RELIGION GONE WRONG

(That’s not the title that I’m resisting the impulse to use for this writing) 

The latest absurd story about how wrong a religious majority can go comes out of Pakistan.  Eleven-year old Rimsha Masih, who is known to be developmentally disabled from birth, has been arrested and imprisoned in Islamabad on charges of blasphemy.  If she is found guilty, this poor terrified little girl will almost certainly face a death sentence. In prison now, undoubted lonely and very scared, she awaits trial by the end of this month. One of her devout Muslim neighbors accused her of burning a few pages of a religious text, which she apparently did accidentally.   The outraged devout neighbor instigated a mob reaction against the little girl.  If police hadn’t come to her rescue she almost certainly would have been stoned or burned on the spot. Earlier this year an enraged mob forcibly pulled out a man from a police lock-up in Punjab and burned him alive on the road because he had allegedly disrespected the Muslim holy book, the Quran.  

We Americans watch with alarm these and other incidents in areas of the world controlled politically by fundamentalist Muslims. We are appalled that such outrage can be done in the name of religion... to honor God. For later reference remember that the two significant words in that last sentence are honor and god.  How could any civilized, reasonable, ethically responsible person respond with anything but outrage to a true story about a man being dragged from his car and set on fire and burned to death because he says something uncomplimentary about God?

What the #%$$ is going on in a world where a whole bunch of people, enough to make up a mob, perhaps even a majority of citizens in a big country, could possibly think that kind of retributive punishment is right and appropriate action? 

Here’s another outrage... one closer to home.  All of my life I have known, up close and personally, hundreds of Christians, real persons, good people actually, who are not subjects of international news stories or even local news stories who act on a belief that at the end of life an unbeliever goes to an eternity of burning in indescribably awful, painful, never-ending hell fire. Even now I attend church regularly with people who say they believe that “unsaved” people go to hell, a hell of eternal torment.  How can I not be horrified by that belief, that attitude, that declaration by people who are real... people whom I know and love?  What’s the difference between what the fundamentalist Muslim does and what the fundamentalist Christian believes his god will do?  A mob of fundamentalist Muslims take action for whoever or whatever they believe is their god, sending the offender on his way to hell as soon as possible, either with burning or stoning immediately.  The fundamentalist Christian is content with letting his god do the dirty work. There is that small, small percentage of fundamentalist Christians who actually do take it upon themselves to deliver divine retribution by shooting to death or blowing up to death someone who is thought to have offended God; but by and large, Christians let the offenders go on offending, believing, or saying they believe, God will get them in the long run.  Oh, I almost forgot... The majority of voters in the state where I live reinstated the death penalty as punishment for capital murder. Remember that irreverent bumper sticker that stuck around for awhile:  JESUS IS COMING, AND IS HE PISSED! 

So my point is this: What’s the difference?  How is the fundamentalist Christian who believes his unrepentant neighbors and family members and all the “unsaved” of the world are going to burning hell when they die... how different from the fundamentalist Muslim who believes God rewards the Jihadist martyr with a jolly good time with a bevy of eager virgins and expects all truly good Muslims to stone or burn the offender to send him post haste to the place of eternal suffering?  What’s the difference?

Many years ago I read Morality and Beyond, a little book by theologian Paul Tillich.  The subtitle is “Religious Perspectives.”  I have that book still.  Yesterday I began rereading it for the umpteenth time, and it makes even more sense to me now that I am what is euphemistically called a senior citizen than when I was a young whipper-snapper.  I am reading slowly Tillich’s second chapter.  It’s challenging. It may take a week or two. He calls it “The Religious Source of the Moral Demands.”  Last night I stopped with Tillich’s question early on in the first paragraph:  “Undoubtedly the question of the ethical content (or moral law)--the question of what one must do-- has already and persistently arisen in the minds of many readers... the answer...that we must become what we essentially are, persons--is so formal that it does not offer any concrete advice.  Yet such advice is necessary for the life of man.  So also are principles, which are at the same time abstract and concrete, so that support for moral decisions can be derived from them.  Are there such principles of moral action?  If so, how can they be related to the ever changing conditions of existence?  Is not ethical relativism the only possible answer, even in view of the unconditional character of the moral imperative?”  

Can we possibly ever get back to considering, searching for, a moral imperative...

I closed the evening’s reading with a question of my own.  Can anything be more absurd than the creation of a formal religion around the life and teachings of a kind, gentle, person and imbed in it the caveat that if a person believes in the teachings of some other religion, he/she is damned to hell?