COLD COMFORT :

Sacred Cruelties (Maureen Dowd, April 7, 2002, NY Times)

At precisely the moment when religion should have a calming influence, it has a dispiriting influence. Just when people need religion to bring them peace, it brings them war or crisis or abuse or just plain pain.

As Ms Dowd begins her column we initially seem to be embarked on a puerile search for comfort in the arms of religion. She like many moderns seems to want religion to be a kind of spiritual comfort food, making no demands of us, merely telling us that God, or Gaia, or L. Ron Hubbard, or whoever, loves us just the way we are. She's apparently unfamiliar with such fundamental verses as these :

Matthew 10: 32-39
Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

Bad enough that she quite completely misapprehends the very purpose of religion, but Ms Dowd goes on to a really appalling comparison of Israeli settlers and the unfortunate but rather innocuous comments by the Reverend Billy Graham about Jewish domination of the American media, made 30 years ago, to the current pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church and the wave of terrorism engulfing Islam. Now, I realize that her political correctness requires her to assert the moral equivalency of these four very different events; God forbid she should single out one or two religions for criticism, and not indict them all. But what can possibly be immoral or
antireligious about Israeli homesteading?

And while the Reverend Graham's remarks are in bad taste it is monstrous to judge this great and good man by a couple of unpleasant utterances as against a life devoted to the service of others and a lifelong support of Israel. As he could tell Ms Dowd, one of the dispiriting things that Christianity teaches us is that we are all sinners, that in the course of a lifetime we will all say and do things which on reflection we recognize to have been wrong, even evil. So if you wish to comb through an 83 year old man's life for a flaw or two, you're certain to find them. So what? What does that have to do with the quality of religion in general or of his beliefs in particular?

If religion doesn't serve the purpose Ms Dowd wants it to, perhaps the problem is with her, not with religion. And if her standard for judging another human being is to seize upon the stupid things they have said, then she should fear the Judgment Day.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2002 2:49 PM