The Folly of Thinking in Absolute Terms

Note: This post is the presentation I gave last Sunday at Groveland Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in St. Paul, Minn.

The U.S. passed a milestone the other day, the five-year mark in the Iraq War with 4,000 American soldiers dead, many more wounded and of course, untold thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost.

It takes a poet to remind us of the humanity behind the statistics of war as in Thomas Hardy’s 1925 poem, The Man He Killed.

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him and he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because –
Because he was my foe,
Just so – my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list perhaps,
Off-hand like – just as I –
Was out of work – had sold his traps –
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

The motives of the jihadists who flew their planes into the Twin Towers were different from the warriors in Hardy’s poem, but in their own way, those 19 men also seem innocent and incredibly naïve.

Their desire to sacrifice their own lives and destroy the lives of hundreds of others was fueled in part, we’ve learned, by eagerness to please Allah and hoped for rewards in the afterlife.

The attacks on 9/11 provide brutal evidence – as if we needed more - of the folly of thinking in absolute terms, especially absolute religious terms.

And it was to be expected: in response to the attacks that September morning, the theme of religion found its way into the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq. At a prayer meeting shortly before his pre-emptive strike, President Bush said, “Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."

But the reasons for going to war are usually more complex. As Alan Greenspan only recently pointed out, oil was a big factor in the invasion of Iraq - God’s will notwithstanding.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying that religious sentiments add gasoline to the flames of conflict. There’s nothing quite like bombing an ancient mosque to start a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. And lest we forget, a resurgent Taliban, a Sunni Islamist and Pashtun nationalist movement, reminds us that it’s not over yet in perpetually war-torn Afghanistan.

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll has put faces on two youthful would-be Afghani suicide bombers:

“In Paktika Province a young man, whose chest was wrapped with an explosive vest, was en route to the place where he would detonate himself. But then, he saw people at prayer in a mosque, and he changed his mind. He went to the police. He began removing his explosive vest, but it went off. He alone was killed.”

In the second instance, Caroll reported:

“A young man in another Afghan province, recently home from Pakistan where he had attended a religious school, announced a similar intention to his family. He was going to kill the enemy by killing himself. The article said that he handed over $3,600, presumably a reward for what he was about to do. In front of his mother, brother, and two sisters, he displayed his explosive vest. The young man's mother was horrified, and she immediately tried to remove the vest from his body. The bomb detonated. The young man, his mother, and his three siblings were killed instantly.”

Carroll continues:

“Reports from Afghanistan and Iraq have been numbingly discouraging, in part because, in the United States, they come as a steady stream of abstraction. We see the faces of American casualties on the evening news, and the fate of wounded GIs draws sympathy, but otherwise the human cost of the war is kept vague.

“We know to the single digit how many coalition fighters have died, but estimates of Iraqi deaths span a range from tens to hundreds of thousands. A single death - a tragedy; a million - a mere statistic. Meanwhile, as the suicide bombers treat their bodies as weapons, so do we, as if those faceless killers are indeed the automatons their masters want them to be. Yet, Carroll remarks, this tale of two bombers suggests that every such deed, no matter how prompted by indoctrination or despair, must involve human responses.

“I think of that mother…how could she not have been screaming inside, "Who did this to my child?"

“I think of the siblings, witnessing the horror unfolding before them. How helpless they must have felt, with their last glance fixed on a violation of all they had been taught to love and value.

“I think of that first bomber, who, en route to killing, accidentally caught a glimpse of worship, which is nothing but the wish to affirm life, which is another name for God. I think of the bomb masters, who recruited those boys, manipulated them, tricked them into imagining that death could be an affirmation. And I think of those who created the situation within which all of this unfolds.”

Let me repeat: “Worship is nothing but the wish to affirm life, another name for God.”

Life, not death, is another name for God. In fact, the scripture (Deut. 30:19) says: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”

Carroll is not just any newspaper columnist; he’s also a theologian. He’s a regular participant in on-going Jewish-Christian-Muslim encounters at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and he serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University.

Personally, I’m inspired by a newspaper scribe who consistently seeks to breach the ancient walls between the world’s major religions with bridges of understanding rather than war.

Although, it’s unfair to argue that all wars or other such atrocities have been motivated by religious differences - consider the Holocaust or the mass murders under Josef Stalin, several major conflicts do come to mind when we think of wars ostensibly fought in the name of God.

We might begin with the wars of Islamic expansion in the 7th Century or the Crusades, in the 11th Century that lasted several hundred years. The Crusades were a series of armed religious conflicts waged by much of Christian Europe against external and internal threats. The early Crusaders took vows and were granted indulgences for past sins, not unlike today’s suicide bombers who, as James Carroll suggests, are tricked by promises of rewards in the afterlife for a martyrdom that requires the blood of innocents.

Between the Crusades and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are other conflicts credited at least to some extent to religious differences throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

In our time we’ve witnessed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and skirmishes between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East that continue to this day, reminding us the rest of the world has not stood still while the United States pursues on multiple fronts its so-called war on terror.

The world has certainly not stood still in the nation of Myanmar, once called Burma, where a few months ago tens of thousands of Buddhist monks were involved in a pro-democracy uprising. The monks were later joined by nuns prior to the brutal military crackdown. In reference to the ancient Buddhist “Loving Kindness” prayer, protestors reportedly carried signs reading, “loving kindness will win every time.”

Mention of Burmese cities in the news coverage of the uprising reminded me of Kipling’s poem, “Mandalay.” Re-reading Kipling’s words for the first time since high school, I was jarred by the vulgar chauvinism:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

Then in the next stanza:

An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o'mud –
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd –

Kipling was referring to the Buddha.

The last I heard the Myanmar monks were effectively silenced by the military.

In the meantime, Tibetan protestors have aroused the Chinese and despite the exiled Dalai Lama’s pleas to stop the violence, Germany’s Speigel reported a week ago that deaths were mounting in Tibet and neighboring provinces in China, and no end to the bloodshed was in sight.

It’s easy to pick up the thread of religion and spirituality running through much of the violence recorded in the history of the world, even though most faith traditions at their core do speak of peace as an important goal. Yet for most of us, world peace remains a lofty ideal.

Part of the problem is that prickly assumption that God’s love is reserved for only the group with whom we affiliate – our group alone has the truth. Process theologian Marjorie Suchocki strongly disagrees with that notion: “We cannot presume to universalize our own needs, binding God to only ourselves. Just as God bends to our condition out of the divine character of love, even so God might well bend to the condition of others in other ways.”

Ian Barbour, who has done groundbreaking work in the area of science and religion, suggests that process theology offers a potential bridge between religions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism; and also between science and religion; and sometimes even between liberals and conservatives.

Those are all fine words, but how do we as Unitarian-Universalists provide leadership in our battered world that might extend the meaning of “love thy neighbor as thyself” among people of differing religious beliefs?

Forrest Church of All Souls UU in New York gets down to the nitty gritty:

“Gaze into the light of the heavens. There are 1.7 trillion stars for every living human being. The star to person ratio is 1.7 trillion to one. That is awesome and it counsels humility. It should certainly discourage the scourge of human pride. But does it? No. Instead, we sit on this tiny, munificently fixtured rock, arguing over who has the best insider information on the creator and the creation. Is it the Christian? The Buddhist? The Athiest? The Humanist? The Theist? Please! We humans trumpet our differences, some even kill one another over them, while, in every way that matters, we are far more alike than we are different.”

Rev. Church delights in his favorite metaphor: “In what I call the Cathedral of the World, there are millions of windows…each illuminating life's meaning. In this respect, we are many. But we are also one, for the one Light shines through every window. No individual, however spiritually gifted, can see this Light—Truth or God, call it what you will—directly. We cannot look God in the eye any more than we can stare at the sun without going blind. This should counsel humility and mutual respect for those whose reflections on ultimate meaning differ from our own.”

Rev. Church continues: “To appreciate how enlightened this approach to religion is, consider this. If your neighbor disagrees with your personal theology, short of changing your mind–a prospect that may not delight you–you have only four options. You can convert, destroy, ignore, or respect her. Fundamentalists of the Right usually attempt conversion, but sometimes–as we know first hand from recent experience–they choose to destroy in God’s name. Fundamentalists of the Left (secular materialists) tend to ignore such disagreements as irrelevant, but they too may choose destruction. One need witness only the gulags and crematoria to recognize that religious zealots alone have not cornered the market on muting the exercise of religious and political freedom by resorting to mass murder. In the United States of America and as reflected in Unitarian Universalism–a quintessentially American faith–following the principle of e pluribus unum, we embrace the fourth option: mutual respect. There is only one caveat to abridge such respect. We do not and must not permit stone throwing in the cathedral.”

We must not permit stone throwing in the cathedral. Getting that message out to all of the world’s peoples would seem a daunting task. But each of us in our daily communications with family members, friends, and neighbors can at least begin to spread the word.

May it be so.