A Brief History of Faith

President Obama said yesterday at Fort Hood, "No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts. No just and loving God looks upon them with favor." Taken as a universal moral prescription, he is correct. But as a description of the history of religions, he could not be more wrong. The norm in human history is to kill or be killed in the name of religion. Taking only the last 2,000 years and a very narrow slice of peoples, Romans killed Christians because of their faith, and thereafter, Christian sects killed other Christian sects. Meanwhile, Muslim sects killed other Muslim sects. Then, Christians killed Muslims and Muslims killed Christians, while Christian and Muslim sects continued to kill each other. All of this occurred with a regularity bordering on a scientific necessity. In fact, the only major religion that has not killed others in the normal course over the last millennia is Judaism, mainly because it was altogether too busy fending off the recurrent bloody mobs seeking its extinction. The idea that religious difference does not, and should not, justify killing others is an epiphany of the last few hundred years. This notion gained some credence in Western culture during the Enlightenment, and finally emerged in the American revolution as an obdurate challenge to the religious history of mankind.  The Continent followed suit shortly thereafter, due in large part to the translation and publication in Germany towards the end of the 19th Century of the works of the incomparable Kierkegaard. As of today, this Western ethic of religious tolerance is accepted almost universally, by the Left, the Right, and everyone in between ...... except, of course, by a large slice of about a billion Muslims. Continue ..... I am not being critical of Muslims, I'm really not. My brief history of religious tolerance is intended to show that this is a very recent invention. It should not be a surprise that people as passionate as Muslims will be a good bit behind the curve, as it were. And this is not least because their own culture was marginal and marginalized during the period of the ascendancy of religious tolerance. However, for almost 40 years now, Islam has been ascendant, due to the conjunction between a growing, prospering world starving for energy and the huge reserves of black gold under the sands of the Middle East. Muslims, rightly, insist on taking their place on the world stage. If they do so, however, there is no more important lesson for them to learn than that bloody war in the name of their religion is something the world will no longer accept. And it is up to the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, to teach them this lesson, through persuasion if possible, but through steely nerve and force of arms, if that is what they prefer. The world lost too many people in the countless millennia of religious warfare to let itself fall back into those dark ages. At bottom, this is the problem with the Obama Administration's prevarication and obfuscation about Islamic Terrorism. The Obami are treating the issue as if it is some parochial American political battle with the Right. Instead, it is a transcendent worldwide cultural war. This brazen idea, that people of different religions can live in peace, is at a cross-roads: will it become a universal law between people of all nations, or shall it be just another 19th Century Western curiosity, like bustles and spats? If we can secure this principle of religious tolerance against the forces of Islamic Jihad, then the world will be a better place. Perhaps we can then move on to educating the world about political liberty, and make it a two-fer for 19th Century Western culture.