Thursday, March 10, 2005
L.A. Times Columnist: Made-in-America Wahhabism
The author, William Thatcher Dowell, is talking about the Christian right (cue scary music).
Where to begin with this guy? All the Christians I know hate little children. How did the author figure us out?
And we just love executing murderers. It's a bloodlust, I tell you.
This is why you shouldn't let liberal columnists inform you about what your theology is. Genesis 9 mandates the death penalty. Leaving vengeance to God is correct. It also applies to the individual. God applies different directives to states and individuals. Things completely inappropriate for individuals could be completely appropriate for governments.
But this nuance about the conceptions of church and state (or as Augistine would say the City of God and the City of Man) and how that pertains to certain prescriptions in the Bible is lost on the author.
Oh yes, we hate people of color too. I forgot about that one. And we want to convert people by the sword.
There is some semblance of a good point here, but, alas...Dowell's poor understanding of Islam and religion in general. A fundamental tenet of Islam is that it must be enforced by law. There is no separation of church and state conceptionally in Islam. Christianity doesn't have conceptually that problem. And it has run into problems when church and state were tied. It's first three centuries were persecuted. But do you want a government completely devoid of religious input? That has been tried to not so good results in the past.
You have to thank Dowell though. He's truly concerned about the health of my religion. How nice.
Given the amount of years these 10 commandments have been up in places like the Supreme Court itself, how many people have died in a state-sponsored Inquisition?
The author, William Thatcher Dowell, is talking about the Christian right (cue scary music).
In Saudi Arabia, what drives the Wahhabis is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. A belief system that calls for stoning a woman for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God as the conviction that it is still possible to enforce discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.
The Christian right is equally prone to selective interpretations of Scripture. In its concern for a fetus, for example, the fate of the child who emerges from an unwanted pregnancy gets lost. Some fundamentalists are even ready to kill those who do not agree with them, or at least destroy their careers. They seem to delight in the death penalty, despite the fact that the Bible prohibits killing and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to God.
Where to begin with this guy? All the Christians I know hate little children. How did the author figure us out?
And we just love executing murderers. It's a bloodlust, I tell you.
This is why you shouldn't let liberal columnists inform you about what your theology is. Genesis 9 mandates the death penalty. Leaving vengeance to God is correct. It also applies to the individual. God applies different directives to states and individuals. Things completely inappropriate for individuals could be completely appropriate for governments.
But this nuance about the conceptions of church and state (or as Augistine would say the City of God and the City of Man) and how that pertains to certain prescriptions in the Bible is lost on the author.
Just as in the Middle East, the core of U.S. puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past — in our case, a made-up United States peopled mostly by Northern Europeans alike in the God they worshiped and in their understanding of what he stood for. The founding fathers, of course, preferred the ideas of the secular Enlightenment, which, instead of anointing one religious interpretation, provided the space and security for each person to seek God in his or her own way.
Oh yes, we hate people of color too. I forgot about that one. And we want to convert people by the sword.
Perhaps the strongest rationale for separating religious values from politics is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal that can be harmed by compromise. No less a fundamentalist than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would choose Islamic rule. Yet the effect of that decision has been to betray Islam, as genuine Islamic scholars in Iran have found themselves under continual pressure to change their interpretation of God and God's will in order to conform to political realities.
There is some semblance of a good point here, but, alas...Dowell's poor understanding of Islam and religion in general. A fundamental tenet of Islam is that it must be enforced by law. There is no separation of church and state conceptionally in Islam. Christianity doesn't have conceptually that problem. And it has run into problems when church and state were tied. It's first three centuries were persecuted. But do you want a government completely devoid of religious input? That has been tried to not so good results in the past.
You have to thank Dowell though. He's truly concerned about the health of my religion. How nice.
Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own interpretation of justice under God often leads to horror.
Given the amount of years these 10 commandments have been up in places like the Supreme Court itself, how many people have died in a state-sponsored Inquisition?
