America has been made aware of the barbaric practice of 'honor killings' by the publication of a shaky, grainy but heartbreakingly graphic video of seventeen year old Dua Khalil Aswad. She was beaten and stoned to death by a crowd of neighbors and family members, all of them male, for the crime of being seen with a Sunni man that they believe she had married. This has already been diaried exceptionally well by Kossack exmearden here and by one of my favorite TV creators Joss Whedon.
What this terrible incident illustrates is part of the vast cultural gap that lies between typical Americans and typical Iraqis. In this gap resides concepts of tribalism, misogyny and religiosity that the West tried, and mostly succeeded, to leave behind years ago. And I, in all of my athieistic glory, attribute at least part of this growth to the stories of Jesus Christ.
I am not a Christian despite a Catholic upbringing. I do not call myself religious although I defend others right to be so. I believe in Liberty of the mind and I believe that organized religion too often finds itself constricting those liberties in its pursuit of its 'morality' agendas. All of these reasons are why I support a separation of church and state and a secular government. Strangely, these are also the reasons I find myself with a deep appreciation for the idea of Jesus Christ.
I say the 'idea' because I do not want to get bogged down in a debate over whether he existed or not. Nor do I want to worry about whether he was human or divine. I want to discuss an action that was attributed to him in John 8:1-11 where Jesus was able to intercede on the behalf of a woman accused of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.
It reminds me of how radical a concept this must have been to the authorities of the time. I try to imagine the thoughts of that young girl as she lay there surrounded by those men. Did she wonder which one would stop the assault; which one would act as Christ supposedly did? I imagine a scene where a man steps out of the crowd, in modern clothes on that street in Iraq, and tells that crowd of angry men to spare that young girls life. What bravery it would have shown for him to refute their authority to administer their idea of Justice in their own city. It is easy to see how such a man would quickly draw the attention of the authorities and come to be seen as a threat.
Are they a backward people following a false religion? No. Or at least it is not for me to say since stoning is the punishment set down by the laws of Moses for such an act and I am not trying to overturn the entirety of Abrahamic Tradition. Are they living under an unenlightened concept of Liberty? Most certainly yes. And to the extent that it is moral to judge an honor killing like the one seen in that video as wrong, then that is the extent to which I judge their culture to be primitive in its concept of liberty.
The reason that Democratic candidates, and Progressives in general, should be familiar with these teachings is not because I think we should be more religious. It is because much of what is written can be seen as an effort to free the minds of men from the shackles that imprison them. Of course, not all of it. And certainly not most of the Old Testament, but much of the New Testament can be read that way when seen in the context of the culture of the time. The history in which these writings take place is also a history of the expansion of Liberty.
I am not intending to preach a new gospel here because I fully admit that my knowledge of the scriptures of any religion or any philosophy is superficial at best. Plus, I have an enormous problem with Evangelicals who feel it is their God-given mission to convert me. To me this is just an attempt to drive me into mind-slavery. All I am trying to say is that when I see culturally accepted acts of brutality such as the murder of Dua Khalil Aswad it makes me appreciate the effects of Christianity on Western thought. So whether it is questioning the right of religious leaders to cast the judgement of death by stoning or physically throwing the moneylenders (business and banking) out of the Temple and thus separating business from religion, I see these acts as an attempt to free people from the encroachment of religious power. And it confirms for me that Jesus Christ was a Liberal.