RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
December 14, 2015

Religious fanaticism has become a greater plague on the world. Whether it's Buddhist monks murdering Muslims in Myanmar http://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-violence-specialreport-idUSBRE9370AP20130408

or settlers preventing Palestinians from planting their crops in the West Bank of Israel, or retaliatory murders in Israel against terrorism, or Planned Parenthood murders in the U.S., or the murder of Dr. Tiller in his Lutheran Church in Wichita, or Daesh and al-Qaida, or the Wahhabi Saudis, or even the Branch Davidians, extremist violence among so-called religious people plagues modern societies.

While religious violence has always existed, a philosophical and political condition of modernity was the recognition of the humanity of all those "in the image of God." Modernity proposed that we all accept one another, of whatever religion, on the basis of building a society of mutual recognition and cooperation. Is the deal breaking down?

I claim that much of the violence is coming from groups and people who never agreed to the deal in the first place. Certainly large swaths of the Muslim world never underwent the process of modernity that swept over Europe in the 18th century. Muslims who live in the West have implicitly agreed to the conditions of democracy, but the Saudis support Wahhabism and attempt to export it to many places around the world. The claims that Islam is a religion of peace and that Islam condones violence are both correct, as they are for other religions, depending on the political philosophy where the religion is being practiced. All religions have texts that will support either violence or peace, depending on who is doing the interpreting of the text.

Are Europeans and Americans dealing with unrealistic expectations? I think that the communications revolution is causing an explosion and competition of ideas that will not be settled anytime soon. But perhaps Americans and Europeans, while protecting ourselves from violence for sure, ought also to understand that exclusivism is not dead, that it exists and must be fought in our own countries in the West, and that in societies like the Middle East they may even have rejected our model of human understanding. Sayed Qutab, one of the idealogues of the Muslim Brotherhood, explicitly rejected the debauchery and degradations of Western Society, including our materialism. Even Pope John Paul II called the U.S. a Culture of Death for our focus on guns and unwillingness to support the neediest among us.

Religion is not the source of our hatred and willingness to murder others. It is only a vehicle for spreading, explicating and enacting ideas that are part of the human understanding of our place in the world. All of us must attune ourselves to spreading teachings of acceptance and understanding wherever we can. We are involved in a global competition for minds and hearts. The American turn to isolationism is self-defeating. Only through openness, acceptance and kindness will we win this fight to demonstrate the fundamental equality of all humanity.