A Familiar and Ancient War

When Jesus was young, there were people like John the Baptizer who hated the corruption of the religious establishment, and of the people themselves, who called for people to repent of their own evils, and be baptized as a sign of their new intentions. Jesus was one of those people. That is to say, the first Christians were a reform movement of Judaism.

Before long, they were attracting non-Jews to the movement, and the success of the reformers resulted in their becoming what we today would call more European than Middle-Eastern.

The character of Christianity was shaped in those first few centuries. The documents they left behind reflect that time, those struggles, those ideas and ideals.

That was almost two thousand years ago. None of us live there. We live in Europe, or Africa, the Americas, and other places far, far from Jerusalem and Ephesus. In those places where Christianity is alive and important, there are divisions between those who try to understant what Christianity might mean for this century, and those who believe that we must think as Jesus and Paul and Luke thought in the first century.

The fact is that the people who wrote the Apostles' Creed, or the Nicene Creed, did not think like Jesus or John the Baptizer. Neither do we.

If you look around, it is the conservatives, or the extreme conservatives--the fundamentalists--who try to call the church back to the 1st century, or the 4th century, or the 16th century, or like whenever it is they think truth was defined; that we should believe in miracles, and faith healing, walking on water, demon possession, divine scriptures, or an infallible priesthood.

Something similar is happening in Islam. Muhammad lived in the 6th century. Within Islam, there is a great struggle, as there still is within Christianity, too, between those who want to keep what was, and those who want to come to terms with today. Osama bin Laden's real enemy is Saudi Arabia, his homeland. He believes his own country has lost its 6th century roots. He wants the Saudi monarchy deposed, and Islamic fundamentalists put into power.

It isn't about us. It is about themselves, just as Christian fundamentalism isn't about anything except the reformers in Christianity.

What is happening to Muslims--a struggle between fundamentalists and reformers--has happened, and is still happening, in Christianity. Christians had a six century head start; the Crusades, and the Reformation, and secularism.

The mosque on the other side of town is no more the problem than is the church down on the corner. Unfortunately, religious disputes have often resulted in religious wars, and wars kill people.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog