Religious superiority

The news of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Iraq and the reprisals and deaths that have ensued seem to give a glimpse of a force that could completely destabilize that already suffering country. It is not a force that is unknown to humanity, having given rise to rivalries and wars that have claimed thousands of lives down through the ages. It is the force of religious and sectarian hatred that find their roots in ideologies of religious superiority.

Religious and sectarian hatred is a strange but common phenomenon. In the last few days in Iraq, we see members of two sects of the same faith out to destroy one another. The Sunnis and the Shiites both recognize Mohammad as a manifestation of God, but disagree on secondary matters. It calls to mind similar sectarian wars among the followers of Christ throughout Europe. There Catholics and Protestants, both recognizing the divinity of Christ, but disagreeing about various aspects of the message, have spent centuries in tense confrontation, which, even to this day, remains standing in some parts of the world. Religious hatred also takes an inter-religious form, and at any given moment in the history of humanity the followers of one faith has been out to eliminate the members of another.

The underlying problem is not a difference of belief. After all, we all have differences of belief about all sorts of things. The problem is the idea that “my belief is better than your belief.” The problem is the conviction of one’s own superiority—in religious superiority.

Religious leaders have done much to strengthen the faith of their followers and to inculcate codes of behavior, ethics and morality. Yet it is religious leadership that bears primary responsibility for engendering attitudes of religious superiority. The sometimes open, but often subtle proclamation that “we are better” that rises from pulpits (even here) is the kindling that prepares a society to capture the sparks that ignite a religious conflagration.

It is odd that, in this day and age, where ideologies of superiority of race, sex and national origin have been relegated to the fringe elements of society, the idea of religious superiority is an unquestioned tenet of our lives (even here). The underlying principle that unseated these other ideologies of superiority was the recognition of the principle of the oneness of humanity—that despite our secondary differences with regard to race, nation or sex, we are fundamentally one people and are intrinsically equal in the eyes of a loving Creator.

The parallel principle that must be unequivocally embraced and proclaimed by the world’s religious leaders in order for religious hatred to end is the principle of the oneness of religion. One international institution has written: “The time has come when religious leadership must face without further evasion the implications of the thought that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.”

As long as religious leaders nurture ideas of religious superiority in the minds of their followers, they nurture the condition under which hatred and bloodshed are allowed to emerge. It is the religious leadership that can most rapidly put an end to ideologies of religious superiority—an ideology that leads to fanaticism and intolerance and fuels the fire of religious strife.

(David Khorram, MD is a board certified ophthalmologist, and director of Marianas Eye Institute. Questions and comments are welcome. Call 235-9090 or email eye@vzpacifica.net. Copyright © 2006 David Khorram.)