Religion vs. religion

As often happens, my thoughts this morning are influenced by a report aired on NPR’s Morning Edition in combination with what I’m reading.

Morning Edition’s story was an interview with a reporter just home from Afghanistan and particularly a city there which is under the most Taliban influence. That city, she said, was a terribly paranoid place where people shied away from appearing in public unless absolutely necessary. The reason for this is that they can’t tell who is and who isn’t Taliban, but there is a high probability that if they are observed doing something that some Taliban member thinks is inappropriate, they stand a good chance of ending up dead. To die of natural causes there is considered a gift from God.

In this country there has for several years been a rising tide of right wing oriented religious groups that in my mind are different from the Taliban only in degree. I have a friend who belongs to such a group. He feels that I don’t respect his right to religious choice, but I do. I just don’t respect his religion. His right to choose a religion is not an issue with me at all. My problem is with the religion he chose. In my mind anyone who acts to condemn people of other faiths or those whose actions they don’t like is a spiritual terrorist. To pick and choose the phrases from a chosen “Holy Book” to follow while ignoring a great many others from the same book and then claiming every word of that “Holy Book” as interpreted by some “reverend” is the undeniable word of God is the work of a narrow mind easily misled.

I believe it was Thomas Paine who said, “You may rely on a good man to generally do good things, and you may rely on an evil man to generally do evil things, but it takes religion to make a good man do evil things.”

I have another friend whose views tend to move along the same lines as mine in this area. He just lent me a book of essays by David James Duncan. The title is “My Story as Told by Water.” One of the first essays laid all this out much more clearly than my paltry writing skills allow, so I’d like to share a passage with you:

“Capitalist fundamentalism, I still believe, is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we’ve nothing left to worship, worry about, read, eat, or love but dollar bills and Bibles. My boyhood worry, though, was that this world might not be techno-industrial. Maybe the world God made is natural, it ‘industry’ a bunch of forces like gravitation, solar rays, equinoctial tilt, wind, tides, photosynthesis, sexuality, migration. And if the world is natural, I’d fret if it was the natural world that God loved enough to send His son to die for it, then it might not be such a God-pleasing thing to spend my life converting that world in to industrial waste products, dollar bills and Bibles.”

Amen.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR