We have spent considerable time in these essays discussing the bipolarity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At one pole, each of them has a wonderful system of morals, which have stood by us well. Those morals started out as pretty nasty social laws. It was an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, and a life for a life. It took quite a while for them to become compassionate, but gradually they became so, and have served us well for the past several millennia. The followers of these religions have led better lives by adherence to these guides for life. It appears that the human mind needs religion, in order to make some sense out of our world. Whatever our religious beliefs, they help to solidify our thought processes about who we are and where we are going. There has been expression of religious belief with the earliest signs of art and speech, marking humans as separate from other animals. Religion is just a part of us, and as long as those religions have emphasized these poles of morality, in some form, they have been to our benefit.
Unfortunately, each of these religions has an opposite pole, of equal power. They are intolerant of those who do not share their faith. For Judaism, it is a demand that all people everywhere accept their self-appointed status as the chosen people, the only people that have a covenant with the one true God of the entire universe. Their people and their nation, they say, will serve as an example for all people of all other nations. Those who do not believe in this superiority of the Isreali nation deserve to be shunned. If there are any who show hostility toward these superior Jewish people, they deserve to invaded, bombed and killed.
For Christianity, it begins with the arrogance that they are the only true religion. Their hero, Jesus, they believe, was a God on Earth. He was able to perform multiple miracles that defied normal physical laws. He cured the ill, made wine out of water, walked on water, chased devils out of people’s souls, and raised himself from total death. Jesus has promised an afterlife of pleasure for an eternity for all those who believe that he was the Messiah. The problem is that, according to Jesus, all those who do not accept this myth as to his Godly character, are going to be tortured for an eternity. He asked that his enemies be brought to him so that he could watch them being killed. Jesus, by this teaching, set the example of intolerance for all those people of other faiths. According to Christianity, all those of other faiths deserve to be invaded by religious, economic or military means, and all other people must be converted to Christianity, or suffer dire consequences.
Islam shows this bipolarity to an extreme. It is at once the most compassionate of the three religions, and also the most hateful. Muhammad, the great prophet of Islam, demands that all his followers, who have any means or resources, give to any persons who have less. They must take care of the cripple, widow, orphan, ill, and the traveler. If they do so, their reward will be great. They will live forever in luxury and pleasure, according to Islamic myth. This afterlife of eternal pleasure, however, is an exclusive club. Only those who believe that Muhammad was the last and greatest prophet of the human species will be admitted. All others are to be scorned and condemned, or summarily slain. Any person who has resources and does not share them with others is particularly evil, an agent of the great Satan. Those persons deserve all the scorn a true Muslim can muster.
This religious intolerance is fertile ground indeed, for those who wish to prey on the fears of humans. As long as we have sustenance, shelter, security, sexual gratification and self-assurance, it is difficult to get us riled. Prey upon our fears that we will lose part of our secure world, and we can be convinced to do most anything evil to other humans. Any leader who has his own personal cause, based on jealousy or greed, finds this religious intolerance a convenient substrate to bend to his or her own purpose. Every religion has been used to fuel acts of aggrandizement and cruelty, after convincing the true believers that those possessions most precious to them are about to be taken away from them. Prey upon their fear, remind them that their religion preaches acts of violence against those of other faiths, and invasions, bombings, destruction, torture, beheadings soon follow.
Our human history of violent intolerance has been pretty frightening. As soon as a more destructive weapon of war has been conceived, it has been widely used, in short order. As soon as long sharp swords became available, they became the weapons of choice over spears. As soon as bows and arrows became known, everybody wanted them in order to kill each other. As soon as guns were manufactured, all warriors were putting them to use in their battles. As soon as cannon were available, they were being dragged to every battlefield. As soon as airplane bombs were created, millions of people met their death in a rain of terror from the sky. As soon as an atomic bomb was created, it was put to use in war, causing millions of deaths, mutilations and cancer victims.
Here’s the situation. Humans have never before hesitated to use the most destructive weapons available to them in their conflicts with each other. We have become one world, with our intolerant religions thrown violently against each other. We have true believers of these intolerant religions, who are committed to either persuading all other humans to accept their particular myths, or else destroying those other humans. We have an increasing number of nations who have atomic bombs available to them. How long will it take before one of these nations, in great anger, pushes their buttons, as those remaining nations push their buttons in retaliation? Will it be sometime within the next few decades? You do the math.
Maybe the biblical forecast of an apocalypse ending the world as we know it is exactly correct. Maybe that apocalypse is a nuclear war, coming soon to a planet near you. There is one way to prevent this holocaust – make the world aware that their religious faiths are myths, and cannot be used as an excuse for intolerant violence directed against other humans.