SOME ARE MORE CHOSEN THAN OTHERS:

GOD'S REAL ESTATE (RALPH PETERS, April 13, 2003, NY Post)

ONE of the greatest blessings enjoyed by the United States is that God hasn't claimed any local real estate. The insistence in so much of the world that one divinity or another cherishes a specific handful of dust remains one of humankind's great curses.

Viewed honestly, the competition between faiths and creeds over sacred ground remains a cancer of the human condition. Whether we speak of millennia of bloody contests for control of Jerusalem or the bloodshed over plans to build a Hindu temple on the site of a razed mosque in Ayodhya, the importance of Karbala in Iraq or the destruction of Sufi shrines by Muslim fundamentalists, competing claims over bits of earth have spawned the world's most enduring and inherently insoluble conflicts.

The amount of suffering human beings are willing to inflict on one another over a corner of dirt is impossible to reconcile with the basic tenets of any of the world's leading religions. Men will fight for their religion, but they will massacre for their religion's totems. And sacred earth is the greatest totem of all, the ultimate idol.

CERTAINLY, some religious groups in the United States value specific pieces of land, from the national shrine of the Virgin in Emmitsburg, Maryland, to the grounds of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. But the roots do not run sufficiently deep to tap history's underground rivers of blood and, still more vitally, the sanctified ground is not contested. [...]

THERE are many respects in which the United States differs wonderfully from the old worlds we Americans left behind. But is there any more important advantage in continuing to build our unprecedented multi-ethnic, multi-faith society than the inability of zealots in our midst to convince us that God favors one bit of earth over another?

When our congregations outgrow our churches, temples or mosques, we build anew on a bigger plot, either down the street or miles away in a suburb. Communion in the "little brown church in the vale" has always been a movable feast. This flexibility grants us a tremendous strategic and moral advantage.

Of course, we Americans have strong religious traditions. The vision of a "city on a hill" is part of the fabric of our national being. But that city has never been a physical place, except in the sense of the nation as a whole. The simple fact that God - again, by any name or names - doesn't do real estate in the United States is so great a blessing that one almost suspects that we are - all of us, no matter our faith - truly a chosen people.

We would though have it known that God favors New Hampshire quite a bit more than Vermont. Many of you will know that the two states are separated by the Connecticut River, but few realize that the border is not mid-River but at the low tide mark on the Vermont side. The river belongs to us. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2003 5:11 PM