posted September 23, 2006
Growing up during a time of segregation, Jim Crow and lynching, I
recognized from a very young age the hypocrisy and double standards of religion. Abuse of religion have played a significant role in the sufferings of many in our society. All religions have their flaws and
darker sides. Therefore, when my daughter-in-law was deployed to Iraq
I wanted to learn more about the people, their ways, thoughts and the religion(s) of the region. I've had friends from that region. My daughter even once dated an Iranian doctor (he was a very nice and compassionate individual), but I never really thought much one way or another about the people or religion as a whole.
I've learned, religion can't give anyone something they don't already
have. It can only enhance what is already there. In self serving and
manipulating hands, it can and has been used to enhance evil and mass suffering. That historical reality is relevant to any religion. No
religion can escape the title of persecutors, tormentors of the masses at some point and time in history.
I've never been one to run with groups, cliques or packs - I was raised by parents who demanded that we think for ourselves. Ask questions, dissect, analyze and make our own decisions about who we befriended. To not allow others to "dictate your friendships for you." Their teachings guide me to this day. I passed those beliefs and teachings on down to my children.
And that's why, when my daughter-in-law was deployed to Iraq and I came across a site that offered free Qu'rans to anyone who would like to know more, learn more about the religion, I immediately requested a copy. It took a while for my Qu'ran to arrive because they had such a heavy backlog of people requesting a copy. My daughter-in-law had been in Iraq for almost nine months and had fallen in love with the many Iraqi people she met when my copy finally arrived. But I was honored to have received it at any date, no matter how late. Now the Qu'ran has a permanent place alongside my bible (my husband, not me, is the biblical scholar of the family, having studied theology and the ministry in college).
Both our family Bible and Qu'ran share a surface together and there's been no conflict between the two. Maybe people should try the same. Maybe, just maybe, thinking people who take time to think alongside those who don't think for themselves but need to learn to do so, should come together on common ground and thought, and stop allowing others to manipulate and control their thoughts for them.
Brenda Washington
washington8213@bellsouth.net
* * *
For a self-proclaimed “thinking person,” Mrs. Brenda Washington displays an amazing ignorance about both the Quran and the Bible. They each claim to be the final Truth revealed from God, and make no allowances for other beliefs, no tolerance for “sharing the same space.” For example, in Exodus God proclaims that we are to “have no other gods before me,” and that “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” How Mrs. Washington squares that with her claim that there’s “no conflict between the two” (i.e., the Bible and the Quran) is apparently a feat only people who “think” like she does can accomplish.
She says, “No religion can escape the title of persecutors, tormentors of the masses at some point and time in history.” Certainly men have corrupted all religions, including Christianity, to their own shame and the misery of others. Instead of simply equating all religions based on that sad fact, though, it seems that a thinking person would take the time to examine the actual content of each faith. While Christianity has certainly been mis-used to justify all sorts of wrong-doings (the Inquisition, witch hunts, failure to oppose slavery, Nazism, etc.), those acts are in clear contradiction to the Bible’s teaching. The Christian New Testament commands us to love our neighbors, and even our enemies, showing the love that Christ showed for us on the Cross.
On the other hand, the Quran sanctions, even demands, the subjugation and even killing of non-Muslims, especially of Jews and Christians. The brutal beheadings we’ve witnessed on video the past few years, and the suicide bombings reported almost nightly on the news, the wanton murder of innocent men, women and children “in the name of Allah,” are not corruptions of Islam, nor men’s mis-interpretation of the Quran. While some would equate militant, “fundamentalist” Muslims to fundamentalist Christians, such a comparison reveals the inability or unwillingness to recognize or acknowledge a simple fact: it is the content of a faith, and not the degree to which its adherents live by it, that should be the first factor in rendering any judgment about it.
There is a huge difference between people failing to live up to their professed beliefs (of which the great majority of us Christians are guilty) and people carrying out the prescribed, commanded actions of their faith, in service to their god (as militant Muslims are routinely doing around the world today). A thinking person wouldn’t be blinded to this truth by pride or simmering resentments, racial or otherwise.
But then, that would require acknowledgment that, for all its failures and corruptions by men, it was Christianity that brought about the end of slavery in Western civilization, yet that slavery continues today in Islamic countries, sanctioned by the Quran. Is it because most Islamic nations are inhabited by people of color, and that recognition would remove the justification that many American blacks use for their hatred and distrust of white people? I wonder about Mrs. Washington’s lack of concern for the Quran’s prescription for the treatment of women, or its sanction of murder, slavery and forced subjugation of all who don’t subscribe to its tenets. To equate that with the love, mercy, grace and humility that the Bible calls for Christians to exhibit (even as scarce as those attributes are in professed Christians) is not, I submit, a conclusion that a thinking person would reach.
Mrs. Washington’s own words (“religion can't give anyone something they don't already have. It can only enhance what is already there”) will be rejected and refuted by true Muslims and true Christians alike. Rather, they reveal her membership in the largest “religion” of all, the Church of the Almighty Self. But for some, even such tortured “thinking” is preferable to the uncomfortable truths – about ourselves, our “people” and our failures – that Christianity insists we each must face, without excuse.
Paul E. Scates
Chattanooga
pescates@earthlink.net
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