I’m not totally naive. I had to take two courses on religions at the university I attended. I chose western religions and eastern religions, as opposed to Native American and other less popular religions.
One of the assignments was to write an essay on the holocaust. The previous assignment was to read the Battles of Jericho in the Old Testament, basically the Jewish bible as I understand it. That text has God telling his people to go into the village and kill every man, woman and child because they don’t worship the one true God. So, instead of the traditional take on the holocaust, I wrote my essay stating that the Jewish people were no better than the Nazis.
It was a very risky paper to write. The professor was a Catholic priest who had a Jewish grandfather that lived in Germany during the holocaust. But I stated my points well and was given an A+ on the essay with the professor exclaiming “This took some development of ideas!”
But I can’t get on board with portraying this entire population as a threat today. Being suspicious of an individual’s motives is all good and well and if they have bad motives because of their religion then I’m all for calling it as it is. We need to be worried about strongly orthodox Muslims as well, because of their religion. That religion grew out of the old testament just like Christianity did. Except I think it preserved too much of the Old Testament, where Christianity, not without it’s own problems, took a different tack.
I think it is not wise to carry on like the people that we’ve identified as a threat. I can’t believe that is the right path forward. Christianity evolved to where most of its followers no longer advocate annihilating those who do not follow it. I believe there are a lot of Jews and Muslims who have evolved to this point as well. If we go forward hating an entire group then we will just perpetuate a vicious cycle of hatred. The better way, I think, is to isolate the bad ones in the group and get the good ones in the group to start rejecting them and to start calling them out. I realize that is difficult to the point of sounding like a fantasy, but I believe that has to be the way forward.
I’m not totally naive. I had to take two courses on religions at the university I attended. I chose western religions and eastern religions, as opposed to Native American and other less popular religions.
One of the assignments was to write an essay on the holocaust. The previous assignment was to read the Battles of Jericho in the Old Testament, basically the Jewish bible as I understand it. That text has God telling his people to go into the village and kill every man, woman and child because they don’t worship the one true God. So, instead of the traditional take on the holocaust, I wrote my essay stating that the Jewish people were no better than the Nazis.
It was a very risky paper to write. The professor was a Catholic priest who had a Jewish grandfather that lived in Germany during the holocaust. But I stated my points well and was given an A+ on the essay with the professor exclaiming “This took some development of ideas!”
But I can’t get on board with portraying this entire population as a threat today. Being suspicious of an individual’s motives is all good and well and if they have bad motives because of their religion then I’m all for calling it as it is. We need to be worried about strongly orthodox Muslims as well, because of their religion. That religion grew out of the old testament just like Christianity did. Except I think it preserved too much of the Old Testament, where Christianity, not without it’s own problems, took a different tack.
I think it is not wise to carry on like the people that we’ve identified as a threat. I can’t believe that is the right path forward. Christianity evolved to where most of its followers no longer advocate annihilating those who do not follow it. I believe there are a lot of Jews and Muslims who have evolved to this point as well. If we go forward hating an entire group then we will just perpetuate a vicious cycle of hatred. The better way, I think, is to isolate the bad ones in the group and get the good ones in the group to start rejecting them and to start calling them out. I realize that is difficult to the point of sounding like a fantasy, but I believe that has to be the way forward.