Four-Colour Commentary

It's the Most Shoppingest Time of the Year

My grandmother just sent out a message in her characteristic way of thinking about The Big Picture. She was at a church recital and she got to thinking about Jews and the early Christian movement.

I went to hear the Lessons and Carols this afternoon, and I have been singing to myself ever since, “Sing to all Jer- ooo- salem, Christ is born in Bethlehem”. So the message is to the Jewish people,. But they never accepted it. Why? Imagine if they had agreed to sing along – there would be no Israel festering in the Middle East. Maybe Islam wouldn’t have taken root and grown, if its few beginners had been faced with one cohesive religion all around them. No Crusades, no Holocaust, no Merchant of Venice. Gosh.

I love that my grandmother thinks of things like this, but I suspect the Jews didn't take to early Christianity because as far as they were concerned it was pure heresy for a living man to claim to be the messiah, even in his supposedly reserved way. Also, splitting the Jewish communities of Rome into olde timey Jews and new-fangled 'Christians' put all of them at an inferior position, politically. The Jewish community was treated with a little respect by Rome; this new upstart cult could throw all of that out the window. I have no trouble at all understanding Jewish resistance to Christianity.

As for Islam, there is certainly a causal-historical point of view: if not for Christianity, no Islam; if not for Judaism, no Christianity. However, there's also the idea that the Arab people were, politically and socially, ready for a new faith, perhaps even in need of one, and they happened to grab up what was at hand, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and then altered it and fit it to their own context. And all of that happens over hundreds of years, of course, so it has time to be molded and shaped and squished to satisfy the various desires of those who are in the position of privilege to be able to alter the text; the exact same things are true of the Torah and the New Testament, of course.

The perniciousness of Jehovah, it seems to me, is logically going to be the result of setting up any one godhead. There is an inherent statement in monotheism that not only can my god beat up your god, but your god doesn't actually exist. You've merely fallen prey to some character that we made up to stand in for everyone else's beliefs (Satan), or petty, random spirits who are out to screw with you (demons or Arab djinns, for example). If we're going to point to any one religious mistake, it's monotheism. At least with the polytheists, there's always room for one more, as long as that one doesn't claim to be the only one. Within polytheism, there is an implicit welcoming of many stories, many voices, and many points of view. That's not to claim that polytheists don't wage wars and commit colonial genocide and persecute women and all of those things.

In the end, which religion you follow is meaningless compared to how well you treat your fellow human being, and no faith can claim to be the 'religion of peace' without a heavy dose of hypocrisy; they've all done all of the things that they claim only the pagans do, or the heretics, or the infidels, or the barbarians, or whomever. Nobody's hands are clean. Not Jesus, Abraham, and Mohamed. Not Krishna, the Buddha, and the Master Kung. Everyone kills to demonstrate that they're the best at maintaining peace. This is one of the many, many, many reasons why I stopped believing that humans are inherently logical creatures.

Merry Christmas.