Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

September 25, 2006

Is Monotheism the Problem or Is It Zealotry

AlterNet has a rather interesting albeit disrespectful article about the "evils" of monotheism. The author's point is that believe in one true god produces a ready conflict when there is disagreement about who is that god and how should one worship him.
The chief authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century were secular and even anti-religious. They are not gone, but they are exhausted. Now, in our global warming, nuclear bomb-loaded world, especially in the United States and the Middle East, we face an older, far more popular and durable ideology: the angry god as mandate and role model.


Like Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell and others before him, Sam Harris insists that the basic premises and literal texts of monotheism are so authoritarian and repressive that people who believe them also easily and frequently support all sorts of other repressive causes. For evidence, see the last 2,000 years of history, or tomorrow's newspaper.


The historic battles within monotheism are legendary: Hebrews vs. Christians, Sunnis vs. Shiites, Catholics vs. Protestants, Lutherans vs. Calvinists, Church of England vs. dissenters, Puritans vs. Baptists, and so many others. Currently some Islamic extremists have a hard time deciding who they despise more: Is it the evil Christian and Jewish heretics, or is it the evil Muslims heretics? So much heresy, so little time.


For monotheism, it always comes down to heresy, to the rejection of orthodoxy. Starting perhaps with Zoroastrianism, each monotheism itself began as a heresy, instantly generating its own orthodoxy. Heresy -- free thought and choosing to reject the rules -- is the primal offense against the monotheists' conception, and love, of their solitary deity.

Indeed, not since the Middle Ages when the conflicts over the true religion tore through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Central Asia all the way to China, has the Jihadi call for "monotheism" and killing apostates been heard louder than now. The author makes clear that the Christian and Jewish side of "the monotheism" problem included the original founders of Israel, the guerrilla war against Rome in Palestine. Then of course there was the wars between the Luthers and the Catholics, followed by the bloody crusades.
But is the problem monotheism or is it a self-serving rigid fundamentalist view point that everyone "must" agree or else. One can find that regimented thought in the origins of Orthodox Judaism and Christianity in the Pharisee movement. tiscali.reference.encyclopaedia describes the historical roots of Pharisees. A Pharisee was a...
Member of a conservative Jewish sect that arose in Roman-occupied Palestine in the 2nd century BC in protest against all movements favouring compromise with Hellenistic culture. The Pharisees were devout adherents of the law, both as found in the Torah and in the oral tradition known as the Mishnah.


They were opposed by the Sadducees on several grounds: the Sadducees did not acknowledge the Mishnah; the Pharisees opposed Greek and Roman rule of their country; and the Pharisees held a number of beliefs – such as the existence of hell, angels, and demons, the resurrection of the dead, and the future coming of the Messiah – not found in the Torah.


The Pharisees rejected political action, and in the 1st century AD the left wing of their followers, the Zealots, broke away to pursue a revolutionary nationalist policy. After the fall of Jerusalem, Pharisee ideas became the basis of orthodox Judaism as the people were dispersed throughout the Western Roman Empire.

So the Pharisees where the believers in the Jewish law with rigid interpretations. They also took it upon themselves to decide who was and wasn't complying with their interpretation of the law. But the Zealots put those fundamentalist belief into action. According to Wikipedia the Zealots
have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord." [...]The Zealots objected to Roman rulership and sought to violently eradicate it; Zealots engaged in violence were called the Sicarii. They raided Jewish habitations and killed Jews they considered collaborators, they also urged Jews to fight Romans and other Jews for their religiopolitical cause. Josephus paints a very bleak picture of their activities as they instituted what he characterized as a murderous "reign of terror" prior to the Jewish Temple's destruction.


According to Josephus, the Zealots followed John of Gischala, who had fought the Romans in Galilee, escaped, came to Jerusalem, and then inspired the locals to a fanatical position that led to the Temple's destruction.

This kind of fundamentalism sounds very much like the operating values of the Israelis, as well as the Jihadis and the fundamentalist Christians in the US. A dogmatic ideological group bent on pursuing their beliefs politically and through warfare are "zealots" indeed.

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