While America fusses about the Newsweek reports of the Quran used for toilet paper… that’s a money making idea incidentally, and I’ll make it available to novelty print-shops under a Creative Commons license… toilet paper scrolling off the sacred texts from the bathroom roll, perforated, two-ply… while America frets and fusses about the nasty liberal media and the usual suspects try to turn our attention to the non-news regarding sourcing of a dull story by Newsweek, the Brits (bless their repressed little hearts) have begun the tortured process of attempting to share the truth with this bloated democracy that is too apathetic to listen.
But enough about the Brits, let’s talk about the "people of the book."
Talk about a historical blind alley. Several thousand years ago the technology shifted from carved stone and clay tablets to parchment and papyrus. Monotheistic believers in the middle-east took advantage of the media and laid their myths down in writing. A millenium or so later, several hundred years after the Trojan war had played itself out, the christian cult showed up and entered the competition for religious mind-space. Never mind that there were lots of fine North African gods languishing following the defeats of the Barca clan, these people discarded perfectly fine alternatives like Baal and Moloch, ignored the precepts of fire worshippers, dissed the entire pantheon of Greek and derivative Roman deities, and ripped off the one true G-d that the Hebrews worshipped while installing their guru as the annointed son of same… "same," dammit, not "SAM" What kind of people are you anyway?
It remained for them to append several poorly written and conflicting stories regarding son-of-same to the book the Hebrews had been carrying around, to write a few letters to each other confounding common sense and propping up a cultural patrimony, then to shut down any debate with a whiz-bang dip of ergotamine snuff and record the original apocalyptic vision.
Things were quiet for several hundred years give or take the roar of the occasional lion, the crunch of a martyr’s bones. But out in the desert a few local chapters of the Sons of Hagar were forming (no - not sons of Sammy Hagar, but rather descendants of Ishmael, he of the Book, the original, the one true protagonist of Moby Dick who shared with us the wisdom of Starbuck, the first mate and brewer of coffee, and of Queequeg, the harpoonist and maker of coffins). They, the sons and daughters of Hagar - not Starbuck and Queequeg - invented algebra, eschewed alcohol, and they brewed a fine cuppa Joe.
Then came the crusades, Attaturk’s genocide of the Armenians, Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, and what’s next? He’s a loving god, a fierce god, and everything we know about him we learned from bad acid or from the book.
And we know how to get each other’s goat around that book thing. Take what they did down in Gtmo. It wasn’t about a TP shortage. It was about disrespect. Imagine what the Tennessee snake-handlers would have said if they’d used a Holy Bible that way in Islamabad. And would the Jews have risen up in massive violence if somebody had so used a Torah? It really doesn’t matter.
A few days ago Norm Jenson posted an op-ed by Shadia B. Drury, "Virtue Trumps Freedom." Included were these observations,
When virtue becomes the supreme value in a society, the result is the criminalization of "sin" as defined by the sacred texts - and as these texts are interpreted by the powerful. You end up with a society that resembles the reign of the English Puritans in seventeenth-century England-they abolished Christmas because it was too much fun and there was too much pleasure and indulgence associated with it. Or you end up with a society that resembles the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan of recent memory: no music; no dancing; no kite flying; no films; no female voices singing on the radio; no female voices broadcasting the news; and no female arms, ankles, or faces seen in public. All these harmless freedoms and pleasures are supposedly too obscene - unlike public executions, stoning, burning witches, or tormenting Jews.
[…another] reason that biblical religions are an obstacle to free societies is their attachment to the concept of collective guilt. The biblical God tends to punish the whole community for the sins of the few. In fact, the biblical God brags about his penchant for that kind of justice: ". . . I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me . . ." (Exodus 20:5). Time and again, the anger falls on the whole community for the transgressions of some. Some of the Hebrew prophets, such as Jeremiah, rightly objected to this divine justice and looked forward to a new covenant in which "everyone shall die for his own iniquity" (Jeremiah 31:30). Ezekiel echoed the same principle (Ezekiel 18:20), but to no avail. When Jesus came, things got even worse. Jesus took it for granted that all men and women are justly condemned for the sins of their ancestors-Adam and Eve. Jesus supposedly came to bear the punishment that we justly deserve for original or inherited sin.
Moby Dick was a good book, and there are enlightening and interesting passages in the bible. I’m sure the same can be said of the Jewish texts and the Islamic, but when oh when are we going to get over this need to elevate "the sacred" to anything more than a state of mind? And what is the medieval attachment to the printed page that would make people of whatever faith rise up in anger if one were somehow construed as mistreating it? Of course, I don’t get it about flags and the pledge of allegiance either. I think this world needs more Jainists and fewer Janissaries. (And no offense to these guys is intended. They seem to be the exception that proves the rule).
