Why Am I a Cultural Judeo-Christian?

For me, these explanations were far from sufficient. I’ve written many times that atheism is not a worldview – it is merely a conclusion drawn from science that the existence of some immaterial, omnipotent intelligence is so improbable that it cannot be accepted. Atheism, however, is just a gate, beyond which lie many roads. It usually intertwines with some ideology – unfortunately, very often a criminal one. In my youth, I had nothing to do with atheists in red ties, and today I have nothing to do with atheists parading in keffiyehs – and not only just with them.

Religion is tied to human evolution. Traces of mystical thinking can be found in artifacts dating back to the dawn of Homo sapiens. In other words, ever since the “naked ape” – or, if you prefer, the “third chimpanzee” – began burying its dead and leaving valuable objects with them, we know that its mind was asking more difficult questions than just whether the shadow hides food or deadly danger. There are no human societies without religion, and secularization merely means replacing religious wars with ideological ones – which still bear all the hallmarks of religious wars.

The history and evolution of religion itself form a pillar of our knowledge about how social order and moral codes are built. When I call myself a humanist, I am invoking hundreds of authors who were believers – often heretics within their own religions, rejected by the clergy but influencing the minds of future generations. Both language – which preserves laws and customary norms – and the moral codes embedded in civil law have, in every country, their religious DNA.

An economic historian tells his students that there are only three types of culture – wheat, rice, and maize – but religions are tens of thousands of years older than agriculture. Animals dream, but it was only language that allowed us to share those dreams, to ask questions about the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, to express fear not just through body language. Yes, in the beginning was the Word. Only with language could we share our dreams and speak of encounters with the dead within them.

What does it mean to say that I am a cultural Judeo-Christian? The pioneer of British conservatism, Edmund Burke, sought a politics that preserves from tradition what is best and does not hesitate to discard what is harmful. Perhaps today we should call this evolutionary traditionalism – the opposite of revolutionism, which seeks to build a new world on the ruins of the old one.

“Judeo-Christianity” is a strange term. It’s hard to say whether Christianity is a branch of Judaism, a reformed continuation of it, or perhaps a plagiarism. That last word might partly explain the astounding hatred that Christian churches have historically shown toward Judaism and its followers. Thieves rarely feel warmth toward those they’ve robbed – they also tend to slander them. And yet they cannot disown the connection, so we sometimes say that our European civilization is Judeo-Christian.

Richard Dawkins is right – if we were to forcibly detach ourselves from our entire religious tradition, we would lose the ability to understand literature, the way our ancestors thought, we would cripple language.

But there’s more. Revolutionary atheization leads to identity disruption, hinders communication, creates a new platform for religious-style conflicts, and destroys culture. However we look at it, the evolution of morality and legal systems was coupled with the evolution of beliefs – which only slowly changed alongside scientific progress. Atheism has no catechism of its own, and like in the past, it borrows – sometimes well, sometimes poorly.

This is nothing new. Religions have also blended and influenced each other, and we often lose track, not knowing anymore what came from where and by what path. When you ask where the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” comes from, most Christians will say it’s from the Torah or the Talmud. The fact that it reached them via the Code of Hammurabi – and that it doesn’t symbolize vengeance, but rather a principle of proportionality, that punishment should not exceed the harm – is known and understood by only a few.

David S. Landes (father of Richard Landes), a brilliant American historian and economist, once pondered why agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent and not in the Americas or somewhere else. It was due to the presence of the most easily domesticated plants and animals. The consequences of agriculture beginning there were far-reaching. Farming made food surpluses and division of labor possible, made slavery economically viable, led to class stratification, the division into professional, armed protectors and farmers or artisans. This, in turn, allowed for the formation of social organisms larger than nomadic clans in search of food.

All this created new frames for imagination and new systems of belief.

We might find it comical, but in the Bible, even the sons of Adam and Eve are founding cities. I vividly remember a brilliantly written satirical story about how the Sumerians burst into laughter watching the Jewish God create the world. Our rationality is limited – constrained by the time and place of our birth and a few other factors. The emergence of agriculture led to the unification of wandering clans into states, and in the next stage, to the attempt to merge a crowd of tribal gods into a single, omnipotent deity.

The road to discovering the evolutionary origin of species, to the emergence of genetics, neurology, and other fields of science, led to a better understanding of the phenomena that – in entirely understandable ways – used to push people toward belief in supernatural beings. But that road had to be long, and the discoveries that shattered the structure of existing thought – the structure upon which the whole social order rested – inevitably provoked unease.

Today, we have once again reached a moment of heightened irrationalism, triggered by the frustration that comes with a destabilized identity. National identity and religious identity have both come under heavy fire – often overly zealous rejection, or desperate defense.

Were it not so tragic in consequence, it might be almost funny that, once again, one of the reactions to identity crises is a furious wave of antisemitism.

In the search for a compromise between change and continuity, many people fall into a rage bordering on paranoia. Some – like fanatical Muslims – are ready to kill out of fear of atheism and moral decay. (Religious fanaticism leads to absurd forms of conservatism.) Others dive into revolutionary frenzy – which often brings similar results and pushes them toward shallow yet fiercely held opinions that pave the way for hatred of those who think differently.

It is a global trend that has reached all of us.

We cannot change it. We can only try to expand the space of moderation, and above all, build our own awareness – that we are a tiny link in the chain of generations, and that impulsive actions might harm those who come after us.

Yes, I am an unbelieving cultural Judeo-Christian – the heir not only to the dark chapters of the past, but also to the legacy of heretics who stubbornly tried to crack the “unchanging truths”. They were rejected – like Copernicus and Galileo, like Darwin and so many others. But in the end, it was they who made continuity possible.

The Egyptian philosopher Murad Wahba bristles at the phrase “clash of civilizations”. He says that there is only one civilization – the opposite of barbarism – and that preserving its continuity is a struggle that can give meaning to life. (He himself devoted his best years to the study of the life and work of Averroes, who preserved Aristotle’s legacy from Christian barbarism.)

And how does one become a cultural Judeo-Christian?
That’s an interesting question – one I’m still trying to answer.