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One small voice in the proud tradition of FreeBlogging*Tuesday, August 17, 2004posted by gbarto at 1:36 PM:Bjørn Stærk has taken a pretty good look at one unfortunate development of late: the gradual lumping together of Islam and Islamism.Islam is a religion. Like all religions, it asserts that it has ultimate truths, truths worth dying for, and truths quite possibly worth conquering for. Like most religions (all that I've seen), it's also riddled with logical contradictions of the sort that only the hardiest believer could bear, never mind try to reconcile into a coherent worldview. Most religions call for peace, promote love and brotherhood and mention that these will come shortly after a great and mighty god rubs the unbelievers' noses in their own impiety. If you read the texts, there are legitimate reasons to believe this about my religion. To my chagrin, instead of praying for every last soul to find their way to the true path so that the awful vengeance mentioned in my religious texts would be unnecessary, some adherents of my faith seem to revel in the fact that they'll get to have the last word as the wicked are smote. That's certainly what I took from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's "more in sorrow than in anger" declarations that God no longer loved us if He allowed 9/11 to happen - and why would He, given our deviation from those gentlemen's ideas for what we should be... And frankly, there's an element of that thinking going all the way back to Dante (and doubtless before). The problem here is that where the rubber meets the road with religion is a place called the human being. Human beings are quite possibly the best things God ever made, with apologies to dogs, cats, rainbows and vanilla ice cream on a hot summer afternoon. But like our fanciest computers, they're a mess. If you talk to Freud, we all want to sleep with our mothers, and if you watch Jerry Springer, half of us have. We're the species that brought you 9/11 - the senseless destruction of 3,000 lives and acts of heroism that would have made Homer's jaw drop. We've given the world Michelangelo... and Hitler, Bach... and Idi Amin, Aristotle... and Jerry Springer. (I know, I know, billions of people throughout history and he's stuck for a sixth!) Religions are, to the understanding of their adherents, God given. But they're also a way that human beings make sense of the world. And with all due respect to the divine letters of Sanskrit and the sacred origins of the runes, we're doing it with imperfect human languages. We cannot know the mind of God, because it works differently from ours. We, in the U.S., live in a first world country where every year one or two epileptic or asthmatic children die because a "healing" goes bad. Where a certain number of people believe that fossils are the work of a cunning Satan trying to trick us. Where, less than a hundred years ago, the state of Kentucky declared pi to equal three in all real estate transactions, because 3.14... was too hard to figure with. When you are confronted with a philosphy that explains, literally, life, the universe and everything, you're likely to get worked up about it. But with imperfect human understanding, we're bound to make a hash of it. We can't even picture four dimensions. How are we to conceive of the perfect unity of creation? We can't. Smart people treat this discovery as an opportunity for humility and introspection. And even contemplation of the world around them but outside of them. Then there are those who make the pieces of the puzzle fit, dammit, even if the end result doesn't look like anything. We call these people -ists, because if something lacks a logical explanation, naming it obscures the fact. Less than a millenium ago, an awful plague was unleashed across Europe. Many were killed, sacred sites were desecrated, the general worth of humanity was discarded as secondary to the holy cause of the moment. It was called the Crusades. It featured such inspiring moments as Saint Louis IX of France's death in the Holy Land - from diarrhea. It featured the rise of a likely corrupt but certainly profitable group of monks who lived in castles with their vows of poverty - the Templars. Its high point, unquestionably, was the sack of Constantinople, in which thousands of Christians were robbed and slaughtered in the name of Jesus Christ. And can we forget the Inquisition? The Catholic church has certainly tried. What happened during the Crusades, and during the Inquisition, wasn't Christian. It violated many of the most basic precepts of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Some things happened that can't even be justified with the Old Testament! Christianity, glad to say, has survived. It offers a noble teaching that encourages us to love our fellow man, to consider the interests of others as our own, to forgive both others and ourselves while thanking God for the truest and most saving grace, His divine forgiveness of those who follow the way of His Son. That's not what the Crusades brought. That's because they were an -ism. Call it Christianism. It was an ideology that asserted that select men, in the name of God, could direct the resources of man toward remaking the world to fit a certain picture of what Christianity should, in the end, produce. It was not, mark you, an attempt to live to the fullest as a Christian. It was an effort to make others live as Christians, and such compromises as were made in the middle were taken for granted as a) excused by flimsy readings of the really bad parts of the OT and probably Paul and Peter and b) necessary for the greater glory of God. The world survived Christianism and a much better Christianity ultimately emerged. But lest we forget, it was less than 250 years ago that the Divine Right of Kings was first firmly tested by the French and American Revolutions. 150 years ago, there were still monarchists trying to restore the House of Bourbon to the status God wanted for it. So to look askance at the Islamists is, more than anything, to fail to recognize just how fast we've come to where we are. Christianism, in the end, was undone by the Enlightenment. What is interesting is that Christianity survived, though Christianism didn't. In fact, in the most religious Enlightenment society, the United States, political liberty and religious free will seemingly merged, with the state getting a whole new role in protecting Christianity - creating a space for individual conscience that the state would not interfere in. That also creates a space in which one may freely be a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist or whatever, so long as you don't disturb the neighbors. We take this for granted today, but two or three hundred years ago, it was assumed that the state needed to act to protect people's virtue. Somewhere between the inquisition and putting people in stocks for missing church, one will find the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Closer to the inquisition end of the spectrum, you'll find the Wahabbists. But if history is our guide, a time will come - as with the Enlightenment - when making the puzzle pieces fit becomes more inconvenient than tangling with the local Iman. In places, that time is already arriving. It's happened for Musharraf. But it's also happened for a fair number of Palestinians who just want to reopen their shops. It's happening with Iraqis all over the place. Today, we're actually not in so horrible a place. Yes, the threats of nuclear terrorism, etc, persist. But the historical sweep indicates the dying of another -ism, Islamism, even before the word has fully caught on. So let us be careful in contemplating Islam, Islamism, Al-Qaeda, etc. Al-Qaeda is, unquestionably, evil. As was the inquisition. Both perverted institutions designed to guide humanity into tools for debasing and oppressing it. Islamism, like Marxism, like Christianism, is headed for the ash-heap. The appropriate response is not disdain for Islam (how many people stood up to the Inquisition, at first?), but a morbid disgust at what happens when small minds and smaller hearts are joined in an effort to make a backward picture of the world go forward. Pray that it's over soon. Take heart, for on the historical timeline, at least, it will be. * * *
French Elections, 1st round
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