I read this last weekend and just remembered that I wanted to use this if I blogged on religion. This a terrific editorial from
The Boston Globe
I'm putting it up now because I think it speaks to so many of the complaints about organized religion (legimate complaints, in my view) in the comments under my introductory post.
I KNEW that my God was bigger than his," Lieutenant General William G. Boykin said of his Muslim opponent. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." That and other remarks derogatory of Islam caused a stir last week, especially because the general holds a key position in the war on terrorism. Awkward memories surfaced of President Bush's inadvertent use of the term "crusade" to define that war, and fears broke into the open that the war was, despite disclaimers, a religious war after all.
Boykin's Pentagon superiors did not seem to take offense, but Muslim leaders did, and so did members of Congress. Boykin's remarks can only inflame Arab perceptions. On Friday the general offered a sort of apology.
"I am neither a zealot nor an extremist," he said, "only a soldier who has an abiding faith."
The general's critics are right to deplore the denigration of the faith of Muslims, but the problem goes deeper than a crudely expressed religious chauvinism. In point of fact, the general's remarks do not make him an extremist. It was unfashionable of him to speak aloud the implications of his "abiding faith," but exclusivist claims made for Jesus Christ by most Christians, from Vatican corridors to evangelical revival tents, implicitly insult the religion of others. When Catholics speak of "salvation" only through Jesus, or when Protestants limit "justification" to faith in Jesus, aspersions are cast on the entire non-Christian world.
In the past, the step from such exclusivist theology to contempt .....