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In the history of hate, the 20th century was rather an anomaly. The Holocaust was little about religion — not a single accusation of Jewish heresy was ever proposed as the rationalization for the slaughter — and everything to do with scapegoating. Regardless the difficulty, it was the Jews in toto or individually that was the root. In Leninist and Stalinist Russia, and in Mao’s China it was the suspicion one was not sufficiently or sufficiently genuinely to the party. In the US it was all to skin pigmentation. Religion or the particular religion’s god were irrelevant to either the hate or its vile expression. And that was what made the last century so unique. This one it seems is returning us to our roots.
I’m raising the issue now, during the holiday season, for two reasons: to plea for a tad more honesty and a lot more tolerance. (And yes, it’s the ‘holiday’ season, not just the Christmas one. Hanukkah and Kwanza occur during the same period. By the way, “Christmas” is only tangentially connected to Christ. The first intonation to December 25, as no authority is 100% certain, seems to have been by Sextus Julius Africanus of Libya — get THAT: an African! Moreover, the revered ‘season’ owes at least as much to the pagan worship of the return of longer days as it does to Jesus of Nazareth.)
But what’s this got to do with Iraq, or the administration’s treatment of our military and veterans? I’m getting to that.
As to the honesty part, the inconsistencies that are part and parcel of believers’ faith are impossible to gloss over. The horrible disease that strikes a young child has nothing to do with any part of an all-powerful god, but the heavens rejoice at God’s love if the child unexpectedly recovers. And the erstwhile omniscient God is seemingly unknowing until He of a sudden hears the prayers of the family and friends of the stricken child. It’s as if He is a military drill sergeant, “I can’t hear you!” Pray harder, and “I still can’t hear you!” Pray harder yet, and voila, “Now that’s more like it, the child shall be saved.” And what of the child who isn’t? Does that translate as some indictment of either the child or his or her parents? Was that child less worthy somehow? Were not the pleas of his or her family sufficiently earnest or ardent?
More honesty, religious beliefs are by definition the sacrifice of intellectual reason to mere doctrine that does not require evidence for its support. Indeed, frequently solid evidence must be eschewed, sanctioned against as heresy in order to maintain the purity of the doctrine.
Any time “because” serves as an adequate answer, the genuine truth of the matter becomes irrelevant by necessity. Hopefully an anecdote will illustrate this proposition. From around 1603 to around 1633 or so the infallible Church under Pope Urban VIII brought this old Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer, we’ll call him Galileo, under the authority of the Inquisition for openly espousing Copernicus’ absurd notion the earth revolved about the sun, as opposed to the once again infallible Church truth that it was the sun that orbited the earth. The Church held as it did because it was in the Bible, God had said so; Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 104:5 and "Ecclesiastes 1:5. End of discussion. Guilty.But what’s this got to do with Iraq, or the administration’s treatment of our military and veterans? Hold on. Hold on. I’m getting to that. Just a couple more facts on behalf of honesty and I’ll connect the dots.
Everyone has heard it: The United States is a “Christian country.” The facts are it never was nor was it ever intended as one. Let me pull from the dusty drawer the text of the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, unanimously agreed to in the United States Senate, and which was signed at “. . . the shores of Tripoli”: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,[sic]-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [sic] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”Whatever horrors are being visited on others by some Moslems today are not less than those Christians have levied on those who were not esteemed to have found Christ. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The depravities perpetrated in the name of Christ: burning at the stake, disembowelment, quartering, the iron maiden, ethnic cleansing. Nor were Christians alone in their potential for savagery. The Incas and Mayans and Hawaiians and the African tribes all had their homicidal rituals on behalf of this or that god. The loving god was concomitantly vengeful and jealous, regardless that neither of the latter attributes reconcile with anything construable as the least bit loving.
Pertaining to tolerance, I’d only ask those who claim to recall the charge to love one’s neighbor and the parable of the Good Samaritan to recall neither had anything whatsoever to do with loving one’s friends or helping a stranger and everything to do with loving those who hate us and seeing past superficial features. “For if ye love them who love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the tax collectors the same?” And the cultural context that framed bigotry and prejudice the Samaritan parable sought to discredit was “Can anything good come out of Samaria?”
None of this augurs toward not retaining a strong self defense, or not employing that defense when the need calls for it. Rather, to get off the high self-righteous horse and out of the carriage of self certainty.
But all of us are to one extent or another are the same: We do see the mote (dust speck) in our brother’s eye, while being blind to the beam in our own.
I was raised in Allen Park, Michigan, a suburb just outside Detroit. Every Tuesday, after school, the Catholic priests and nuns would visit the elementary schools, to hold catechism. There they indoctrinated the captive students to believe they were better, more loved by God, than those of us who were not of that faith. (I was reared Presbyterian.) The best we could hope for was a Purgatory, while the true believers, the Roman Catholics might obtain Heaven. (Look, seven and eight year olds just don’t make that stuff up on their own.) However the efforts had little influence on who they played with, the effort to obtain some social segregation amongst us, based on religion was, manifest.
In Palmetto, Florida it is against the law to sell alcoholic beverages from a grocery or other store on Sundays. There is no secular rationale behind the prohibition. It’s entirely Southern Baptist generated and maintained. But why? Jesus turned the water into wine at the wedding feast, and served wine to his disciples at the Last Supper. And Paul recommended “a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” It’s because the 100% twisted prohibition against partaking alcohol is how Baptists believe everyone should behave, and so help me God, everyone will. No other reason. (If they didn’t believe that “everyone” had to abide their doctrine, they’d never have pushed the law. They’d leave it to their parishioners to follow the sect’s instructions and to others to follow their own personal paths unfettered by any civil code.) Yet, in that town as well as much of the Belt, they have the power. What if they also felt that naming a teddy bear Jesus was blasphemous? And what if they had absolutely unrestricted power? If, on behalf of one’s ideology, one can wield power to pro- and prescribe behaviors that all must comply with, what else . . . if one has absolute power, unrestricted by anything external? Really don’t think so? Check history; not just Baptist history, but all human history.
(By the way, I am not picking on either the Catholic Church or Southern Baptists. It’s just that the facts are there, en route to a point concerning the irrationality of religious doctrine and accordance, and how it leads to the intolerance that makes war so easy to justify thereby.)
Contrary to anyone who would argue it is not, it is not such a long journey to perceive how the Sunnis and Shia can resort to atrocities against each other, on behalf of their Moslem tenets, or Moslems against everyone else. Let’s ignore for a moment the lies and incompetence that got us into the tragic mess that is Iraq, and ponder that what’s keeps us there and Iraq, as well as most of the Mid-East a tragic and highly dangerous mess is nothing other than the sacrifice of intellectual inquiry on the alter of religious imperative.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Really . . . please have some. And share the happiness with your brother and your sister, no matter that they may be from Samaria and do not share your personal religious beliefs. I fully understand that no fundamentalist Moslem is likely to receive and/or read a word of these sentiments, but the tidings are to them as well. And who knows, perhaps if everyone could cut the crap, including them, our soldiers truly could come home.
— Ed Tubbs
