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It was a busy Labor Day weekend. A bunch of new polls came out and, shocking though it may be, Democrats are behind in some of them (although not in others, there's a ton of volatility). Lots of polls in individual races, and there the news looks a little better for Democrats. The NY Times had a story about Democratic "triage" that was promptly denied by DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen, but there isn't any doubt that a whole lot of Democratic incumbents are in trouble. Obama came out with some new jobs ideas, the infrastructure I liked a lot more than the corporate tax cut, but I'm happy to see he is putting jobs ideas out there, and his Labor Day speech in Milwaukee was good. I'm also very happy he is standing tall on eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which is both the right policy call and smart politics. Anyway, there is a whole lot to write about, and I will be doing a number of pieces on the election and the economy in the coming days and weeks, but I feel compelled to just take a moment away from all of this electoral politics to delve into the far nastier world of religious politics.
Religious politics has been in the news quite a lot lately between the blatant Muslim bigotry being practiced by Gingrich, FOX News, and their crew regarding the NYC community center site, the outrageous Koran burning being planned by the church in Florida, and the Glenn Beck pro-theocracy rally on the Mall last week. Here's a classic quote from this weekend by a tea party organizer named Geoff Ross that sums up a lot of the sentiment of the anti-Islam people out there:
I'm not anti-Islam, I'm anti-terrorist. But if you take quotes from the Bible and compare them to the Koran, the Bible might say "turn the other cheek" while the Koran would say "strike your enemies down and kill them.
I love quotes like this one, which show no knowledge at all of either the Koran or the Judeo-Christian Bible. My apologies to my religious friends of all faith traditions, but let's be honest: every religious scripture has lots of questionable quotations and ideas in it. They all have a lot of good in them, teachings about morality and generosity and mercy and kindness, beautiful ideas and poetry and stories, but they all have what theologians technically refer to as icky stuff as well. To take one of Jesus' gentlest quotes and line it up next to one of the Koran's most violent isn't what you would call, well, kosher.
Let me just remind Mr. Ross and all of the other Islam-is-so-violent bigots about the Bible I grew up reading. After I saw Mr. Ross' quote, I went to my Bible and proceeded to look it up to make sure my memory was right: I count no less than 15 different chapters of the Bible where God either orders, blesses, or Himself commits the mass slaughter of innocents, including children. On several different occasions, God says that his warriors may not spare the life of any living creature in towns being attacked. Once, when a king of Israel (Saul) disobeyed an order to "make war on [your enemies] until they are exterminated" and showed a small bit of mercy, God was angered and rejected Saul as king of Israel. In the Exodus story, as you may remember, Pharaoh was ready to cave and let the Israelites go multiple times, but God "hardened his heart" so that God could show He was powerful enough to kill off all the first-born Egyptian children, including even the children of slave girls. In the book of Numbers, God demanded the slaughter of 60,000 men, women, and children for the crime of interracial marriage. In the book of Joshua, God mandated that Joshua kill every man, woman, and child in at least 11 different towns so that they could take the land of the people who lived there. In the book of Genesis, Abraham actually tries to talk God out of slaughtering every man, woman and child in a couple of towns because there might have been some good people there, and God decides to do it anyway.
Look, I don't recite these passages because I think the Jewish or Christian religions are bad. I think these religions have a great deal of good in them, and I love and honor the Christian faith tradition I grew up in. The Old Testament prophets, Moses, Jesus, and other Biblical figures were great moral teachers. The Bible has profound passages about morality and justice, kindness and mercy, charity and equal rights for the poor and oppressed. It has stirring poetry and powerful stories about good and bad; it has beautiful discussions of philosophy and the nature of humans and God and their role in creation. But the Bible of Jews and Christians, along with the Koran, has passages of violence and injustice, stories that would make any moral person question the God portrayed in those pages. Similarly, the Koran has some violent passages in it, but it also has teachings of great morality and beauty.
I love the Judeo-Christian Bible, but part of what I love is the complexity of the stories in its pages. The debate in its pages, the conflicting ideas about the nature of God, the goodness of God, the relationship between God and humans, is worth the read. But it's not all pretty. To say the Koran promotes terrorism because of the violent passages in the Koran is as wrong as saying the Jewish and Christian faiths are all evil because the way God is sometimes portrayed in their Bible sometimes gets a little nasty. The people spreading religious bigotry in our country are doing us all a disservice, not the least of which is threatening our own national security by helping the Muslims who practice terrorism to spread their anti-American message.
Jesus once suggested that before his disciples obsess about the speck in their brother's eye that maybe they should focus on the log in their own. When it comes to religious bigotry, that seems like pretty good advice to me.
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