I read the news today, oh boy. Religious bias can be found in most of the stories. Im just as guilty of pointing to belief system differences. A local nineteen year old on Christian missions to Kenya for three years was just charged with molesting children from 4-10 years of age in the childrens home where he did his holy work. My immediate response was look at those Christian values. Then I stopped that negative voice with a more reasoned one, Not all Christians. I read about Gaza and wonder where the God these people pray to is in all of that? Isnt the entire religious disagreement about which prophet was right and who wrote the best book? At what point does being righteous become war? (Also, Im sure the Native Americans can relate to a people removed from their lands and faced with overwhelming military powers. Still, at what price will peace come?) Diana Simmonds posted a quote from a woman who is the granddaughter of a family half wiped out in a holocaust and I know genocide when I see it. Her name is Naomi Wolf, and she went on to say, God is only ever where we stand with our neighbor in trouble and against injustice. Since the dawn of man, humanity sought reasons for its existence. Every society had a creation myth, a necessity for the roots of any religion to take hold. A belief in a supreme being is shared among each of these myths. Evidently it is part of the human condition to want the answer to the question, Why am I here? I get religion. I understand the need for people to feel they belong to something, have purpose, and a hope for the hereafter. Thats the real issue, isnt it? What happens in the end? If any of the religious factions at war in the world had to face their God today, how exactly would that turn out? I imagine it would not be what they expect. It brings to mind a phrase I read somewhere, Above all, love one another. If we stripped away all the religious differences, at their roots is the fulfillment of the myth, from dust we come and to dust we will return. When the dust settles, will it matter whos religion was right? Or were they all wrong? I was brought up in a religious home. My father was in seminary school for a couple of semesters, before becoming a math teacher and then a school principal. We read and discussed the bible and the tenants of other religions of the world. There was never any judgment, just information. We were allowed to choose the church of our choice, and both my brother and I chose churches of which neither of our parents were members. I think we had a healthy diversity and discourse on religion in our home. I walked out of my church, when told, as a lesbian, I was not welcome. I found my own spiritual place to dwell and believe in a higher power. I do not consider my belief system to be more enlightened than any other. I would not fight to defend it, but would fight to defend my right to practice it. Id like to think that I have a lot in common with Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. Humanity is after all drawn from the same cloth. We share the human condition. Underneath it all we are simply people who desire long and happy lives with those we love. Why cant we agree to respect each others belief systems? It all boils down to what book one read and the interpretation one follows. I think it would be a healthy exercise to read all the books and underline the common threads, instead of our current state of an all consuming concentration on our differences. “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our childrens future. And we are all mortal. ~ John F. Kennedy [Commencement Address at American University, June 10 1963]”
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:50:46 +0000
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