The Dalai Lama is right. All religious traditions do have messages of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, all religions also have messages of hate, cruelty and condemnation. The conundrum of religion, as we saw illustrated in the On Faith discussions with author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, is that for every claim that religion does good in the world, there are also the well-documented examples of religious messages of intolerance, moral callousness and judgmentalism, and the harm that they have caused.
The problem, however, is even more convoluted than simply that all religions proclaim contradictory messages. Love, compassion and forgiveness can be used against individuals and groups through certain kinds of religious interpretation. I have spent many years working and volunteering in the movement to end family violence. Battering husbands often accompany their violent acts with the language of love, citing the oft-quoted scripture that wives need to “submit” to their husbands. Battering parents do the same, telling their child that a violent punishment is “because I love you” and “for your own good.”
Violent people love violently, stupid people love stupidly, selfish people love selfishly and so forth. Love without justice can degenerate into sentimentalism and finally into narcissism.
Compassion is a widely respected religious virtue and rightly so. Yet compassion or empathy can keep us from confronting destructive behaviors in others. The virtue of compassion has been thrust upon women as their sole responsibility in relationships. Finally, empathy for others can erode the important and healthy sense of an integrated self that everyone, women and men, children and adults, needs to function as a separate individual.
And finally, forgiveness. Women are often urged to “forgive” their batterers. Many women have told me in counseling sessions that when they took their problem of domestic violence to their local preacher, they were urged to “forgive the beatings as Christ forgave us from the cross.” Forgiveness cannot be separated from the need of the one who is perpetrating the violence to confess the wrong and change. Then and only then does forgiveness become possible and sometimes still it takes a very long time for people to let go of the hurt that has been done to them, the deep meaning of forgiveness.
The Dalai Lama commands world-wide respect and admiration not only for his espousal of the virtues of love, compassion and forgiveness, but for his practice of them in a way that sets them in the context of peace and non-violence. Absent that context, these virtues can be corrupted beyond belief—corrupted as much as the machinations of their seeming opposites of hate, cruelty and condemnation.
I believe that the practice of peace and non-violence is the greatest religious lesson the Dalai Lama has to teach us all.
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