Philosophy of Religion

  (out of 5 stars)

Religious scholar Hector Avalos, better known for his book The End of Religious Studies, tackles a contentious subject in Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence. Avalos argues his theory that religions create scare resources (regardless of whether real or imaginary) which lead to various levels of violence in order to defend, gain, or promote them. He posits that there are four main areas where scarce resources are created, namely through divine revelation (inscripturation), sacred space (such as Jerusalem), group privileging, and salvation. While Avalos is clearly a dedicated, detailed, and highly intelligent researcher, Fighting Words offers a dense format that often slowed and obfuscated his argument to the reader.

From the beginning, Avalos makes it clear that the book will serve as a direct rebuttal of arguments (of other writers and researchers) which determined that religions are largely peaceful and that violence is an aberration of the nature of religion. The interpretations of these 'pacifist'-leaning researchers are deemed 'essentialist' and found to be no more reasonable than the fundamentalist interpretations. Large parts of each chapter are dedicated to describing the arguments Avalos seeks to counter, and at times, the narrative bogs down in explaining them.

Avalos explores the three main Abrahamic religions and how each has created scarce resources which inspired violence. The strongest part of the book for me involved a long discussion of Hitler and Nazism and how the anti-Jewish violence was largely rooted in Biblical scarce resource creation. The comparison of Mein Kampf and the Bible (as inspirational sources of value) is fantastic and compelling.

The last few chapters were weak (to me). The discussion of secular states and Avalos's solutions left much to be desired as the author admits frequently that the solutions he offers are unlikely and possibly ineffective.

Fighting Words offers a dense history of some aspects of religious violence and is clearly aimed at scholarly readers familiar with the materials. I felt that there were many examples of the author missing obvious events worthy of consideration and instead concentrating on incidents that (perhaps) were not the best available to address (and I admit this was likely determined by specific arguments within the scholarly circles and not as much by popular non-scholarly debate subjects). While much of the book was clearly written for Avalos's fellow researchers, a lot of history and argument were within my grasp as an intermediate non-professional religious reader. Strong scholarship, solid-but-not-concise argument, and decent attention to the subject await the reader therein. Three and one-half stars.