<<Wow. I'm just amazed that I survived living in an Islamic country for a year. They must have missed me when they were searching out non-Muslims to kill.>>
LOL. We are very good friends with a couple a little older than we are, the husband is an Eastern European Jew and the wife is from a large Jewish Iranian family whose ancestors have lived in Iran for centuries. "They" must have missed a lot of people for a very long period of time.
During the time our friend's family was living and growing in Iran, Jews in Spain and Portugal were either hiding from the Inquisition or burning at the stake, being burned alive in their homes during various European pogroms, or beaten to death by mobs, often rushing straight out of church after listening to the usual Easter sermons about how the "perfidious Jews" killed their so-called "god," hiding all over Europe from the Germans or sucking down Zyklon B in a German gas chamber. The Religion of Peace and the people who were raised up in it were really working overtime.
What is really surprising to me in all this anti-Muslim bigotry is not so much the pure ignorance of it, but how people raised in the Christian faith and supposedly all its teachings are apparently oblivious to one of the few things in it that make any sense at all, the admonition that you are keen to point out the mote in the other's eye while ignoring the log in your own. That a Christian can point an accusatory finger at ANY other religion has always amazed me. The sheer fucking gall of it!
The truth about religion is that it is separatist by nature.
We can speculate in here about the various tenets of each religion, and sign on or off on how each single aspect or verse of each religion hits us in terms of truth, trust, validity. But this is a discussion board designed for that very purpose.
But you won't get that on the street.
In today's American religions, especially the ones who stay on the front page, what you have are people who are not by their very nature rigid to the teeth, but because many of the teachings of each one demands that they "have no other God before me" they become rigid because they have been taught that.
Religion is without, putting in. I find that spiritually a contradiction. In religion, it is from without that your decisions about what is significant to God are made. In religion, you are rarely called upon to think. Conversely, to illustate the opposite, the current rightwing fundamentalists spend a lot of time talking about the salient need for being obedient. I would bet the rent that if you channel surfed on next Sunday, one of the coxcombed would be drastically intoning the despicable sin of being disobedient. In psychology, it is called reinforcement.
It is the very nature of religions to find bugaboos to point to because then they can save you from the horrors of those who stray from their organized thought. In codependency, it is called creating a crisis so you can solve it.
I honestly think that if the perfect scenario would work--open discussion, openness to new ideas, broad subject study--it would come from the dark side--the liberals. The capacity to start a new religion--one of crystalized verity born of exchanged thought and a million offerings of opinion and tried and true existing universal elements of metaphysics--is perfect, time wise; the internet could provide the very forum necessary for developing one.
But it won't happen. There won't be a newly created religion that will grow and spread. This is because the rightwing element has already gained more than you might think they have. As it stands now, they control the common room, implicitly, by their ready passion, their emotional smouldering, and above all, their license-to-kill confidence. Rarely in any room is the noisy one not one of them.
Almost any approach to honest discussion about religion would have you seeing, surrounding you, a gathered crowd (who only came to debate) suddenly let their shoulders droop noticably at the first syllable of a truly open discussion, knowing that the rightwing religions are all about to explode about it.
We don't discuss religion with them because we know them by their manners--we know that they will sneer and shout us down. We also know if we remain too long, deferring, suspicions about us and Satan will emerge. In their own enclave, they see themselves as mirrors full of lambs, but to the rest of us who are exposed to their bristling disapproval, they are simply potentially dangerous because of their smite-happy tyranny.
