(Host)
Commentator Bill Schubart looks at the news and the persistent role
that orthodox religion seems to play in the continuing violence against
minorities and sexual subjugation of women and children and struggles to
"keep the faith."
(Schubart) Whether I am ushered into the next
world by a choir of cherubs or a bevy of trident-bearing imps, or
whether I just compost quietly in nature’s great recycling system is not
a matter on which I spend a great deal of thought.
I am, by
genetic endowment half-Jewish, by upbringing Roman Catholic, and by
choice, agnostic. I neither deny nor assert the existence of God.
I
have seen the great comfort and goodness wrought by small churches of
all persuasions in the small communities in which I have lived.
I
also see the hell-born misery ultra-orthodoxies of all religious types
wreak on people the world over. Be it the Taliban, ultra-Orthodox Jews,
the far-right Christians or the Sunni-Shiite internecine wars, you name
the orthodoxy, and history books and news archives will drown you in
tales of persecution, torture and death.
Throughout history
there have been oases of peace and sanity where Jews, Christians and
Muslims or Buddhists, Muslims and Hindi have flourished in mutual
respect. For four centuries prior to the 11th century, Jews, Christians
and Muslims lived together under moderate Muslim rule in Cordoba, Spain.
During the European Holocaust, Muslim Morocco prided itself on defying
Vichy’s order to its French colonies to round up their Jews. The Islamic
monarchy instead sheltered them from German and French persecution. But
examples like these have been rare. And human carnage done in the name
of various deities or "with God on our side" as Dylan sings, is common.
The subjugation of women across all orthodoxies and the persecution of
religious minorities and homosexuals is as prevalent today as the
burning of non-Catholics was in the streets of Seville during the
Spanish Inquisition.
The recent news coverage of Ultra-Orthodox
Jews spitting on an 8-year old girl and calling her a "whore" even
though she wore the modest uniform of the orthodox school she attended
resembles Puritan extremism. And the requirement that women in
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods ride in the back of buses recalls
our hard-fought civil rights battles here at home.
The slaughter
of Muslims by former neighbors with whom they had lived in peace for
decades in the former Yugoslavia, the genocidal rampages in Africa, the
multi-century cover up of sexual abuse of children in Catholic parishes,
all in the name of religion must cause doubt about the existence of God
or, at least, about his earthly designates.
I believe in a
higher power. I am open, as I was as a young altar boy, to the loving
and forgiving God who teaches that the meek shall inherit the earth.
But
in observing the ongoing persecution and slaughter conducted on
religious grounds, I can’t embrace or even trust religions managed by
man in God’s name. I miss the spiritual discipline I knew as a child,
but I can’t muster enough faith to forgive institutions willing to fight
to accumulate earthly riches and political power – while at the same
time perpetuating sexual subjugation of women and children.