Thursday, January 15, 2015

Religion of Peace Part Two

This essay isn't about Islam, it's about religion in general.

Viewed objectively, no religion can believably claim to be a religion of peace. No matter that some religious "holy" books are filled with "love thy neighbor" and others about duty and good works, the truth is that religions are more than just a collection of scriptures or a list of rules, but are also the people who claim to follow those scriptures and rules. Every religion has multiple, competing versions: there are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, Protestant and Catholic Christians, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists, Hindus that honor Krishna as the supreme god and Hindus that give that honor to Shiva. And within those major divisions there are countless subdivisions. So why would we think that we could label any of these world religions as either peaceful on one hand or terroristic on the other? The reason that there are divisions among those who claim to follow the same faith, the same holy book, the same founder, is that the founding documents, the scriptures are far from unambiguous and in order to make sense of them you need interpreters.

And there lies the problem - the interpreters all disagree! While many subdivisions of the major religions claim the right to define membership and the power to decide who gets kicked out, in reality, if someone claims that they are a Christian, then they're a Christian; if someone claims to be a Muslim, that person is a Muslim. Often we get the "he's not a true Muslim" or "she's not a real Christian" line in order to disassociate the violent or the crazy from their professed faith, to excuse the tenets of the professed religion from culpability. But what prevents any group, no matter how small, from having their own unique interpretation? Nothing really.

Every individual is responsible to make moral choices. When immoral choices are made in the name of religion, individual responsibility is abdicated.


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