Last preached on May 15, 2005
A little over a year ago, I spent an evening working on the computer and, as I often do, I had one of the 24 hour news channels on as background noise. Yes, I will freely admit that it was Fox News…. But I promise, I’m better now… now it would have probably been CNN or NPR. Frankly, I was not paying it much attention.
Then there came a story that grabbed my attention away from website building. It was an interview with a young Palestinian woman, maybe 19 years old. This young woman was an intelligent, articulate mother of two young children. She had been arrested by Israeli police intending to sacrifice herself as a suicide bomber, hoping and indeed praying to take many Israelis with her as she could, women and children if possible.
This shouldn’t have shocked me, because I have seen it many times in my life. My time in military service took me often into areas of our world where ideas such as this are commonplace. And indeed, as a soldier, I too considered the possible need that I might be called upon to lay down my life in the service of my ideals.
But this was different. Looking in her eyes, you could see where her reasoning and mine diverged. I always knew that someday, as any soldier, I might lose my own life, or even take a life, to protect others, either to protect civilians or to protect those fellow soldiers on either side of me.
But in her eyes, I saw that her reasoning was not protection of others. It was not to gain a homeland for her people. It was not even revenge against the Israelis… Oh, she used all those excuses, and more… but her reasoning was much more evil. Yes, I said evil. She desired to kill herself and as many others as possible “In God’s name.”
I believe the terms “good” and “evil” only apply to human actions and intentions, and have nothing to do with the Divine. A storm cannot be “evil” just as a mother tiger caring for her young is not “good”. But people, human beings, having free will, conscience, and the ability to reason can and indeed do commit both “good” and “evil”. They are aspects of human nature, nothing more and nothing less.
As I sat there, watching the TV, I asked myself how she could come to think like that. Was her goal to become a suicide bomber comprehensible to us, as Unitarian Universalists? Or was she just, as the author Tom Clancy once said, “simply a Klingon”? In other words, were her thoughts and culture so alien to us that we cannot understand them, as much as if she were from another planet?
The quest for martyrdom, murder, and mayhem in a religious cause is certainly not unique to the Palestinians or even to radical Islam. Radicals within Christianity certainly have plenty of blood on their hands, both historically (as in the Crusades and the Conquest of the New World) and recently in Ethiopia, Ireland, and Bosnia. The Old Testament boasts of atrocities committed in the “name of God.” Radical followers of all of the world’s major religions have killed others who disagreed with them, even within their own faith. Even radicals such as Ethan Allen, within my own Faith tradition of Deism committed actions during the American and French Revolutions that could only be described as Terrorism.
Why? When you read the holy books of all of these faiths, when you read their sacred writings and study their most deeply held beliefs, they all seem to abhor the kinds of atrocities that are often committed in the name of their God, and in the name of their faith.
Either there has to be an understandable reason, or we just give up and admit that, to the Unitarian Universalist mindset, these people are Klingons. But, as in the novel where Tom Clancy uses that analogy, to just dismiss them is to avoid the challenge presented to us by the fifth Faith Tradition of our Principles, the “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”
Mark Twain, in his philosophical essay, “What is Man?”, puts forth the idea that everything a man does in his life, he does for reasons of self interest. In essence, that when you get to the root causes of a person’s actions, somehow, to their way of thinking the action is of some ultimate benefit to themselves. He puts forth the analogy that, if a man gives a beggar 25 cents, (call it 5 dollars today) he does so, not to help the beggar, but to gain for himself freedom from his own guilt and conscience, and to grant himself the feeling that he has done something good that day. He sleeps better, has a better image of himself, and can even use that good act to make up for something not so good that he might have done… quite a deal for 5 bucks!
This ran through my mind as I watched this young Palestinian woman being interviewed and I asked myself, “What could possibly be the self-interest in blowing yourself up and taking as many woman and children as possible with you?”
As I asked myself that, she gave me the answer. She said, (I’m paraphrasing) “though the Koran does not call for women to become martyrs, it doesn’t forbid it either. I know that when I die on a mission I will be received in paradise.”
That is the self-interest! A better life in God’s paradise bought and paid for with your own blood and the blood of as many enemies as you can take with you.
Yes, to our Unitarian Universalist mindset, this is complete rubbish… but would it be if you really believed? If you could buy yourself an eternity in heaven by committing such an atrocity, wouldn’t that be in your self interest, if you truly believed?
Add into that mix the respect of your peers before you commit the act, the feeling that you are fulfilling your duty to God, and therefore are better than all those “cowards” who don’t. To know that by doing so, you are buying social standing and financial support for your family. Throw in the fact that you live in a third world country, and that the life you are leaving is one of hardship and hard work, just to survive? And then, add to the top a bit of personal ego icing that you, not anyone else, but you… are doing what you know to be God’s will, and the pride you would feel because of that.
The unwavering, personally undeniable belief that what you are doing is God’s Will. The faith you have that the act is righteous, and the consequences are not your responsibility at all, but God’s.
When I thought about it, I began to wonder why we don’t see ten bombings a day, or more. It became clear, that though the reasoning is still alien to me, I at least could begin to understand why it was not alien to that young, nineteen year old mother of two.
It is not the existence of Israel that causes such bombings. It was not the proximity of catholic and protestant neighborhoods that gave rise to the IRA. It was not a desire to secure the birthplace of God that spawned the crusades. And it certainly was not some mythical genetic difference that caused the war in Bosnia.
All of these atrocities, and many more were spawned by Belief without Doubt!
It is the belief in the infallibility of one vision, one set of scripture, and one version of the Divine that causes people to commit, sanction, or dismiss such acts.
Our Modern Media culture has given us a name for people who hold this kind of view — Fundamentalists. Though we hear most often of the fundamentalists within Christianity, they exist in every faith tradition… including ours. Yet in our Unitarian Universalist faith, fundamentalist views often trend more to the political than the religious.
To the religious fundamentalist the word of their God has to be infallible, for the God of revelation could not be God if he made mistakes. So if God has granted man a Revelation, then that Revelation must also be infallible. All or most of it must stay true, or it was not a revelation in the first place. In their minds defense of any part of the revelation is defense of the whole.
The simple point fundamentalists make is that if you believe in a Revelation, really believe, then there can be no room for doubt. To have such doubt would be tantamount to denying God’s perfection, and therefore denying God.
And if there is no doubt, is not killing, murdering, and maiming, when you believe you are called to it by your God, not only allowable, but an expression of your Faith? For such actions would damn you to hell if not sanctioned by your God. Fundamentalists who commit such acts are risking their immortal soul on the strength of their belief that their view of God’s Will is the correct one.
And then, how much stronger is that Faith when they risk, not only their immortal soul, but their very life in order to gain a place at God’s side.
How wonderful that would sound… so long as your beliefs had no doubt.
I would be remiss if I did not state that not all, or even most members of any revelatory religious tradition are Fundamentalists. Most are those who believe in the basic principles of a Revelation, but admit that the specifics of that revelation were written for a different time, in a different perspective, and that it is the principles that must be held to, not necessarily the specifics. These are not the people of which I speak. I am speaking of those, found in all the revelatory faiths, who demand the absolute validity of their particular revelation. It is they who are subject to the dangers of Belief without Doubt.
The danger of holding Beliefs that you are unable to doubt extends beyond the purely religious, and into the political spectrum. The same kind of mentality which can fly airplanes into buildings could be applied to a different set of beliefs. Those who kill workers for logging companies in the name of the environment, or who slaughter whole villages in South America in the name of Marxist or Maoist political ideology are just as much “fundamentalists” as those who shoot doctors in front of Planned Parenthood clinics. They have just found a different form of God in which to have “Belief without Doubt”. In truth, if we UU’s are susceptible to a form of Fundamentalism, this one is the greatest danger to us.
I believe, though still with a bit of doubt, that there is an inherent part Unitarian Universalism that helps keep us from falling into the trap of “Belief Without Doubt” when it comes to our religious beliefs.
In order for us to live up to the ideal that we set for ourselves of respecting and learning from many different religious faith traditions, it is required of us that we entertain at least a small amount of doubt as to the correctness of our own religious beliefs. In other words, though we do not state it explicitly in our principles, in order to live up to those principles we have to accept that possibility that our own, personal opinions could be wrong, or at least they are not the only possible valid opinions.
To me, this acceptance that there is more than one possible answer, more than one valid “portal” into understanding the Divine, is indeed the basic foundation of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. And, it is from this that we gain the level of doubt necessary to prevent ourselves from ever committing such atrocities “In God’s Name”.
The ability to Doubt is more than just a measure designed to prevent us from falling into the trap of Religious Fundamentalism… much more. In fact, it is what makes us into, what Mark Twain called “Permanent Seekers of Truth”. For it is that ability to doubt the beliefs we hold that goads us into questioning them. If you hold beliefs that cannot be questioned, then you cannot grow in those beliefs. Your beliefs become stagnant and dogmatic, and you become stagnant, and dogmatic.
There is, however, the danger of allowing your doubts to rule you… and never getting anywhere. Because we humans are incapable of absolute knowledge on any subject, belief is necessary for us to conduct our daily lives, to keep a sense of our relationship to the families, communities, and indeed worlds we inhabit. So, what we strive for is a doubt that does not keep us from living, but also requires us to question.
This is what we Unitarian Universalists mean when we use such quotable phrases as “The Questions are more important than the Answers” and “Revelation is continuous”… For our enshrinement of Doubt at the foundation of our faith calls us to continue searching, learning, growing, and changing throughout our lives, and maybe even beyond. It is this ability to doubt that makes us who we are as Unitarian Universalists.
Do you remember that young, 19 year old girl whose story on Fox News started my mind along this track? A few months after I first published a version of this essay, a friend of mine, a fellow Deist, sent me a news article. That misguided young girl had finally succeeded in her goal and committed a suicide bombing… killing herself and taking a few Israeli soldiers with her at a border crossing. She left two young children to grow up thinking that their mother’s death was a heroic act, and not the tragedy it really was.
The warning of the tragic life, and death, of that young Palestinian woman is that if we ever cease to Doubt, then we are no longer reasoning, no longer thinking, and no longer growing. So I ask you… if we ever lose the ability to doubt our beliefs, would we still be Unitarian Universalists? Cherish your doubts… for they may be all that save us.