I went looking for more on Irshad
Manji, the author of the book review that I responded to last week.
That led me to the interview below. If you would, read what I have to
say, then see what you think about her idea of “reclaiming God's
good name.”
The more I listen to so-called moderate
believers, the more I find that we are in almost total agreement.
They are saying that their prophet, Jesus, Mohammad or Buddha or
whomever challenged the earlier prophets. That the religion they
created was a step forward for human progress, a movement of love and
inclusion and forgiveness that did not exist before they came along.
They then use that to justify continuing to study their prophet's words and
actions thousands of years later.
I agree, almost. When the New Testament
was written, Jews were enslaved, they had no homeland, no army. Rome
was a brutally oppressive society with a pantheon of gods and
emperors who were claiming to be born of a virgin and claiming they were gods. When
the Koran was written, female babies were killed and tribes traded
off enslaving each other as power shifted back and forth. Gautama
Buddha was born into a wealthy family that kept him isolated from the
horrors of the caste system. When his eyes were opened to it, he knew
it had to change.
The story of Jesus challenged not only
the Romans and their gods, but it directly spoke to the corruption
within Judaism. This can be found in the early chapters of the book of
Mark, as well in the character of Herod, a puppet Jewish King who cut
deals with the Romans and of course Judas selling out to the High
Priests. Even ignoring the scripture and just looking at how the
early Christians acted shows a break from traditions. They held small
meetings in homes where women studied alongside men and they took
care of their neighbors, regardless of their backgrounds.
I hear words and passages thrown around
when moderate Muslims talk about the Islamic golden age, between 800
and 1200. They may use ijtihad, which has to do with reasoning, or
falsafa, meaning philosophy. I'm not sure where exactly these are in
the scripture, and when I've seen them, they are mixed with praise
for Allah. I don't really care. I note that they are explicitly
honored in Islam as opposed to the way philosophy and thinking are
denigrated in the Bible, but words from history only matter if they
did indeed influence a culture. We know that Muslims built libraries,
improved their infrastructure, their agriculture, wrote poetry and
generally flourished while Europeans were 99% illiterate and worrying
about the end of times.
But of course all this ended. We know
more about the tribal aspects of Islam that are left over from before
Mohammed than we do about the progressive movement that people would
have actually embraced at the time. Conquering was the normal course
of events at the time, so the fact that they swept across North
African “converting” people was partially due to their military
power, but just as important was that the conquered people accepted
them as leaders because they did a better job than the idiots they
overthrew. And they allowed people to practice the religion of their
choice, with restrictions, but it was allowed.
When I say I “almost agree” with
these moderates about how their religions are based on peaceful and
progressive ideas, I'm not not sure where we actually disagree
because they won't talk about why those progressive movements failed.
Once you start talking about how the Catholics eventually partnered
with the Romans and started burning pagan churches or how the Islamic
golden age ended and Jews were expelled from the universities and the
death penalty for apostasy was actually enforced, the discussion
becomes irrational. You get accused of bringing up the worst aspects
of religion or of cherry picking history. This is ridiculous of
course because it is they who are refusing to discuss that history
and only want to discuss the times and the players in history that
promoted what we now think of as modern ethical behavior.
I don't bring up Augustine or
Al-Kahzali as proof that religion will always fail, I bring them up
to ask the question of why did the progressive movements fail? For
that matter, why are they failing now? Right now, we are all hoping
that the leaders of the Westboro United Baptist Church will just die
and no one will replace them or continue on with that work. They
don't allow anyone to have a reasonable conversation with them and I
don't know of anyone interested in trying. Once someone has chosen
the Bible as their only guide for how to act in the world, it is not
possible to use that Bible to change their minds. But just because you aren't a Bible thumping fundamentalist, it doesn't automatically make you reasonable. What is the progressive movement doing to directly address the problems created by fundamentalism?
The first century was a time when Jews changed how they looked at their
own laws by bringing in a new way of relating
to god. Slavery ended because the world grew to where
more people could see that no single tribe had a special place in the
hierarchy and that thinking that way was toxic to the world. Homosexuality is gaining more and more acceptance
because we are gaining a better understanding of the mind and we know
that just because we don't have certain impulses that doesn't mean
other people don't. We have learned to examine right and wrong by
examining the whole world, all living things, the entire eco-system
and the future of the planet. Soon we will be considering the future
of other planets.
Those religious movements failed
because they couldn't incorporate new information fast enough. The
Islamic movement is the last time in history that a new world view
took hold and united enough people to become an empire and last for
generations. Cultures were already mixing and oddly enough, Islam
accelerated that by taking paper making from China and translating
and copying knowledge from all over and spreading it further West.
When they got to translating not only the words but the ideas of the
ancient Greek texts they reawakened philosophies that had been lost
due to the barbarism of the 4th and 5th
centuries. After that, people had tools to question why they were being forced to worship a god. They began to expect a logical argument for it.
Where I agree with these moderates is
on the amazing work some small groups of people in history have done
to bring reason and progress into cultures that were literally
killing babies and promoting horrendous acts we would never allow
today. What they don't want to discuss is that those same small
groups also had some backwards ideas about where the universe came
from and how to deal with meat products or what clothes we should
wear. We've dealt with many of those beliefs and they don't seem to
mind that we all break most of the rules every day, but if you
suggest something like their prophet does not deserve to be worshiped
or that prayer doesn't work or the resurrection didn't happen, they
lose the ability to form a coherent argument, sometimes to form a coherent sentence. If you suggest we
shouldn't teach children these things until they are old enough to
think critically, they bring up ethics and traditions and community
and other issues that to me are completely unrelated.
My suggestion, and I have brought this up with pastors, friends and whomever cares to engage me, is that their prophet had something to say, and so did a bunch
of other prophets and philosophers. Why not just include them all?
Why fight over which character in a story is the coolest and instead
really dig into which ideas can actually bring about progress right
now? I have as yet not received an answer.
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