NEIL STEINBERG 07/07/2015
Sun-Times
There was a heartbreaking story on the front page of the New York
Times Monday about a woman who fled the chaos of
Myanmar with three of her four children,
making the perilous sea journey to join her husband in slightly
less chaotic Malaysia. It’s a long article, focusing on the child
she left behind. But one phrase in one sentence leaped out at me.
Let’s see if it leaps out at you too:
“Her husband, who had raised shrimp and cattle, had been among tens
of thousands who made the journey two years earlier,
after Buddhist mobs rampaged through villages like their
own, burning houses and killing at least 200 people.”
“Buddhist mobs?” Rampaging and killing? I didn’t know Buddhists did
that. What happened to the Eight-Fold Path? To saffron robes and
shaved heads?
Not to single out Buddhists. Every faith has a litany of positive
beliefs — God loves us all, we’re all part of His creation, do unto
others as you would have others do unto you — that get swept aside
when convenient.When
we think of bias, we think of negative prejudices. But positive
biases can be just as misleading. It isn’t as if you need to think
hard to find other examples of Buddhists betraying the tenets of
their faith: monks in Japan in the 1930s, for instance, were almost
universally supportive of that nation’s catastrophic march to
global war.
The mayor of Mundelein, Steve Lentz, drew attention — which is hard
for a mayor of Mundelein to do — by turning his July 4 speech,
normally a time of patriotic platitudes, into a denunciation of the
“moral quagmire” society faces because we are more accepting of
gays and unwed mothers. In saying this, he is viewing the world
through one facet of the lens of his Christian faith. And that lens
has turned the situation upside down as a lens will.
Society easing up on its habit of punishing gays and single mothers
is not an example of moral failure, but of moral clarity, a triumph
of liberal compassion over the blurry forces of punitive religion.
It’s closer to a miracle than a crisis. And while children raised
by two parents indeed do better than children raised by one, that
is a practical matter, not an ethical one. Drivers who wear
seat belts also do better than drivers who don’t, yet nobody makes
wearing a seat belt into an ethical issue. At least not
yet.
And not that morality is a poll, but most Americans find both gay
marriage and out-of-wedlock childbirth to be acceptable,
ethically.
In the hands of people like Lentz, religious morality becomes a
Divine Certificate of Merit to bestow on yourself and people
exactly like you. It is a pass given uncritically to the home team.
One they don’t deserve and one that hurts more than helps them. The
surest sign of love isn’t a kneejerk pass, but careful attention
and thinking. I adore my boys, but if they screw up, I’ll tell
them. I think Israel is grand, but I also understand that Benjamin
Netanyahu could start building concentration camps in Gaza and
gassing the residents and a certain swath here would busy
themselves explaining why that is OK.
It’s very hard for people to grasp that the high regard they hold
themselves in is not universally shared. There is a meme going
around the Internet, a pair of photos. The top one shows a picture
of robed members of the Klu Klux Klan.
“No one thinks that these people are representatives of
Christians,” it’s captioned.
The next one shows a band of Islamic fighters under the black flag
of terror.
“So why do so many people think these people are representative of
Muslims?”
A point I heartily agree with. Still, looking at that top photo, I
couldn’t resist.
“No one?” I wrote.
Because to me, Christianity, like every other religion, is the
carte blanche that people give themselves to do horrible things.
Murdering children in the name of Buddhism. Blowing up women in the
name of Allah. Allowing millions to dwell in misery in the shadow
of your land flowing with milk and honey. Shunning good people who
have done nothing wrong in the name of Jesus’ love.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Religion is a tool.
Like a hammer. You can build a house with it. You can hit someone
in the head. Your choice, not the hammer’s. But people are cowards,
and the meaner they are, the more cowardly they tend to be. So they
blame the hammer, thinking it excuses them. It doesn’t.