Saturday, July 18, 2015

Religions that Promise Us Death and War

7/18/2015—I have written before about the death of Islam. It is easy to see that Islam will go down the path that Christianity did in Europe after the wars of religion following the Reformation. For what do we see? The more religious you are, the more violent you are. This can be seen in the lone gunman who kills marines in Tennessee. But the violence is almost as clear in the Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables that put opposition to the Shia sect in Iran above even humanitarian aid. All in the name of purified Islam. Who needs this?

But now we see the same thing in Judaism. The Aipac organization is opposing the deal with Iran and, of course, Israel does too. The more Jewish you are, the more likely you are to oppose the deal.

Israel’s version of security lacks any real commitment to the humanity of its foes. You see this in the way Arab citizens of Israel are treated. You see this in the way Iran is portrayed. Demonized.

I don’t know whether President Obama is skilled enough to sell the deal to the nation. But Roger Cohen’s column today in the New York Times is how a lot of young people will see it—-the alternative to the deal is war and an actual Iranian bomb. And these young people will see that religion, in this case Judaism, kills.

And you can see this in India, too, in Hinduism’s political expression. The more religion, the more hatred.

But what do we see in Roman Catholicism? Pope Francis. What do we see in Buddhism? The Dalai Lama. They have their blind spots too. But it isn’t always the more religion, the less humaneness. If religion has a future, they are it.

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