Religion & Society:

Preamble:

Fundamentalism can be defined as religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of everything in the scriptures. Many individuals belonging to various religious groups, including Jainism, endeavor to establish the superiority of their faith or sect through slogans and proclamations about the infallibility of their scriptures, by indulging in ritualistic charades, and by displaying money and materials. However, an insightful examination of the spirit of Jainism reveals that such exploits do not constitute a genuine practice of Jainism. In the hope that we Jains will desist from such fundamentalism, some excerpts from Bill Moyers' interview of Karen Armstrong are presented in this article. Ms. Karen Armstrong, who is one of the world's foremost students of religion, spent seven years as a nun and has written the best sellers, "The History of God", "The Battle for God", "Jerusalem", a biography of Buddha, and a short history of Islam. - D. C. J.

Bill Moyers: If you were God, would you do away with religion?

Karen Armstrong: Well, there are some forms of religion that must make God weep - religion that has concentrated on egotism, that's concentrated on belligerence rather than compassion.

Bill Moyers: You get September 11th ... you get the Crusades, you get ... do you remember the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Itzhak Rabin? I can see him right now, looking into the camera, and he says, everything I did, I did for ...

Karen Armstrong: For God.

Bill Moyers: ... for the glory of God.

Karen Armstrong: Yes. Yes. Well, this is bad religion. ... And sometimes we use religion just to back up these unworthy hatreds, because we're frightened too.

Bill Moyers: Fear?

Karen Armstrong: There's great fear. We fear that if we're not in control, other people will cut us down to size, and so we hit out first.

Bill Moyers: That's what we're taught when ... growing up, you know, Jesus loves the little children. All the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world. But as soon as they grow up, they go for each other's throats.

Karen Armstrong: Yes. And a lot of this talk about love and compassion can be on the rather sloppy level. Or rather easy, facile level, where compassion is hard. It has nothing to do with feeling. It's about feeling with others. Learning to put yourself in the position of another person. There were years in my life when I was eaten up with misery and anger, I was sick of religion but when I got to understand what religion was really about, uh, not about dogmas, not about propping up the church, not about converting other people to your particular wavelength, but about getting rid of ego and approaching others in reverence, I became much happier.

But you have to go a long journey, a journey that takes you away from selfishness, from greed. And that leads you to value the sacredness in all others. ...

Bill Moyers: What happened in your case? You said that you came to this insight that you weren't a good person.

Karen Armstrong: After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. ... I went to Jerusalem. And there, very importantly, I encountered Judaism and Islam. And up until that point, my religious life had been very parochial, been very Catholic ... and I'd never thought about Islam at all. But in Jerusalem, where you see these three religions jostling together, often very uneasily, even violently, you become aware of the profound connections between them and it was the study of these other faiths that led me back to an appreciation of what religion was trying to do.

Bill Moyers: What appealed to you about Islam? Because in the context of 9/11 ... there's so much talk about Islam as a violent religion. We saw those suicide bombers, heard those suicide bombers invoking the name of Allah, saying they were doing this in the name ... of God, and the name of their own faith. So you're saying, there are good things about this religion, that helped you rediscover your own spiritual journey.

Karen Armstrong: Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past. That Mohammed didn't believe he had come to found a new religion to which everybody had to convert, but he was just the prophet sent to the Arabs, who hadn't had a prophet before, and left out of the divine plan. ... The mystical branch of Islam, the Sufi movement, insisted that when you had encountered God, you were neither a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim. You were at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple or a church, because all rightly guided religion comes from God, and a man of God, once he's glimpsed the divine, has left these man-made distinctions behind.

Bill Moyers: How do you explain the hatred in the world of Islam toward the west, toward America in particular?

Karen Armstrong: Well, uh, all fundamentalist movements, that's whether they're Jewish, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, all begin as an intra-religious debate, an intra-religious struggle.

Then, at a later stage, fundamentalists sometimes reach out towards a foreign foe and hence the Muslim feeling that American foreign policy ... is holding them back.

Bill Moyers: Why do they think American foreign policy is the root of their ills?

Karen Armstrong: This was very much an Arab feeling. They feel that they are fighting a holy war ... that America fights Muslims, has killed Muslims, in Iraq, that America is still continuing to bomb Iraq ... There's a running sore of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has been festering for so long, and has become symbolic of everything that Muslims feel that is wrong with the modern world. Just as here, in the United States, fundamentalists have symbolic issues, abortion, uh, and evolution, which they can't see rationally, but they've become symbolic of ... of the evils of modernity. The state of Israel, which meant that Palestinians lost their home, has become for Muslims a symbol of their impotence in the modern world. ...

Bill Moyers: You said once that you felt the fundamentalists were trying to restore God to the world.

Karen Armstrong: Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.

Bill Moyers: They drag God back into the political world by denying democratic aspirations.

Karen Armstrong: Yes.

Bill Moyers: I mean, do you think democracy and fundamentalism are, uh, can co-exist?

Karen Armstrong: Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion. ...

Bill Moyers: When fundamentalism experienced its rebirth in this country, a quarter of a century ago, political rebirth, it was because the federal government, the Internal Revenue Service, had, uh, denied their parochial religious schools tax-exempt status ... And the fundamentalists became alarmed at that, and fearing that they were going to be annihilated.

Karen Armstrong: Exactly so. And similarly, in the famous Scopes Trial, which I think tells us a lot about the fundamentalist process in 1925, you'll remember, fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools, and there was a celebrated trial, in which the fundamentalists were really ridiculed in the secular press. After the Scopes Trial, after the ridicule, they swung to the extreme right, and there they've remained.

Bill Moyers: The inequality gap in this country is larger, I believe, than in any other industrial society.

Karen Armstrong: Yes.

Bill Moyers: What does that say about the most religious country in the world? And that's your definition. America is the most religious country in the world, and yet it's the most unequal economically.

Karen Armstrong: It's ... and this should trouble us all. It should trouble us all. Religious people should join hands, and fight for ... for greater equality. Try and see if you can introduce Christian, Jewish or true Muslims values into society. Not trying to force other people, but bringing to bear that respect for the sacred rights of others that all religions, at their best, three very important words, at their best, are trying to promote.

Bill Moyers: Where are you in your own journey? You're not a practicing Catholic, are you?

Karen Armstrong: No. I usually call myself these days a freelance monotheist. I draw nourishment from all three of the religions of Abraham, uh, I spend my life studying these faiths, in a sense I'm still a nun. I live alone, and I've never married, and I spend my life writing and talking and reading and studying spirituality and God. And I can not see in essence any one of these three faiths as superior to any of the others. I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence and obscenity, moral obscenity that we saw on September the 11th.

Mahatma Gandhi's Observation About Religious Zeal

Mahatma Gandhi, in his autobiography 'The Story Of My Experiments With Truth', writes, "... many things combined to inculcate in me a tolerance for all faiths. ... Only Christianity was at the time an exception. I developed a sort of dislike for it. And for a reason. In those days, Christian missionaries used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their gods. I could not stomach this. I must have stood there to hear them once only; but that was enough to dissuade me from repeating the experiment. About the same time, I heard of a well-known Hindu having been converted to Christianity. It was the talk of the town, that when he was baptized he had to eat beef and drink liquor; that he also had to change his clothes, and that henceforth he began to go about in European costume including a hat. These things got on my nerves. Surely, thought I, a religion that compelled one to eat beef, drink liquor and change one's own clothes did not deserve that name. I also heard that the new convert had readily begun abusing the religion of his ancestors, their customs and their country. All these things created in me a dislike for Christianity."

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