Agents of the Undertow:
They have always been my heroes.
Mavericks, outlaws, malcontents and rebels, each of them...
Not Like Us
Jonathon Sachs, writing for the Times Online, recently wrote:
- "The real battle, and it applies to secular and religious alike, is: can we love, not hate, the people not like us?"
At first the question seems self-apparent in the issues it raises. But thinking deeper I realized that there was more, much more, to the query being posited and that the answers lie within the question itself.
How do we define 'different than us'? In the United States we live in a society that is diverse in its ethnicity. Our neighbors are hispanic, black, polish, chech, asian, latin and more. For the most part, we live peacefully with each other. We are neighbors, co-workers, friends and spouses. We fought our way through hard times. Segregation and the World War II interment camps are blights upon our history. But we have moved beyond them. Peaceably. We are re-visiting some of the problems of our past because of the issue of illegal immigration, but most of us realize that the answer is integration, not internment or segregation, not deportation.
Mr. Sachs asks "can we learn to love the people not like us?" Human differences in appearance have become less of a factor in our prejudices. We've moved miles towards becoming the true "melting pot" of humanity. That isn't to say that racism doesn't exist. But at least we have de-institutionalized it. So, what are the differences that divide us? If southerners don't hate yankees, if blacks don't hate whites, if we no longer want to force our asian brothers into camps, if, instead, we now intermarry then where are we different? The answer is made loud and clear in newspapers and on television every single day. It is our religious beliefs that divide us, that allow us to hate those that are not like us.
When the World Trade Center towers collapsed the late Jerry Falwell, leader of the "Moral Majority", said God condemned moms and dads to leap to their deaths from the World Trade Center because we don't discriminate against gays. He - and Pat Robertson and others - made similar comments about those suffering from the wrath of hurricane Katrina. Comments like these aren't out of the ordinary. They are everpresent and they are made on national television and on Sundays at your local church. The list of hateful statements like these is too long to document here. Simply turn on your television any day of the week and you will be bombarded - in the name of God - with the same hateful trash.
Change the wording from Falwell's statement slightly and ask yourself how tolerant we would be of this hatred. Instead of saying God condemned them to jump because we are tolerant of gays, imagine if Falwell had said God condemned them to jump because we've allowed blacks to live among us. The outrage would be never-ending, and rightfully so.
It is only in the realm of religious belief that we tolerate outright hatred. And it is only through the eradication of religion that we will be able to live peacefully as humans. Just humans. Only when we have eliminated religion will christians actually become truly christian, as Jesus taught it.
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