From “Why the West gets religion wrong,” by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst, in last Friday’s International Herald Tribune (emphasis mine):
What unites both liberals and conservatives is their mutual insistence on the exclusivity and absoluteness of their vision. In this both sides are composed of fundamentalists who mistake their subjective beliefs for the only objective truth.
But true religion is not and cannot be fundamentalist. No true follower of monotheism can claim to know the mind and will of God. Judaism is marked by the struggle to interpret the righteousness that is demanded by God. Similarly, Jesus was never fully understood by his disciples nor was he even recognized by them after his resurrection. And in Islam, a fatwa used to be a nonbinding wisdom judgment of elders limited by the greater wisdom and judgment of God. It only became a lethal injunction when Muslims started to copy Napoleonic models of authority and legitimization.
Equally, religion is not and cannot be relativist. No genuine belief in God is just a matter of personal taste or subjective opinion. True religion has always been public and political because it is about forming communities around shared values and the practices that embody them. In the West, privatizing religion initiated the abandoning of any collective public realm that expressed common substantive ideals. We should not then be surprised when Iran and other countries do not wish to follow us down this path.
Leave a Reply