Early death:
In today's world that is armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and drones and nuclear weapons, we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo- we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16th Century and may be, much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best. Ironically the mindset that our sacred texts are perfect, betrays the very quest that drove our ancestors to write those texts. Each of the men who wrote part of the Bible, Quran, or Gita took his received tradition, revised it, and offered his best articulation of what is good and real. We can honor the quest of our spiritual ancestors, or we can honor their answers, but we cannot do both.
“Because the faith of Islam is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the religion,” says a young Muslim explaining his faith online. His statement betrays a lack of information about the origin of his own beliefs. But more broadly, it sums up the challenge that all religions face in moving forward. Imagine if a physicist said, “Because our understanding of physics is perfect, it does not allow for any more innovations in the field.” Perfection in itself is a utopian idea. Even emperors need maids to cook and engineers to build; nothing is complete in itself.
Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions are just a few. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good. Here is one of the worst of humanity’s moral and spiritual concepts: blasphemy. This dubious concept promotes conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, it belongs to the dustbin of history just as soon as we can get it there. Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off- limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and that is precisely the emotion the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not, but death-to-blasphemers became part of Shariah during medieval times.
The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other horrors. As I write this piece, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging in Saudi Arabia- 1000 lashes in batches of 50- while his wife and children plead from Canada for the international community to do something. What a horrid shame!
Adherents who think their faith is perfect, are not just naïve or ill-informed. They are developmentally dwarfed and in the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age: a time of violence, slavery, desperation and early death.
