Friday, April 01, 2005
The Dead Weight of the Past
The world is suffering from the continuing pressure of the dead weight of the past. Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus are entranced by texts written long ago, in contexts very different from the modern world, by people who could not have any understanding of the ways of thinking that educated people everywhere now take for granted. We must clearly affirm that neither the Torah nor the Christian Bible nor the Quran are the word of God. Pick up any one of these texts and read for a while. Even those who believe that God exists in some form cannot believe that God would have sent down messages meant for all time that were so clearly related to the time and place of their recording or transcription.
People have always been killed and tortured in the name of religion. But that this should continue, that it should threaten the very existence of American democracy based on the separation of powers should cause everyone to pause for a minute. In a desire to embed multiculturalism in our society and institutions, many liberals concluded years ago that questions of belief should not be raised in polite society. "Everyone has their own book, and they have a right to follow what it says." But we can accept this no longer. When the book of the Jews is read to grant them all of Palestine while the book of the Muslims leads them to understand that they have a god-given right to the same territory, we outsiders, the interpreters of our day, must come clean. We must clearly declare that no religious book has the authority to guide anyone today.
In the United States, fundamentalists — Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish — insist that the findings of verified science in field after field must be dismissed because they are not found in their holy books. The result is that millions of "schooled" Americans reach maturity deeply confused about the meaning of the modern world and how to react to it. Many Christians have been taught to believe in a violent second coming, a belief so strongly advocated by some that they would be glad to see an all-out war of Jews and Muslims in Palestine — it would herald the glorious end of time. Some Christians have even seen nuclear war in this light, believing that it is actually what the Book of Revelations leads up to. Elite American policy makers cannot blithely carry the country forward and maintain the peace as long as these dead weights continue to pull us down.
In the Middle East, fundamentalist Islam continues to teach that women are inferior, that they were put on the earth to serve men and bear children. As the history of Pakistan has demonstrated, no matter how many liberals rise up to leadership positions in Muslim societies, there is always the danger that a politico-religious group will be able to undermine the progress toward equality that fitfully occurs. "Real democracy", in the sense of free and fair elections, may carry such societies back to the Middle Ages. I have always felt that the Draconian measures of the Turkish army to keep religion out of politics (Islam cannot be mentioned in a political context) cast doubt on the sincerity of the commitment of the Turkish elite to democracy. Now, however, I wonder if such Draconian means are not essential in the Islamic context for the world to grow up.
All peoples must eventually mature into educated modern peoples free of the burdens of the past. If they do not, their leaders will not be able to work out a means to face the escalating difficulties of a world whose relentless material expansion threatens us all.
People have always been killed and tortured in the name of religion. But that this should continue, that it should threaten the very existence of American democracy based on the separation of powers should cause everyone to pause for a minute. In a desire to embed multiculturalism in our society and institutions, many liberals concluded years ago that questions of belief should not be raised in polite society. "Everyone has their own book, and they have a right to follow what it says." But we can accept this no longer. When the book of the Jews is read to grant them all of Palestine while the book of the Muslims leads them to understand that they have a god-given right to the same territory, we outsiders, the interpreters of our day, must come clean. We must clearly declare that no religious book has the authority to guide anyone today.
In the United States, fundamentalists — Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish — insist that the findings of verified science in field after field must be dismissed because they are not found in their holy books. The result is that millions of "schooled" Americans reach maturity deeply confused about the meaning of the modern world and how to react to it. Many Christians have been taught to believe in a violent second coming, a belief so strongly advocated by some that they would be glad to see an all-out war of Jews and Muslims in Palestine — it would herald the glorious end of time. Some Christians have even seen nuclear war in this light, believing that it is actually what the Book of Revelations leads up to. Elite American policy makers cannot blithely carry the country forward and maintain the peace as long as these dead weights continue to pull us down.
In the Middle East, fundamentalist Islam continues to teach that women are inferior, that they were put on the earth to serve men and bear children. As the history of Pakistan has demonstrated, no matter how many liberals rise up to leadership positions in Muslim societies, there is always the danger that a politico-religious group will be able to undermine the progress toward equality that fitfully occurs. "Real democracy", in the sense of free and fair elections, may carry such societies back to the Middle Ages. I have always felt that the Draconian measures of the Turkish army to keep religion out of politics (Islam cannot be mentioned in a political context) cast doubt on the sincerity of the commitment of the Turkish elite to democracy. Now, however, I wonder if such Draconian means are not essential in the Islamic context for the world to grow up.
All peoples must eventually mature into educated modern peoples free of the burdens of the past. If they do not, their leaders will not be able to work out a means to face the escalating difficulties of a world whose relentless material expansion threatens us all.
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