HBU

You might have naively thought that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were making mutually exclusive truth claims, but Globe columnist James Carroll is quite sure that “monotheism doesn’t mean ‘We’re number one.’” It simply implies that “God is one not in the exclusiveness of counting, but in the inclusiveness of creating.” Okay then–let’s play “How far can we bend over backwards to excuse the actions of the faithful?”

Like so many of his fellow “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bible” religious apologists who nurse at the withered teat of postmodernism, Carroll lets his obfuscatory rhetoric and esoteric readings of scripture get in the way of an honest appraisal of the situation. Robert Jeffress calling voters to reject candidates who don’t believe in Jesus Christ–the Israeli zealots in Jaffa vandalizing Muslim and Christian cemeteries–the Islamic mob in Cairo killing two dozen Coptic Christians? They are only:

revealing what happens when embers of earthly conflict are fanned into flames by the heavenly justification of a twisted monotheism.

Wherefore the “twisted?” Call up Robert Jeffress, or the leader of the group that wrote “Death to Arabs” on Jaffa gravestones. What would that conversation be like, if Carroll told them their interpretation of the holy book was “twisted”? I can hazard a guess that they’d run scriptural circles around him, and Carroll would be none the wiser. Not realizing that you cannot separate the morally wicked from the morally positive in any of these Holy Books, writers like Carroll slog on, expounding on faith as a virtue.

Why are we still looking to these scriptures for advice when there exists a vast literature, composed in every language on Earth, that transmits tales of ethical struggles without any pretense of infallibility or questionably moral passages? It is no accident that religions haven’t sprung up around The Brothers Karamazov, To Kill A Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn. Who has read Twain and interpreted his novels as a case for slavery? I submit this not in jest, but to highlight a major discrepancy in the way “sacred scripture” is approached. Like every other bound stack of pages ever scribbled on, the Torah, New Testament, and Koran are nothing more than manmade additions to our body of literature. Their sole importance now lies in being a reference point for other pieces of art, and any writer who recommends these texts—whether as inerrant revelation or as “great moral teachings”–does a disservice to the moral compass of his fellow human beings.

Exhibit A, Carroll:

sibling rivalry can be the bitterest kind, and among these three [religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] the competition has been exacerbated by a mistaken monotheism: For my God to be true, yours has to be false.

What scripture is Carroll reading? In the Old Testament, we have the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” In the New Testament, we have Jesus firmly stating in John 17:3, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” In the Koran: “Thee only do we worship (1:5); “Allah–there is no deity except Him,” (2:255). You can make the case, as Carroll and David Wolpe have, that the “Hebrew intuition that ‘God is one’ pointed to a quality, not a quantity”–but you’re not to smugly pin this conclusion to the rest of the religious peoples, who tell us daily that their God is not only the correct one but the certainly correct one. Doing so insults their sincerity and needlessly complicates the conversation.

Exhibit B, Carroll

To say, as the Book of Genesis does, that God is the creator of all that exists – not just of the tribe – means that all creatures are alike in participating in God’s life. That all humans – not just “us’’ – are in the image of God means every person counts as much as every other.

If this weren’t utterly meaningless, it would still qualify as unnecessary. How empowering to remember that we’re all just God’s little Sesame Street production studio, “participating” in His life! There exists a point at which humility is no longer educative or beneficial, and prostration before an improvable god lies far beyond that point. We don’t need to invoke any deities—only spend time with each other—to reach the self-evident, but apparently not-obvious conclusion that all of us share a common human dignity.

And yet, not content to whip up a storm of esoteric interpretations, Carroll reminds us all of our implicit membership to the cult of compulsory love:

Such is the scope of tolerance embedded in the oneness of God, alive in every person, that not even those who betray it are excluded.

In words reminiscent of Gandhi’s “pacifism at all costs,” a man’s betrayal of his fellow human beings thus must not be opposed at every moment, but simply suffered, until the wicked “feel the scope of the tolerance embedded in the oneness of God alive in them” and gladly renounce their ways. One wonders if someone told Stalin or Hussein of this wondrous fact. Tell it to the children of Tutsi and Hutu Catholics in Rwanda, whose shared Catholic faith did nothing to forestall the butchery. Tell it to those displaced by the Gaza settlers or massacred at Jasenovac. All victims of the faithful, whether in religious, ethnic, or political disposition.  If you denounce the Biblically inspired actions of Robert Jeffress by deferring a faith-based reading of the Bible, you admit that the text itself is useless, at best, for moral guidance.