'Not In God's Name' Confronts Religious Violence With A 'Different Voice'
NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks about his new book, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence
All Things Considered
October 08, 2015
4:41 PM ET
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his new book about religious violence, writes a great deal about the book of Genesis. All the major figures of the first book of the Hebrew Bible are complex characters. The best have their faults, he writes. The worst have their virtues. And Sacks insists on the importance of that moral complexity. He writes this. Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God. Rabbi Sacks joins us from London. Thanks for joining us today.
JONATHAN SACKS: Good to be with you.
SIEGEL: We should note that most of the political violence of the last century was the work of secular movements - Nazism, communism. How important is religion to violence in the world today?
SACKS: I think it's absolutely fundamental, certainly in the Middle East, certainly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and certainly in parts of Asia. And nobody expected this because for the last three centuries, every self-respecting Western intellectual has been predicting that religion was in intensive care and soon to leave humanity altogether. So this is really unexpected. But what we are seeing is, after a set of failed secular ideologies and, in the Middle East, secular nationalisms, a set of religious counterrevolutions that are combining religion with politics in the most destructive way.
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446980200/not-in-gods-name-confronts-religious-violence-with-a-different-voice
7:48 audio at link.