For some time in recent months I have exchanged views on various issues with a number of friends for whom I hold the highest respect for their inspiring and challenging intelligence. I plan to add to this Blog those of my responses which may still be relevant to current issues. I recall making this same statement of intent in an earlier entry. I mean it this time. This entry is just one regarding Islamic terrorism from a discussion today. My friend said, in the course of his argument, “This is a war, and it will be a really long war….. Given 1400 years of history, it may never end except for an unlikely collapse of will by the combatants or a catastrophe of world scope.”
My response: You seem to be espousing a crusade, a Christian Holy War against Islam. I believe history does not support your premise nor will history have to come close to your apocalyptic projection. However, one way to assuredly make this future more likely is to agree to definitions of nations as single repositories of the one true religion to the physical expulsion or cultural/political condemnation of any one or all others. This seems to me particularly stupid in the long run when the religions share the same God and only the current interpretations of the “founding books” by a minority of believers are initiating the current violence. The following is an interesting twist from “Democracy in America” by de Tocqueville.
"Mohammed professed to derive from Heaven, and has inserted in the Koran, not only religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The Gospel, on the contrary, speaks only of the general relations of men to God and to each other, beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, while the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
"In continuation of this same inquiry I find that for religions to maintain their authority, humanly speaking, in democratic ages, … they confine themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters, ….
"The preceding observation, that equality leads men to very general and very vast ideas, is principally to be understood in respect to religion. Men who are similar and equal in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator; while on the contrary in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven…..
"It seems evident that the more the barriers are removed which separate one nation from another and one citizen from another, the stronger is the bent of the human mind, as if by its own impulse, towards the idea of a single and all-powerful Being, dispensing equal laws in the same manner to every man. In democratic ages, then, it is particularly important not to allow the homage paid to secondary agents to be confused with the worship due to the Creator alone. Another truth is no less clear, that religions ought to have fewer external observances in democratic periods than at any others….
"Those who have to regulate the external forms of religion in a democratic age should pay a close attention to these natural propensities of the human mind in order not to run counter to them unnecessarily….” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch1_05.htm
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