Religion as cosmetic reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue only the postmodern, post-doctrinal West could love: its self-congratulatory elites having evolved beyond anything so quaint as doctrine and arrived at . . . nihilism. Ratzinger knew better. Doctrinal differences never lose their salience because it is doctrine that defines a believer. To airbrush our differences — even for the well-intentioned purpose of elevating “peace” as a transcendent value — is to deny the essence of who we are.
[...]
There is no common concept of God, and the mush that passes for this feel-good illusion cannot obscure that real faiths exist. They are different because they represent different claims about ultimate truth. One cannot apprehend what those claims are, and how the believer is apt to act on them, without studying doctrine and respecting the divergences between faiths. Substantive differences, civilizational chasms, and supremacist ambitions do not evaporate just because we wish to believe everyone wants “peace.”
[...]
Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant. In the Middle East, about 80 percent of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan tell pollsters they desire to live under sharia strictures. Even in the Far East, in Indonesia, where the practice of Islam tends to be more moderate due to its syncretism with other traditions of worship, sharia is on the march — preferred by half the population . . . and rising. Throughout the West, including in the United States, governments are under pressure from their swelling, aggressive Muslim communities to accept and adopt sharia standards — legitimizing them in our law and our culture, even as their brute repression of speech degrades our capacity to assess the wages of conferring legitimacy.
"Peace" at the price of sharia? No thank you.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment