Religious beliefs

I’m sure that, in the course of polite conversation, everyone has been taught that they’re supposed to avoid two subjects: politics and religion. That’s been hammered into people because nobody really likes to have their beliefs questioned. Or challenged. They’re far more comfortable believing than they are thinking about those beliefs.

Do you believe in God? Which God? The God of Christians, Jews, Muslims (arguably one and the same), or of some other religion? What do you believe in if you don’t believe in the concept of God, either with a big g or little g? Environmentalism? Political liberalism? Secular humanism? Everyone believes in something.

Secular humanism is the prevailing belief of those in the United States that don’t believe in a higher power. Those who believe in secular humanist ideals are, typically, wonderful people with beautiful ideas. They typically believe that, since human beings are inherently good, crime, violence, and all of the other ugliness of the world is a product of misunderstanding. They believe that violent individuals are those who have been disadvantaged by society, and have no other way of expressing their unhappiness. Many believe that their concepts of right and wrong are equal to anyone else’s concepts of right and wrong, and that there are no absolutes in Good and Evil. It is a lovely belief, and one that shapes many ideologies. And yes, it is as much a religious belief as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.

Many of those who do believe in an omnipotent higher power, i.e. God, believe that humanity is inherently flawed and evil, and that there are rules set out to guide us into Good. The dominant religions in the world that believe this are Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Indeed, the three often have the very same beliefs about what those absolutes are, and where the lines between Good and Evil lie. Unfortunately, we’ve been to busy fighting each other about them to stand up for them in the face of the ongoing culture wars.

The two (arguably) most contentious religions in the world are Islam and Christianity, both of which truly have their roots in Judaism. Christians believe that we serve the same God as the Jews and Muslims, but we also serve his Son, Jesus Christ, through whom God revealed his will and saved all believers. Islam believes that there is no God but God, and that Mohammad was the last, most important prophet, through whom God revealed His Word. They also believe Christ existed, and that he was one of the divine prophets (second only to Mohammad), but that there is no salvation but through total submission to the Will of Allah (as the Jews believe that there is no salvation but through the Messiah who will come, and total submission to the Will of God).

With so much in common, why do Christians and Muslims fight each other so viciously? Why do the Muslims seem so determined to wipe the Jewish homeland from the face of the earth?

I think it’s partially that there are no fights so bitter as those among family (Mohammad himself referred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike as “children of the book,” and exhorted his followers to treat the other children of the book as brothers), partially because of a lack of understanding between we modern Western Christians and the Muslims that are, in a very real sense, still stuck culturally in the dark ages. Dinesh D'Souza put it well in his Townhall essay earlier this week.

Honestly, I completely understand their rejection of what many Americans idolize as modernity, or “living in the 21^st century.” Look around. What do we have over here in the United States? We have women used for their bodies by the cultural expectations of sex without commitment. We have what looks like the sluttification of the entire society—I mean, seriously. Look at the current fashions in Hollywood, which is where most the rest of the world get the images that wind up associated with modern Western Civilization in general and the United States in specific.

We have the movie Juno, and the recent teen celeb pregnancy of Brittany Spears’ baby sister. We have what appears to be a pregnancy pact amongst a whole bunch of underage teens in the Northwest. Many conservative Christians wonder if the situation in the small, blue-collar town in the secular liberal state was influenced by the glorification in Hollywood of teen pregnancy. Muslims probably wonder the same. We have that in common, but they don’t know that—they’re under the impression that Hollywood is the American mainstream.

On the flipside, we have modern radical feminism’s insistence that women leave their homes, husbands, and children and pursue their own personal fulfillment, often at the expense of the fulfillment of the desire for a family. The media, and our own government, pushes with foreign aid packages contraceptives and abortions, both geared toward taking women from the home and putting them in what conservative Muslims, men and women alike, think of as a man’s role. They’re told that, to reject the sexual revolution, birth control, and abortion is to reject all Western values. Their own radical religious leaders, who really do want to reject all Western values, do not tell them otherwise. They’re under the impression that this is part of the American mainstream, and want nothing to do with either the sexual revolution or its consequences.

We have Britney’s 55-hour marriage, her disastrously failed marriage to a failed rapper and backup dancer, and her mental crack-up. Most of those who watched the whole train wreck believe that her whole life is an illustration of how the modern, radical feminist, hedonistic culture born in the ‘60s hurts young women. A lot of Muslims are told by their religious leaders that this is the outcome of feminism and equality. They’re told that their only choices are between their daughters and wives locked in burquas or dressing (or not dressing, as the case may be) and acting like Britney Spears. Since that’s the images our media pushes, and what Hollywood glorifies, how else are they supposed to see us?

We have the movie Brokeback Mountain, and states passing laws that legalize gay marriage, when Muslims believe that homosexuality is an abomination. They aren’t told, either by the Western media or their own leaders, that much of the American population feels that way, too, regardless of what they’re told they must think and feel. Though, to be fair, most conservative Christians believe that Christ told us to love the sinner but hate the sin—which leads us to the doctrinal hair splitting that the individual isn’t the abomination, it’s the choice to commit the act that is the sin. I don’t think most Muslims would necessarily agree, but I don’t think they’d disagree as violently as they do with the insistence that a modern Western-value-oriented world would embrace the act as inherently equal to the procreative act between husband and wife.

The Muslim world was once the seat of scientific and mathematical enquiry, the rule of law over barbarism, and cultural equality amongst the children of the book. Somehow, sometime, during the Dark Ages, that changed. It’s swinging back.

Modern Muslims embrace, once again, the idea of independence, the rule of law rather than that of dictators secular or religious, and scientific advancement. What they reject—often violently—is the image of modernity that Hollywood pushes as the American ideal.

Maybe we, as Americans, need to re-think the images of us that our entertainment industry and media pushes out to the rest of the world. It's certainly got a hand in current problems between two religions that have more in common than they don't.