Wednesday - December 05, 2001
Henotheism
A lot of people, mostly politicians and pundits,
go on and on about how Islam is a peaceful religion. Either these people are
completely ignorant, or they choose to ignore Islam's record. Militant Islam
today is very consistent with most of its history in that it is very intolerant
of other religions and has expanded almost entirely through military conquest.
This is a legacy of its Judaic past in an indirect way. Christianity and Islam,
the two modern forms of Judaism, have taken from their predecessor the belief
that their god is the only god and that worship of any other god is incorrect
and evil. This was a belief almost unique to Judaism in ancient days. Almost
every other religion or cult besides the Jews were henotheistic; that is, they
believed that the existence of other gods besides their own was not inconsistent
with their own gods' existence. For instance, in early Hellenistic Greece they
mostly still believed in Athena and Demeter et al., but these were only a part
of the concept of "god" which transcended individual deities who were but
messengers of "god." The Greeks, as did almost every other religion, believed
that there was one universal "god concept" which was represented by individual
deities, thus all gods were legitimate to a certain extent. The Jews in contrast
believed that all other gods besides their own did not exist and it was sinful
to worship any others. This was the profound change brought about by
Judaism.
So where am I going with this?
I can write all day about the history of religions or the fundamental evil of
believing in a deity, or even the fundamental inconsistency of theism and
morality, but here I want to concentrate on how Judaism and its modern versions
in the form of Christianity and Islam have changed the world in fundamental
ways, and not for the better.
There have been religions among people for as
long as we can tell, and these have taken many forms. There have been cults of
Isis and the Mother of the Mountain and other female deities, all with very
similar origins. There have been Cybele worshippers that for centuries believed
that castrating oneself with a rock in a formal ceremony was the way to be
indoctrinated into the highest level of their religious order. The Greeks had
the Eleusinian Mysteries (and mysteries they remain, their secrets having been
taken to the grave of the last of the initiated, surely a sign of devoutness)
among many other beliefs. All of these religions had people as devout as any
modern Franciscan, Mufti or Rabbi with as profound a belief structure as any
today. A remarkable characteristic of all these religions was that they
acknowledged the equal legitimacy of other gods. Almost every major ancient
religion was henotheistic except
Judaism.
The Jews were the first major
religion to declare that their god was the only god. At first they only claimed
that their god was the most powerful god, but that quickly changed after the
very earliest period of their long history. This intolerance of others' beliefs
caused the Jews to be isolated for most of their history, but it also encouraged
a homogeneity that made them strong. It wasn't until the Romans conquered them
that they began to splinter into sects (there were other sects, i.e., the
Samaritans before the Romans but these were less political in their schism) that
had various levels of tolerance for other beliefs. The Zealots, Sicarrii, and
the Essenes among other sects could not accept the tolerance the Romans had for
their culture and beliefs and insisted on rebelling, with a fanaticism and
totalitarian control over their people not unlike the Taliban today. These sects
were destroyed by the Romans, almost to the last man, but the idea of changing
Judaism to another form caught on and Christianity was born as a pacifist
version of these rebellious sects. Being non-violent, they were allowed to
survive.
The primary difference between
Judaism and Christianity, beyond the superficial detail of the messiah figure,
is that unlike Judaism, Christianity was evangelical. That is, they recruited
from non-Jews to join their cult. Judaism almost never, even to this day, tries
to expand to non-Jews because their belief in being the "chosen" people implies
that others aren't naturally disposed to be Jewish. That is, they won't turn
away converts, but it doesn't normally occur to them that non-chosen people,
gentiles, would wish to join them, and they make it more difficult to convert
with their requirement to mutilate male
genitalia.
The appeal of Christianity
was to combine the certainty of there only being one god, with the inclusiveness
of not having the idea of genetic purity which was the hallmark of Judaism.
Christianity spread through this type of appeal, and then became dominant in the
Roman Empire through exerting political power, mostly without violence. Usually
starting with recruitment of individuals, Christianity would eventually convert
existing nations wholesale, but early Christians were not content with mere
official status, they had to eliminate all other beliefs. Using propaganda and
political influence they destroyed non-christian temples, and as their
popularity increased they chased down worshippers of pagan beliefs and forcibly
converted them. Early and medieval Christian writings about other beliefs have
an air of paranoia generally, these beliefs were considered evil. In fact, much
of our current ignorance of other cults besides Christianity is due to their
systematic destruction of competitor religious writings and places of worship,
not too unlike how the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statue recently in
Afghanistan.
Islam came from a similar
beginning, the desire to be more inclusive. In fact the founder of Islam was an
Arab and not a Jew. To distinguish themselves from the genetic purity of Jews,
they claimed to be followers of Abraham's first son, Ishmael who was born to
Abraham's Egyptian slave girl, rather than Isaac who was Abraham's son through
his wife, Sarah. Islam's strength was again the appeal of monotheism, the
certainty that there is only one god, combined with the inclusiveness similar to
the Christians, and topped off with complete and total control of every aspect
of life even more so than Judaism, perverting life from "living" to an existence
that is a sort of halfway house for death (or eternal life as they would claim).
This total control of life was an incredibly powerful social tool, as we have
seen over the millenia; a similar control was used to enact the Russian
Revolution in 1917, and many other totalitarian regimes. The remarkable thing is
that Islam has had periods and places where they had some tolerance for
non-believers, and even then this tolerance was based on the belief that these
non-believers were generally not worth associating with; religious and social
tolerance was almost never granted to their own people. For instance, in
medieval Spain, the Muslims allowed Christians and Jews to continue worshipping
and living as they wished, so long as they stayed within areas set by the
Muslims, there was to be little or no intermingling of cultures officially
(reality was a little different, of
course).
This period of tolerance in
Islam was the height of Arab history but unfortunately, as it seems to always
happen, religious intolerance brought about the fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba
to the Almoravids and then the Almohads around the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. These fundamentalist sects, especially the Almohads, destroyed the
beautiful culture of the Taifas of Iberia, whose art, science and poetry were
justly famous, and re-instituted fundamentalist Islamic culture -- backwards,
and less literate. The extent and form of this decay is a topic for another day
but it is sufficient to say that fundamentalism is not new today, and has been
ever present in the world of Islam with varying degrees of
prominence.
So back to the topic at
hand. Judaism, with its monotheism and intolerance of observing and
acknowledging other gods spawned Christianity and Islam which shared that trait
of not recognizing other gods (with some debate as to whether Christians were
really monotheistic what with hundreds of saints, the Virgin, the Trinity,
etc.). Jews revolted from Rome and ceased to exist as a nation and took on a
very tolerant (or acquiescent) patina. Christians adapted and adopted various
pagan rituals and observances and turned them into new Christian rituals and
thus spread their political power while at the same time keeping secular and
religious lives separate to a degree. Muslims spread through the sword and made
(and make) no distinction between secular and religious
authority.
Since the Romans destroyed
Judea, the Jews have accepted other religions in their host nations wherever
they happen to reside. Since the turmoil of the Reformation, Christianity has
generally kept that which is Caesar's for Caesar, and that which is god's for
god and kept religion and politics less stringently tied together. But Islam
still believes and still has as a major fatwa (a ruling of recognized scholars)
that a Muslim cannot be a Muslim properly and live in a non-Muslim state. For
true Islam, not only is there no distinction between religion and state, to want
a distinction is heresy. This intolerance of other religions which is common to
Judaism and Christianity, is more severe in Islam in its fundamentalist forms,
creating a danger for the rest of the world from their seemingly insane
insistence on declaring "Jihad" on people half a world away who know little to
nothing about them.
I don't pretend
that the world will be without war and violence with a return of henotheism to
our various cultures, nor do I pretend that a renewed henotheism could happen
within the next few centuries. I do know, however, that the religious
intolerance, the fundamentalist tendency for Jihad, the co-mingling of religious
and secular power is something that Islam has proven all too often is dangerous
among them. I believe firmly that people have the right to worship as they wish,
but when their beliefs require coercive enforcement and participation in a
medieval culture, then that religion has ceased to be protected. It is a
fundamental requirement that we transform Afghanistan, Iran, and other nations
from the backwards, oppressive theocracies that they are into modern, prosperous
capitalist nations. The people of those nations have a right to be free, and no
one has the right to force religion onto them. More importantly to us
immediately is that until we transform these cultures like we transformed
Germany and Japan, they will be extremely dangerous to us. It is my sincere hope
that this is what President Bush means when he says that this will be a long
war.
Go Back to the Start, Do Not Collect $200 Send me your two cents
|
