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Professor looks at God from 2 angles

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by Beth Mueller

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

A Northwestern University professor decried the justification of violence through religion, calling it "hijacking of God to assist human politics, greed and aggression," during a lecture at the Pyle Center on the University of Wisconsin campus Tuesday.

Regina Schwartz, a professor of law, literature and religion at NU examined the Judeo-Christian God in Biblical stories from two perspectives — one of vengeance and law, and the other of generosity and love. She used these to contrast a religion endorsing violence with her own religious philosophy, focused on justice through love, which she said is absent from secular philosophy.

Schwartz said her argument is based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel, specifically in God's preference for one brother's sacrifices over the other's.

"God is portrayed as playing favorites repeatedly, with someone receiving his blessings at someone else's expense — some are blessed, and some are cursed," Schwartz said.

She linked this scarcity of blessings to modern religion-based conflict.

"There will be no blessing for some. God may bless America, but what about all the other nations of the earth? That may be another matter," Schwartz said.

She went on to argue this competition to possess both God's blessings and physical resources has yielded identities based on distinction from "the other" throughout history, and through this competition groups seek also to "possess God."

"The possession of objects can be helpfully contrasted, it seems to me, with the love that knows no possession, a love that presupposes an endless supply, even before the reality of scarcity," Schwartz said.

She added in biblical religions, "Love is always bound to justice."

"I thought she made some very good points about the justifications of war and death in the Bible," UW junior Sam Dorn said.

However, other students disagreed with certain points in Schwartz's presentation.

"By virtue of scarcity, like human nature and desire, there will be violence, and then eventually they'll justify it with whatever their ideology is, be it monotheism, polytheism or atheism," UW junior Mike Abts said. "She acted like monotheism is the reason it happened, but that seems to be not the case at all."

UW junior Bryce McNichols also found some fault in Schwartz's reasoning.

"She acted like if things in the Bible would have been different, maybe the history of violence would have been different," McNichols said. "But I don't think that's the case; I think people act how they want to act and then use their religion to justify that."

The lecture, titled "Holy Terror and Holy Love," was part of a series of events sponsored by the UW Center for the Humanities.

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