Saturday 11 February 2006

Pic of the day: The Re-Balancer, my superhero justifying his violence with taoism. Historically, I'm afraid the Abramic religions have been more prone to imposing their worldview through violence.

Religious supremacists

"Supremacist" is a word with a very bad image. Usually you hear it about "white supremacists" in America. But it is not really so restricted. At heart, it is anyone who think that they and their group of people are inherently better than any other group of people, and therefore have the right to rule or even replace all others.

It could be argued that the USA today is itself officially supremacist, as it seems to think it has a God-given right and obligation to change the rest of the world to follow its rules. Of course there is the small matter that the USA actually is supreme. Still, there is an awkward similarity to the British empire back when Rudyard Kipling wrote about the White Man's Burden. Perhaps great empires always will feel that way. In any case, I can think of worse cultures with which this could happen. Oh yes.

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Religions are a special case. It may be that all religions are supremacist in one sense of the word, at least the modern ones. I am not sure about the more local religions of the iron age. It is not easy to distinguish between the religion and the nationality there. In fact, one of these religions is still alive and well, although it is different from all the rest. It is strictly monotheist. Judaism, as it is called now, does not really make a difference between belonging to the people and belonging to the religion. Despite this, a quick look at Jews today show that a lot of people must have joined the faith over time, so it is hardly a race thing. (No matter what some right-wing people have said in the not so distant past, and indeed a few may still be saying.)

Jewish supremacism is fairly mild in so far as their plans of world dominations are a lot less concrete than their enemies seem to assume. It is true that prophesies foretell that Yahweh's people will guide the whole world, but it is something supposed to come about by a divine miracle rather than by human manipulation. And it seems a rather benign rule at that, not a bid to replace the other ethnic groups. That's limited to the land of Canaan, which was promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In that case, God told them to spare no one, not even the camels, but kill everything that drew breath. This did not entirely come to pass. The Israelites were satisfied with less, and they also made compromises with the locals. But at a time there, Israel was as supremacist as you can get, within its geographical boundaries. They seem more moderate today, to tell it as I see it, but there are still some who don't believe so. Not that these are much better.

Christianity is also, strangely enough, a supremacist religion in some ways. Oh, it does not advocate killing the infidels and taking their land. It is the gospel rather than the race that is supreme and must necessarily conquer the whole world. This is an important distinction in theory. In practice, not all Christian nations have taken that distinction so seriously. Despite the early success of spreading the Gospel through martyrs, it did not take long before the Christians decided it was better to kill the heathens than to be killed. A natural sentiment which I can certainly understand, but a pretty dramatic deviation from the life and words of their founder. Various degrees of imperialism have been justified by "spreading the faith" over a span of several hundred years. And even between Christian nations, the religion has been used to explain wars. The idea that there is just one True Faith kinda plays into the hands of these people. Not that I'm saying there is more than one True Faith, mind you. But I really don't think a True Faith requires you to kill people.

Still, Christianity almost from its outset was meant to replace Judaism, not to mention the heathen polytheist religions which Jews and Christians alike agreed were rank superstition and evil.

And then Islam set out to replace Christianity and Judaism both. It began at a time which seemed ripe for such an effort. Christianity had become the state religion of Rome, but Rome had fallen. The western empire was awash in barbarians, and the eastern was in some degree of retreat. The Jews, on their side, were scattered and hundreds of years had passed without a chance to get home. Their role in history seemed to be ended, and Christianity a candle in the growing winds. A new faith that built upon the best in the old and enhanced it, that was what Mohammad offered the world. A rejuvenation of the besieged idea of monotheism, in an age where the surviving Christians were worshiping the Trinity at best, saints at worst, often saints eerily similar to local deities of the past.

Once again, religious supremacy turned out to be hard to separate from cultural and even racial. The neo-Arabic culture that was infused with the religious fervor of Islam, became a wildfire sweeping the middle east and spreading outward to the Atlantic and to far eastern Asia. For centuries, the words of the Prophet were spread by steel as well as by scroll. It must have seemed to the Muslims that their founders had indeed been right, that their faith was destined for supremacy. To rule the world.

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In light of this it becomes easy to understand the helpless rage that many Muslims feel. Their way of life, their faith and their nations were destined to be the Next Big Thing, to march ever forward until they ruled the world in glory. Now the Previous Big Thing is eclipsing them everywhere and in every way (except morally, at least as they see it). Even the obsolete Jews are back and flowering, on the sacred grounds of Islam. A cruel betrayal by fate! How could such a thing come to pass? It is no wonder that many look for conspiracies and turn to extreme measures. Do not forget that the Christian nations acted suspiciously similar in the past whenever good things happened to the Jews. It is not so far ago that we should forget.

In a way, I don't think we can ever have religion without a sense of supremacy. If I did not believe that my faith was better than others, then I did not believe at all. I must necessarily think that others are wrong if I think that I am right, since they don't agree with me. There is no way around it. But at least it should be possible, if we continue to think it over and talk it over with each other, to agree that this only applies to the faith itself. Not to the nations or races that happen to hold our faith today. Remember that the nations that we consider "Christian" nations are not the same that were so originally. They may not stay that way either. Even as I watch, Christianity is fading here in Scandinavia, its churches becoming more and more like museums, biblical tenets being voted out of existence. Some of you will no doubt applaud this, and perhaps a few lament it. But I think it could happen to any country that becomes rich enough and well enough educated.

Whenever some claim that their religion bids them to judge others and rule over others, you can be sure that they have failed to judge and rule over their own heart. This has always been what the Supreme Being has asked us to do, but it is also the hardest supremacy to achieve in this life.