The Non-Ground Zero Non-Mosque, Continued

You'd think there was nothing else going on in the world but a bunch of religious intolerance!  This is all I've heard about on the radio for days now.  No Palestine/Israel problem, no Iran, no winless wars.  Heck, you barely hear how Obama's screwed up the country anymore.

Still, the topic of religious intolerance is both global and critical, so I'll go with it. 

Yes, that's right folks: Americans are being (yet again) a bunch of bigoted, self-righteous Christians that would turn Jesus' stomach.  Don't agree with me?  Put it this way: if someone planned to build a church at or near ground zero, would anyone care?  Would it have even made the news cycle?  I bet even a synagogue wouldn't have raised eyebrows. 

"But we're a Christian nation," I can hear you say.  Wrong.  YOU might be Christian, and a large percentage of the US citizenry may consider themselves Christian, but that does not a State religion make.  (and that's a topic for another blog)

What we are is a nation of immature and insecure children.  "A savage, childlike race," I believe it was phrased once.  If someone is too different (ie, brown), we have to keep him out.  If someone espouses ideas too different from ours (ie, Muslim, socialist, rational and educated....), we have to silence him.  The problem with this (aside from basic bigotry) is that it never allows us any exposure to other ideas and hence retards our growth as a society. 

The issue about the non-mosque that is not at ground zero is fueled by the anti-Muslim sentiment that proliferated after 9/11.  I will even go so far as to say that, after that incident, some of that feeling was understandable.  But it's nine years later, people.  We've had the chance to calm down and realize that it was just a bunch of crazies who did it, not the entire religion.  It's time to stop being fearful and ignorant.  Muslims have lived among us all along.  They are our neighbors.  They mourned 9/11 and were outraged just like you did. 

The biggest issue is that people are labeling an entire religion for the actions of its fundamentalist and crazy sect.  I heard a great analogy on the radio today: if you are going to condemn Islam as a whole for 9/11, then are you going to condemn Christianity for the Oklahoma City bombing?  How about for the Crusades?  Or maybe for colluding with the Nazis to exterminate those Jesus-killing Jews?  Or the Fundamentalist Mormons, who marry off teenage girls to 80 year old men?  All these things were/are done in the name of Christianity.

Religious tolerance has never been our strong suit. Look at the freakin' Pilgrims.  They came to America because no one else could stand them and their strict, intolerant ways.  But it's the 21st Century;  can't we move beyond this already? 

And while this is a vital issue, it is not the only one at hand.  There are other First Amendment rights in play.  Such as: the (non-ground zero) location of this (non) mosque is private property.  Since when did we have the right to tell someone what he can do on his own property?  Isn't that freedom one of the key tenets of the very people who are fighting this center?  How about self-determination?  We are a nation of rugged individualists, right?  So why is it so wrong for a community to decide, on a local level, that this center is ok?  Who the hell are we to tell Manhattan what it can/can't do with one of its buildings? 

(Hey Tea Baggers: remember this point next time you want to bitch about "city slickers" telling you what you can/can't do with the Public Lands in your area).

From what I can tell, the local government overwhelmingly approved this YMCA-like center.  It's a privately owned building, which used to be a Burlington Coat Factory.  There is a mosque nearby (which predates the Twin Towers, by the way), and a large enough Muslim community to support and benefit from this.  So, opponents really don't have a leg to stand on.  It is against the Constitution to protest this center.  Of course, the Baggers and friends like to trash the Constitution whenever it proves an inconvenient truth.....(again, another blog).

The bottom line is this: it's private property and they can do whatever the hell they want with it.  And, if people would shut off Dancing with the Stars and read an actual book, they might realize that we do, in fact, have freedom of religion in this country AND that Islam is closely related to Christianity. 

Let them build their Islamic community center, and let's move on.

A Mosque at Ground Zero: Appropriate or Not?

I saw Mayor Bloomberg talking today about how allowing a mosque at Ground Zero was required by freedom of religion and separation of church and State.  He said things like (and I'm paraphrasing here), "if we give in to popular thought and don't allow it, then we allow the terrorists to win."  He reminded us of our Muslim brothers and sisters who died that day and those who grieved with us after.  He said so many things that ring of truth.

Except that they don't. 

Of course I believe in freedom of religion and speech, and separation of church and State.  I also believe that we need to be careful of playing into Al Quaeda's hands with our stupid, pig-headed reactions.  I recognize that there is no guilt-by-association for the Muslims who live and die here.  However, all that does not mean I am onboard with the idea of a mosque at Ground Zero.

It just feels like a big, fat slap in the face to allow a mosque there.  Frankly, I don't see why ANY religious building needs to be there -- it was a church to the dollar bill before, so why change that now?  I have heard that the idea is to have a mosque there to help educate people that bin Laden and friends do not represent the majority of Islam -- and I totally get that.  I support that concept. 

But does it have to be at Ground Zero?  Why not someplace nearby, but not ON the premises?  I say this not out of some misplaced anger, fear, or bigotry toward Muslims;  I say it because it seems disrespectful and in poor taste.  It seems to dishonor the memory of that day. 

How would we feel about putting some sort of Japanese cultural or religious structure at Pearl Harbor?  How do millions of Jews (and others!) feel about the presence of a cross at Auschwitz?  How would the residents of Hiroshima feel if we built a giant cathedral in their town?

I am all for educating the (generally stupid) American masses about Islam and pointing out that 9/11 was perpetrated by fundamentalist nut-jobs.  However, I just cannot find anything within myself that makes it ok to put a mosque at Ground Zero. 

What I find most interesting about this issue is that all the liberal folks on, say, MSNBC, are saying that opinions like mine are bigoted.  I saw Russell Simmons on Keith Olbermann just today, talking about how the push to ban a mosque from G.Z. was some awful, racist, unethical thing.  Really?  I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call "overdone political correctness" on this one.  Please tell me how it is at all ok, or even necessary, for a mosque to be there? 

I realize that this plays into a bigger phenomenon -- that of people trying to ban mosques in their towns.  Now that is bullshit.  If there are Muslims in your town, then they deserve a place of worship.  Fuck you and your pantywaist, uneducated fears.  In fact, I am quite pleased to see some sort of Islamic center in my own town.  Good for them!

I am not going to say it's Right or Wrong to have a mosque at Ground Zero.  I don't think anyone would go to Hell if we allow one.  What I will say is that it is poor judgment.  Seriously, do the proponents not see how this could be exceedingly offensive?  Are people really going to play into the stereotype of overblown political correctness? 

I'm sorry, but I just feel this is wrong.  I just can't see how it's ok to have a mosque there -- and it's not because I'm some Tea Bagger crazy person.  It is just a slap in the face to all those who died, period.  Out of respect we should not allow it on the premises of Ground Zero.  Near enough by that people can go to it, absolutely.  But GZ itself, I'm sorry.  Let's just rebuild the financial buildings that we need and move on.

Journeys with Krishna, Or How I Became a Hindu

Someone recently asked me how long I'd been a Hindu.  Of course, the real answer is that one doesn't become a Hindu; you simply are one.  But, semantics aside, I thought it was an interesting question and found myself wondering.  I mean, I know when I started using the label, but when did I really begin walking the path in a full, true way?

Ironically, it happened when I tried to become a Buddhist.  Meditating on the teachings of the Dalai Lama, I felt a bit of despair.  How would I ever conquer (notice the choice of words) the warrior nature that flows through my veins?  How could I ever achieve the sort of peace that is needed to "truly" practice buddhism? 

Thankfully, my despair didn't last too long.  My recovery from a childhood filled with Christian ideas of denying one's true self (because we are all sinners and flawed) prevented me from being able to consider, in even the tiniest way, the idea of dispelling my warrior nature.  The idea was completely anathema to my beliefs.  So, that put a quick end to that.  But what then?

Concurrent with this rejection of self-denial was the development of my discomfort with the idea of focusing my life and energy on reaching enlightenment.  Partly because an extroverted, warrior gal like me isn't exactly the best candidate for a successful hermit-on-the-mountain experience.  But more than that, I came to see that it would be selfish of me to seek my own personal enlightenment when there is SO MUCH suffering on Earth.  How could I free myself while so many others can barely survive, much less think of esoteric spiritual matters?

These two ideas collided to form a new path.  First, no matter how hard I try, I am not achieving enlightenment in this life anyway -- so why try?  I mean that in the sense of, why try in the sense of the hermit-on-the-mountain?  The ideals I have chosen to live my life by assure that I will be reborn with greater wisdom the next time around, and that's ok with me.  I don't think life here is all that bad anyhow.  Second, I am who I am in this life because of my past lives.  I am a warrior because that is where I am on my "evolutionary" path.  To use Christian terminology, this spirit is a god-given gift and to deny it would be wrong.  So, I choose to embrace it.

This acceptance of who I am in this life, who I might be in the next, and the seemingly odd contradiction of Fate and Free Will are the quintessential hallmarks of Hinduism.  And so I began calling myself such. 

Then along came the Mahabharata, that vast Indian epic.  It contains many, many treatises on many, many topics (maybe this is why Hindu gods have to have many, many arms?) -- but a main foundation is the concept of dharma.  I'll let you go wiki that for the general definition of the concept.  But as it applies here, the Maha discussed the dharma of the Ksatriya class -- warrior kings.  This is a caste you seldom here about as an American studying Hinduism.  But in the time it took me to read the sentence, it had filled the void I'd been trying to fill all along.

Ksatriyas find themselves in a bit of a karmic conundrum: as somewhat enlightened beings they are supposed to rule justly and all that.  But as kings, they sometimes have to do warrior things like attack and kill.  Hinduism has, as it does for so many things, a tidy way of dealing with that: the Ksatriya dharma is to be a good king, and to sometimes kill in the line of duty.  To do otherwise would be adharma, which might be best understood by an American as bad karma. 

So here is my religion telling me that it's not only ok for me to have warrior's blood, but that I am obligated to act on that nature for the betterment of all people.  (ok I aggrandized a little, but you get the point).  And that exactly reinforced the ideal that I had already come to on my own.  So, as far as being a good Hindu goes, I guess I'm on the right path. 

I have long described my spiritual evolution as a journey to find the religion that matched what was in my heart.  I have always been a Hindu;  I just didn't know it.

The Disenlightenment

Let's step back into the far, musty reaches of our minds and pull out some high school history lessons.  I want to talk about the Age of Enlightenment, or more simply, just The Enlightenment.  This period was marked by a flourishing of thought and philosophy that centered on rigorous rational analysis, the scientific method, and reason.  It saw increased questioning of religious orthodoxy and dogma.  Immanuel Kant described it as "the freedom to use one's own intelligence."

Sadly, it seems a new age is upon us.  Because it's ideology is diametrically opposed to that described above, I'm calling it the Age of DisEnlightenment.  This movement is primarily evidenced by the increasing prominence of fascist ideas all over the world. 

(note: by fascist I refer to the common, if incorrect, definition of ultra-authoritarian policital and religious regimes.  I do not refer to the original definition which also includes a corporate economic structure).

We saw a frightening rise in fascist ideology in the US during the last Administration.  A President who is a "Decider" (just do what I say cuz I said so).  Removal of civil rights (warrantless wire tapping).  Politicizing of the justice system (firing of US attorneys who didn't arbitrarily target Democrats).  And so on.  And lest you say, but Obama is here now, might I remind you that he did not overturn any of the civil rights reductions instituted by the Bush.  And, we are still "at war" (or something) in Afghanistan, fighting exactly whom or what at this point?  And yea though he walked through the valley of the shadow of Iraq, he has not gotten us out of that unholy mess either.

But it's not just here, and it's not just politics.  All over the world, religous fascism is rearing it's ugly head.  So-called Islamofascists perpetrated 9/11.  Religious fundamentalists are doing their best to subvert health care reform, women's reproductive rights, science education, and global warming.  The French have banned the wearing of Muslim headscarves by girls in school.  Unbelievably, the Swiss have recently banned minarets.  And in what is possibly the most heinous move yet, Uganda is proposing a death penalty for being gay.

Such ideologies can flourish only in an age of non-thinking.  Where people do not think critically;  where in fact, they are discouraged from or penalized for doing so.  (Remember: science in the classroom is under attack. No science, no understanding of scientific method.....)  Find a dogma, chant the mantra, wave your flag and stay the course.  And don't you dare say a word out of lockstep.  Dissent will not be tolerated. 

Maybe it's always been there and I just never noticed it.  Maybe it's just getting more news coverage these days.  Or maybe it really is an increasing trend.  What, then, would cause a global disenlightenment? 

I won't pretend to have any clue as to the answer.  But I sure would like to see Fareed Zakaria or Reza Aslan take this one on.  Maybe it's just the political/philophical pendulum swinging back.  In any case, the rise in zealous fundamentalism is frightening.  How does it bode for our future, if we become reduced to a species of bigots?  If we are so busy focusing on our differences that we no longer see the similarities?