In light of Bill Moyers' most recent essay
There's no Tomorrow, and in honor of the 16th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's infamous fatwa that Salman Rushdie should be executed for his book
The Satanic Verses, I'd been feeling a little skeptical about the future of tolerance and freethinking, both here and abroad.
I came across a site that posted an academic paper concerniong
similarities in the reaction to The Satanic Verses and the Last Temptation of Christ. In it, the author argues that the controversies show that the central issue concerning our time is the struggle between the secular and the profane. I thought that the terms, at the very least, betrayed a bias.
I think that what the, um, secular humanists, would do is render the terms "sacred" and "profane" obsolete. Any battle we might see would be between those who find the terms meaningless and those who see them as real and distinct divisions. To say that the humanist finds any value in the term "sacred," I think misses the point.
What I think is just as obvious is that the humanists are going to lose this battle. And I write that as someone who finds it deeply distressing that this might be so. I found this website on February 14, 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie, and in reading back on the events of 1989, I am struck by how much less harsh the dividing lines were back then. Like the religious fundamentalists, I see the last battle everywhere I look. Deep lines, wounds upon the earth, are being drawn to separate the foes. The humanists, at the least, can see who they are to fight, and that is the strange alliance that was hinted at by the Verses/Temptation controversies: the combined forces of Islamic and born-again Christian fundamentalists. Although their outward poses would indicate that they are intrinsically opposed to each other, in fact it is they that strike toward the center in the hopes of eliminating any tolerant views before they square off against their more polar opposites.
But they are so much alike. As seen above, they are incapable of viewing their icons in the hypothetical, and see no conflict in sentencing harsh punishments upon those who might be less literal-minded than they concerning their traditions. They each are alike in that they do not see the Earth as their ward, rather it is a temporary dwelling that will be useless once the voyage to paradise has been begun. They are alike in that they have turned their collective backs on science; the Muslim world perhaps even more shamefully than the Christian one, as 1000 years ago it was the religious Muslim world that was the light of civilization. And of course both sides aligned against the center are totally in favor of the the war in Iraq, as it will only hasten the coming apocalypse.
It is in fact a war that has started, but the forces for tolerance are already at a grave disadvantage, with those who committed, and those who have most vociferously uttered the name of, 9-11 in their strange alliance against us.
Soldiers dying in Iraq, moderate politicians blown up by suicide bombers, abortion clinics bombed, women stoned to death, the environment raped. . .it will surely end in US senators speaking in tongues on the Senate floor, and Al Qaeda members detonating nuclear bombs in the subways of the world.
And there is very little that the reasonable among us are going to be able to do about this.
Dark and brooding perhaps, but no more brooding than Myers' piece, I'd say.
Anyone like to cheer me up?