richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

TII 1- ' G O O D ' B O O K A N D T H E M O R A L Z E I T G E I S T 257
falls into one's power, one transgresses a negative commandment,
as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.'
Unlike Maimonides, the children in Tamarin's experiment were
young enough to be innocent. Presumably the savage views they
expressed were those of their parents, or the cultural group in
which they were brought up. It is, I suppose, not unlikely that
Palestinian children, brought up in the same war-torn country,
would offer equivalent opinions in the opposite direction. These
considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense
power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of
children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and
hereditary vendettas. I cannot help remarking that two out of
Tamarin's three representative quotations from group A mentioned
the evils of assimilation, while the third one stressed the importance
of killing people in order to stamp out their religion.
Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A
different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text
from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua's own name replaced by
'General Lin' and 'Israel' replaced by 'a Chinese kingdom 3,000
years ago'. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7 per
cent approved of General Lin's behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved.
In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was
removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed
with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share.
Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks
different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts
early in life. It was religion that made the difference between
children condemning genocide and condoning it.
In the latter half of Hartung's paper, he moves on to the New
Testament. To give a brief summary of his thesis, Jesus was a
devotee of the same in-group morality - coupled with out-group
hostility - that was taken for granted in the Old Testament. Jesus
was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the
Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I
dare: 'Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known
that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.'
Hartung has some good fun with the book of Revelation, which
is certainly one of the weirdest books in the Bible. It is supposed to