- Let's say there was a school system or a chain of clinics
on whose professional staff were a certain number of men who molested the
children in their care and who, whenever this behavior came to the attention
of their superiors, were shifted to another school or clinic, with parents
and colleagues, not to mention the justice system, kept in the dark whenever
possible. Imagine that this practice continued for thirty years through
a combination of out-of-court settlements, sympathetic judges and politicians,
stonewalling lawyers, suppression of information, fulminations against
the media. Don't you think that when the story finally broke, the men who
had made and implemented the policy would be held legally responsible--for
something? Certainly they would lose their jobs.
-
- Bring God into the picture, though, and everything changes.
The bishops who presided over the priestly pedophilia in the Catholic Church's
ever-expanding scandal are not likely to follow Boston's Father Geoghan,
convicted and sentenced to nine to ten years and facing more charges, into
the dock, much less the cellblock. After all, they are men of God. Thanks
to God, the Catholic Church can run a healthcare system--10 percent of
private hospitals in the United States--that refuses to practice modern
medicine where women are concerned: not just no abortion but also no birth
control, no emergency contraception for rape victims, no sterilization,
no in vitro fertilization. The church can agitate against the use of condoms
to prevent the spread of AIDS, even in desperate Africa, a position as
insane as South African President Thabo Mbeki's stance against antiretroviral
AIDS drugs, but that generates a lot less outrage in the West. It can lobby
in Ireland against allowing suicidal women to have abortions and intimidate
a 14-year-old rape victim in Mexico into carrying to term; it can practice
total sex discrimination, barring women from the priesthood and therefore
from sharing in the political life of the church, and still demand to be
taken seriously when it speaks of human rights or ethics--rather like the
Philadelphia parochial school recently reported as giving academic extra
credit to students who march in antiabortion-rights demonstrations even
as the church goes after public funding through vouchers. No secular institution
could get away with any of this, any more than a secular psychotherapist
or family counselor could get away with telling poor mad Andrea Yates what
the Protestant evangelist Michael Peter Woroniecki did: that Eve was a
witch whose sin required atonement in the form of perfect motherhood and
that working mothers are "wicked."
-
- Another example: Let's say a group of Americans decide
that they would like to live where they believe their ancestors lived 2,000
years ago, even though other people have been living there for centuries
and don't like the idea one bit. If these people were Cajuns who wanted
to park themselves in the Bois de Boulogne, everyone would think they were
out of their minds. If they were American blacks taking over swatches of
Ghana, people--including many black people--would laugh at their historical
pretensions and militaristic grandiosity. It would certainly be a relevant
point that these settlers are not displaced persons or refugees--they have
perfectly good homes already. But once again, God changes everything: The
former Brooklynites, Philadelphians and Baltimoreans now camping out in
"Judea" and "Samaria" (the West Bank to you) wave the
Bible and the Israeli government lavishes on them all sorts of privileges--cheaper
mortgages, income tax breaks, business development and housing grants--with
results that are disastrous for Israel and Palestinians alike and that
now threaten the peace of the entire world. In a recent front-page story,
the New York Times treated the longing of Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza to return to their homes in Israel proper as a psychological obstacle
to their forging any kind of rational future, individual or collective,
and maybe it is-- maybe it would be better for them to forget the old homestead
and demand reparations. But at least the old woman mourning a sewing machine
left behind when she fled Beersheba fifty years ago really, personally
owned that sewing machine; the family picnicking year after year in the
ruins of its former property has living memories of farming that plot of
land. It is not a notional "ancestral" possession supposedly
guaranteed in perpetuity by God. In this case, the religious fanaticism
is not coming from the Muslims.
-
- Elsewhere, of course, it is. God has been particularly
busy in the Islamic world, building madrassahs, issuing fatwas, bringing
in Sharia with its bloody stumps and beheadings and floggings and stonings--seventeen
people have been stoned to death so far under the "progressive"
Khatami regime in Iran--and underwriting a wide variety of dictators and
monarchs and warlords. When gods start multiplying, matters don't improve:
Polytheistic Hindu zealots have slaughtered 700 people, including many
children, in revenge for the torching by Muslims of a train carrying Hindus
from the site of the Ayodhya mosque, destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992 because
it supposedly occupied the site where the god-king Ram was supposedly born.
As I write, Hindu fanatics are threatening to fight Muslims for a strand
of beard hair preserved in a Muslim shrine in Srinagar, which they claim
belongs not to Mohammed but to Hindu religious leader Nimnath Baba. How
many children will be burned to death over the proper attribution of that
holy facial hair?
-
- Think of all the ongoing conflicts involving religion:
India versus Pakistan, Russia versus Chechnya, Protestants versus Catholics
in Northern Ireland, Muslim guerrillas in the Philippines, bloody clashes
between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia and Nigeria, civil war in Sudan
and Uganda and Sri Lanka, in which last the Buddhist Sinhalese show a capacity
for inflicting harm on the admittedly ferocious Hindu Tamils that doesn't
get written up in Tricycle. It's enough to make one nostalgic for the cold
war--as if the thin film of twentieth-century political ideology has been
stripped away like the ozone layer to reveal a world reverting to seventeenth-century-style
religious warfare, fought with twenty-first-century weapons. God changes
everything.
-
-
- http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020401&s=pollitt
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Peter Wagner
Peter.Wagner@marad.dot.gov
3-27-2
-
- This is just a typical attack on religion from the mainstream
leftist media. Just because both religion and war happen to be prevalent,
it takes quite a leap of logic to conclude that the one causes the other.
Wars are fought, as Clausewitz explained, over "objects of victory",
whereby the value of the object outweighs the costs of war. If the benefits
do not outweigh the costs in the pre-war rationale calculus, wars are
not fought. The conflicts to which Ms. Pollitt refers (every one) are
the result of disputes over the control of land and the people on that
land. The fact that the two sides do not share a religion is a side issue.
In this regard, religion does not cause war; rather it is used (abused)
by the politicians to facilitate the polarization needed to bring two
sides to the bloody battlefield. The Crusades come to mind. God does
not call us to war, politicians do in the name of God. Scripture attempts
to teach us the difference, but apparently it is a difficult lesson.
-
- Pete Wagner
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