The following is a dialogue on the root causes of war and religion, and, in general, on whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing. It consists of comments made by Dread Jo Davies and my replies to his comments, on a Facebook posting promoting my new book, Psychedelic Christianity. The Facebook posting featured an endorsement of the book, along with a link to the Amazon page for it. The endorsement read as follows:
”A highly trained philosopher, Jack Call (Ph.D., Claremont) takes great care to present clear and convincing arguments, and as someone who has walked the walk, speaks with authority about both psychedelic and religious experience.”—Kurt Smith, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
The dialogue went this way:
Dread Jo Davies: Why get fucked up on religion or drugs when you can do both!
Me: The trouble with saying “fucked up” is that it sounds like something bad.
Dread Jo Davies: Yes, religion is one of earth’s diseases with seemingly no cure.
Me: All religion? Are you sure? Because my religion doesn’t feel like any disease I’ve ever had — more like healing.
Dread Jo Davies: Religion=war, has done for thousands of years, an atheist world would be a peaceful world, especially if they did away with currency too.
Me: I doubt very much that if everyone ceased to believe in God and to use currency, there would be fewer wars. But if so, I would think that it was a good thing that there were fewer wars but not a good thing that people had ceased to believe in God.
What I would say is that no genuinely religious goal is advanced by forcing anyone to do anything.
I don’t think I would prefer a world without the use of currency. I suppose that would be one in which people would barter for goods? But I confess I haven’t given it much thought.
Dread Jo Davies: Yep, bartering with goods and favors, probably wouldn’t work but we all know the two main factors of all war going on right now, and that is money and religion.
Me: I think the root cause of war is the desire to control other people’s actions.
Dread Jo Davies: I think the same as that last sentence — just replace war with religion.
Me: I think the root cause of religion is the realization that there are important things that one cares about very much that are not under one’s control, either individually or in concert with others, and never will be.