God, Gays, and Godless Liberals
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill understands why “honest Muslims would join ISIS on truly religion grounds.” What grounds, you might ask: to fight godless liberalism and its support of LGBTQ rights. The enemy isn’t ISIS but the advance of “godless civilization,” a civilization that will never be “sanctioned in Russia by state law, because that would mean that the nation has embarked on a path of self–destruction.”
First let the irony of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch calling the United States (and Europe) “godless” sink in. The reason we started in the 1950s to splatter “In God We Trust” everywhere was to separate us from those godless communists in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Second lets make it clear that, contra what I said in earlier posts about people of differing faiths not worshipping the same God, some of them do. To paraphrase the Rig Veda: The God who hates gays is one; different haters call him by different names.
What we are witnessing is a clash of civilizations: Fundamentalism versus Liberalism. Both come in a variety of flavors, but each has a shared set characteristics that defines it. Fundamentalists share a zero-sum “us against them” worldview that values creed over critical thinking, belief over reason, authoritarianism over individualism, and fears freedom of thought, religion, press, and speech. The gods they worship support the hate and fear they preach.
Liberals share a non-zero worldview of “all of us together” where the “us” is not only humanity but all life. Our values promote egalitarianism, democracy, freedom, reason, science, an evolving and open-ended spirituality, and the rights of each person (even fundamentalists) to think, speak, and pray as they choose.
There are fundamentalists and liberals in every religion, and they are at war. At the moment the advantage goes to the fundamentalists. While liberals have irony on our side and fight the good fight on late night comedy shows, fundamentalists have the military-missionary-media complex, and lack the restraint that self-limits liberals to snark while they, the fundamentalists, march on to victory with arms and growing political clout.
As always the first casualties in such a war are women, sexual “deviants,” and Jews (except in Israel where Jewish fundamentalists are about to control their own country for the first time since the Hasmoneans in the first century BCE).
If you want to know what liberals stand for begin with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you want to know what the fundamentalists stand for see how they treat women, the LGBTQ community and Jews. The shadow-side of liberalism is Huxley’s Brave New World. The shadow side of fundamentalism is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Both need to be resisted, but the coming darkness is more Orwell than Huxley.
ISIS is never going to conquer Russia or the United States. But fundamentalism might. And when that happens you’ll be hard-pressed to find the distinction between them.