section on Hitler and Stalin.
Dawkins concludes the section by saying:
“Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its unbridled and carefully nurtured division, its deliberate and cultivated indulgence of mankind’s natural tendency to favor ingroups and avoid outgroups, would be enough to make it into a significant force for evil in the world.”
This point is totally bogus. It is similar to a child saying, he made me do it, in the sense that he transfers the responsibility to someone or something else. Ultimately, man commits evil and is responsible for it. Nowhere is this clearer than in Dawkins’ won philosophy. God does not exist, religion is a creation of man, so where is the fault? It’s just too convenient to blame ‘labels’. Who has created these ‘labels’, ‘evil forces in the world’, these ‘religions’. Dawkins is hauled up by his own firecracker, because there is only one answer. Men. Therefore, if there is only Man and he has created such forces, if we get rid of religion, one would have to assume that Man would reinvent it again, or at least a variety of the same (a ‘religion’). ‘ not believing in God, maybe – let’s call it atheism). Unless, of course, you believe in the generally progressive change of the moral zeitgeist, that we have now evolved to a state of higher morality. Even a brief overview of the history of the 20th century discredits such a claim.