2007
Topic C - Freedom of Worship/Thought
September 4, 2007

A first for me. I will provide most of this space for a guest writer. Ebrahim Rasool is a Muslim from South Africa.

South Africa is a fascinating country in which to examine competing philosophies. What an amazing history and mix. Apartheid with no apologies. Bishop Tutu with opposing views, also without apology. Committed Christians on both sides. Other world religions with aggressive proponents. Connections to and empathy with Gandhi. And Nelson Mandela. How does one keep a vibrant personal faith in a bleak jail cell for 18 years? With no real hope for release? I have tried to imagine how, but I cannot.

This is clear. They have much to teach us. South African's assessments of life dilemmas are not easy, simple, or quickly assimilated.

Their tension has included freedom of conscience, which is also freedom of worship. We hold to freedom of worship in this country, legally, but we do not support it politically. Some leaders in a recent election dismissed others' faith as un-American. (!) I have been informed that my denomination, United Methodist, cannot be Christian because our beliefs counter the scriptures. Well. Methodists' first reaction is humorous, since there are few beliefs on which we completely agree and agreement is not required. (Strangely, our basic beliefs about God as creator and redeemer and Jesus as our authority on God are seldom questioned!)

The second response is one of hurt. I am a devout person of faith and have no difficulty in understanding that some would disagree with particulars of faith. However, to say that I have no right to freedom of conscience is a direct assault on my being human and a citizen. The comments usually are an attempt to dismiss my ideas. All for now. Lowen

The Fifth Congress of the International Religious Freedom Association was held in Cape Town this year.* The next will be in 2012. They are a loving, stubborn, academic association, made up of folks who focus on the right of religious freedom world wide.

Ebrahim Rasool is Premier of the Western Cape Province of South Africa. His speech was delivered at the Congress, is in the public domain, and is published in “Liberty.”

“Religious liberty is more than the freedom to believe. It is also the freedom to LET believe..... religious liberty has to assert the great spirituality of all human beings while persuading of better ways to reach and to worship God.

“The first victim of globalization, the first victim of the onslaught of science, the first victim of the onslaught of technology is often tradition, culture, and religious belief -- not because they are mutually exclusive but because they shake the foundations that we hold so easily; they force us to go back and find the relevance we need to present to the world. In the words of J. K. Galbraith, the Canadian-born American economist: ‘The more uncertain people are, the more dogmatic they become.’ This is because they retreat into the few essential truths that they can hold on to, and they become dogmatic about those few essential truths because everything else has changed........

“(Changes include: family structure, place of women, MTV, HIV/AIDS, our desired control of future generations.) ....unless we reinvent ourselves, we will not be able to speak either to women or to the young.... truly, the more uncertain we become, the more dogmatic we become.

This is the cradle of ideologies of certitude that bedevil the world today. Then it is religion being the fig leaf for ideologies of certitude. This is the birthplace of extremism, and we all know extremism: it labels because it cannot debate and argue. It fights because it has forgotten how to love. It isolates and condemns because it doesn't know how to unite and find common ground. And it has perfected the art of dying for a cause because it cannot live for a cause.

“The religious (trialogues) that we require are not simply among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Jains, Sikhs, etc. The conversations we need are conversations of mind-sets across all religions, because extremism -- fundamentalist in Christianity, in Islam, In Judaism, in Hinduism, or any other religion -- speaks far more of a common language than progressive and well-meaning people across all of those religions. Extremists have their own conversations: they slug it out on the battlefields of Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, or where the case may be. They speak that language to each other because they are essentially the same -- even if they raise a Christian flag here, a Jewish flag there, and a Muslim flag there.

“Traditionalists have their own conversations. They retreat into the churches, the mosques, the synagogues and the temples, hiding from the world, unable to deal with this world. They have their own conversations because across all the religions, they have the same language.

“And those of us who believe that religion remains essential to the world, that its values would be the savior of the word, that its behavior is going to be critical to temper the excesses of globalization and give the common poor people something to hold on to both in this world and the hereafter -- we have to fashion a conversation that crosses the formal lines of division among Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews. Unless we find one another the world will be condemned.

“The key to it is, I believe, in what the Koran teaches (when it says) God says ‘I have blown of My spirit into you.’ In the same vein, (First John tells Christians): ‘Who lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.......God has given us of God's spirit.’

“Then we begin to get the answer. We can only go forward if we recognize that each one of us carries a part of the Spirit of God in us -- that when we speak to one another, we don't speak to the Muslim dress that one wears and clerical clothes that Catholics wear .... whatever. We aren't speaking to their clothes: we are speaking to the divine in each one of them. Even as we differ formally, the common ground is that each one of us carries the Spirit of God within us and is worthy of respect, is worthy of love, and is worthy, at the very least, of tolerance.”