15 July 2005 - 9:38am
God 3.0? Fundamentalism is dangerous in any release
Thomas Friedman posits an interesting theory:
Islam has a long tradition of tolerating other religions, but only on the basis of the supremacy of Islam, not equality with Islam. Islam's self-identity is that it is the authentic and ideal expression of monotheism. Muslims are raised with the view that Islam is God 3.0, Christianity is God 2.0, Judaism is God 1.0, and Hinduism is God 0.0.
Part of what seems to be going on with these young Muslim males is that they are, on the one hand, tempted by Western society, and ashamed of being tempted. On the other hand, they are humiliated by Western society because while Sunni Islamic civilization is supposed to be superior, its decision to ban the reform and reinterpretation of Islam since the 12th century has choked the spirit of innovation out of Muslim lands, and left the Islamic world less powerful, less economically developed, less technically advanced than God 2.0, 1.0 and 0.0.
On the one hand, this sounds so familiar. The same phenomenon was happening in the 20th century, when communism promised food and brotherhood and land to the poor, disenfranchised peasants of the third world. Back then, America thought its best approach was to fight ideas with Phantom fighter jets, B-52 bombers and a whole lot of boys (averaging 19 years old) carrying M-16 machine guns. It didn't work. Vietnam was a loss. Korea was a draw. Central America is still a mess of a place where mistrust of the United States is a way of life.
What won the war on Communism was Communism ... and Western secular capitalist democracy. The Soviet Union crumbled from within, like a brittle old cantankerous firebrand with osteoporosis, while the (mostly) free western world and East Asia thrived. Communist China meanwhile quietly remade itself into capitalist China, without changing its name. And with few exceptions, even the most dogged of our enemies of the past are now our allies and trading partners.
George W. Bush has it half right: Freedom is a compelling idea and something that can transform the world. His error is in thinking that we can impose freedom at the point of a gun. It doesn't work. Guns tend to make people mad ... or dead. Freedom requires not fear or rage or hatred, but reassurance and trust and deeds ... and people power. Just look at the democratization that's been happening in the former Soviet states.
What's perhaps more frightening is the rhetoric behind the guns that comes from the radical right hatemongers who think that murdering people is the path to peace. (Does that sound familiar?) Of course, they will say that their hate is righteous, and to critize them is to preach "moral equivalence."
Kind of sounds like pissing-contest mentality. My hate is bigger than your hate.
The thing is, God 3.0 fundamentalism doesn't have a corner on hate. In this country we don't seem to have a shortage of God 2.0 fundamentalist doctrine preaching hatred as holy virtue. In Israel, God 1.0 fundamentalists are as much a barrier to Middle East peace as any demographic. In India, God 0.0 fundamentalists wage a holy war against God 3.0 fundamentalists, going so far one point as to dissemble a mosque in Ayodhya with bare hands. In all of these conflicts, death is the currency. Death. Killing. Murder. Rage.
The vast majority of people in each of these religious demographics are not hate-filled demagogues. But sensible people don't make headlines. "Live and let live" is not a sound-bite to get people to tune in at 11. And being smart about achieving your ends doesn't appeal to the lizard brain folks who get off on fear, rage and eroticizing violence. (Get the right's new pin-up: a woman in fatigues pointing a weapon at you, with the words "Laura Bush for President." Somehow I don't think Laura approved that fetishizing of violence.)
Fear is the currency of fundamentalism. Their whole political posture is one big anal pucker. Be afraid. Stop thinking. Lash out. Hurt somebody. Get off on it. Repeat.
Islamic fundamentalists are terrified of any ideas that go against their own. Christianist fundamentalists are terrified of any ideas that go against their own. Both preach fear and rage. (Aside: Both are against equality for women.)
Friedman seems to believe Sunni Muslim men have cornered the market on hate:
Why are young Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to Baghdad, so willing to blow up themselves and others in the name of their religion? Of course, not all Muslims are suicide bombers; it would be ludicrous to suggest that.
But virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry Norwegians. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?
With tunnel vision, Friedman seems to miss the fact that murder of civilians is happening all over the world. To say that Sunni Muslim suicide bombers are somehow a greater threat is to assert that the great tragedy is that the murderer dies in the commitment of his crime. Yet killing is happening on a grand scale all over. Since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed by Americans than the number killed in the towers plus Iraq combined.
What's different is that these fanatics have made their religious agenda -- and their murder -- political. They don't kill for vice or territory or jealousy. If reports are true, they're killing out of religious fervor, which includes a promise of an afterlife frolicking with naked virginal women. Lizard brain thinking.
But an even greater danger threatens the world: a religously fundamentalist reponse to fundamentalist Islamic nuts. Dominionists in America are quite open about wanting to destroy religious freedom, and establish a religious theocracy. They're God 2.0's answer to the God 3.0 zealots.
So far, the God 2.0 fanatics are small-time as compared to the 3.0 nutjobs today. Many of them openly appeal to nostalgia for their heyday of lynchings, cross burnings and church bombings.
But some of these fanatics are in our government. And some of them covet the Oval Office, where, among other powers, the "football" awaits presidential orders. I don't know about you, but any religious fundamentalist with nukes scares me.
This is a time for faith: faith in reason, faith in secularism, faith in the greater freedoms that reason and secularism provide to everyone.
When Friedman says:
Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this question any longer.
...he's speaking about Islamic fundamentalism. And he's right. But we also must not give into a fundamentalist response that simply brands hate under a different "release" of God. The darkness swallows all, and then the only certainties are death and sorrow.
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is "God" - specifically a monotheist deity called Y*weh/Jehovah/Adonai who came on the scene a few thousand years ago with the declared purpose of replacing all other deities, especially the Goddess who was worshipped throughout the world at that time under various names. "God" declared himself jealous, something unknown in the ancient world, where Gods and Goddesses were actively shared, imported and acknowledged as a matter of personal choice. This jealousy led his followers to insist that he be given special reverence, always, which is why my capitalization in this post looks odd to you. I refuse to yield that deity any special treatment. My Goddess will be capitalized, too, because I won't yield to the monotheist conceit that pervades Western and Middle Eastern culture.
"God" had a specific purpose in opposing the Goddess, referred to in the Bible as Ashteroth, the Asherah, Leviathan, the "Whore of Babylon" and the serpent, to name a few of her images there. The purpose was to establish a patrilineal system of inheritance so that wealth and power could be concentrated to the control of men in general, and into the hands of an elite class of Kings and Priests specifically. In order to assure that only the king's own progeny benefit, strict control of women's sexuality was required.
The maidenhead and the womb became items to be bartered for and owned by the man in charge, and scripture appeared which reinforced the view that women must be subject to man's will. Very convenient to have this new morality ordained by the "one and only deity" whose followers would kill anyone who said otherwise. Likewise, women became easier to control when they saw their sisters stoned to death for transgressions like being raped.
By the time we get to "God 3.0", women are so oppressed that they may not leave their homes unescorted by a man, and are generally swathed in cloth so oppressive and restrictive that most of the people who die in Tsunamis and floods are women dragged down by their dresses and burkas.
We had a brief opportunity from the oppression of "God's" new patriarchy in a prophet named Yehesua/Iasus/Jesus, whose first apostle was a woman and who preached peace and generosity. Unfortunately, his doctrine took a decidedly nasty turn when a deformed former thief changed his name from Saul to Paul and twisted the "evangel", i.e. good news, of Jesus' message back into the dysangel of it's woman-hating roots. Thus we have the birth of "Christian legalism" as opposed to the state of Grace that Jesus tried to teach.
Around this time the power center that had been Rome was run into the ground by the new "Christians", who destroyed the libraries at Alexandria and eventually created their own Roman center of power known as the "Holy Sea", aka the Vatican. Once in place, the Vatican's members set about re-editing the "word of God" so that women's books, among others, were excluded, and men's power over women and heretics strictly enforced.
At that point, "God" had enough clout to start killing heretics and invading cultures. When King James had yet another revision written under the watchful eye of his Pope, a new resurgence in religious fervor brought us the Crusades and the Witch Trials. Both were enormously profitable for the Crown and the Church. "God 2.0" and "God 3.0" have been at war ever since. 2.0 is a little ahead because he has allowed his women enough freedom to add to the general wealth, but not enough to share in it. 3.0 produced, ironically, some of the most educated women in the world, but then locked them away and forbad them to work or even share their knowledge.
And so here we are. Two extremist forms of worship of a young Hebrew "God" killing each other and everyone else in "His" name. Most of them are completely unaware of the origins of their sacred texts, or even the content of the current, commonly used interpretations of them. They'll kill for them, mind you, but they haven't studied them. This is particularly true for 2.0's followers. There are a shocking number of preachers in the South who are illiterate, but their parishoners will join the Army and kill for what they teach. The majority of Catholics don't follow the Papal doctrine anymore, either, but they still give their votes and their tithes to the Church that would name them fornicators and adulterers if they only knew. They'll march one Saturday morning to keep a grown woman from emptying her womb, then kill a living breathing Iraqi woman because someone declared her government a "rogue entity", though she didn't have a vote on that, either.
To sum up, we're dealing with only one religion here, and only one fundamentalism. A Yawist thug is still a thug whether he prays to "Allah" or to "God". I have no problem with a person believing in this deity. Most people do. I have a real problem in killing people over something you haven't bothered to study yourself; a problem with keeping women enslaved because an old scroll says you can; and the fact that people who think they have the one and only answer are dangerous.
Fundamentalism is a state in which you are convinced that your opinions are truth and will kill to enforce them. A little bit of critical thinking would show that, in fact, they are opinions, and might just be wrong. The minute you stop allowing for the fact that you might be wrong, you become a danger to yourself and others. This is not religion - this is pathology. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Morgaine-ism© #8
"A Woman's Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy is Sacred and Absolute."
Well said. I can't say I disagree. Hate is the faith. But I can't fob the judgment off on all faithful. I see more darkness and danger in those who treat Jesus or Mohammed or Yahweh as a gang sign and scripture as the drumbeat to war.