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         Yesterday’s edition of the Toronto Star reported that a professor at the University of Muenster (where I earned my doctorate) had questioned the existence of the prophet Muhammad.  German police have advised the professor, who is a Muslim, to move his office to more secure premises.  For if Danish cartoons of the prophet provoked riots and assassination threats all over the world, what sort of backlash can be expected from questioning the prophet’s very existence? 
            By now Christians have gotten used to claims that Jesus never existed, or that, if he did exist, next to nothing can be known about him, but the Muslim world may not be prepared to entertain such skepticism about the origins of Islam.
            Last year there appeared a second edition of Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith, which responded to the trauma caused by the terrible events of 9/11/01.  The perpetration in the name of God of acts of unimagineable barbarity led the author to pose a stark alternative: if civilization is to survive, religion has got to go. 
            This seems a forlorn hope, when we consider that the many attempts to suppress religion have usually come to naught.  The religious instinct, like the sexual instinct, is irrepressible.  But I would have to agree with Harris that the religious instinct is the more dangerous of the two, and although the focus today is on militant Islam, we must not forget the crusades, the inquisition, the pogroms. 
            There is an undeniable connection between religion and violence.  The reason, I think, is that religious faith, as it is usually understood, is inherently intolerant.  If I know with certitude what must be done and believed in order to be saved, then anyone who disagrees with me is on a slippery slope and will face a severe comeuppance, if not now, then in the world to come, and although Paul cautions, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19), there are plenty of religious zealots who do not wish to wait for divine retribution, and are only too happy to acts as God’s executioners here and now. 
            But in the early church there was a group of Christians who seem to have found a way out of this dilemma.  They were called Gnostics.  They found religious truth not in dogmatic propositions, about which, under the law of contradiction, if I am right, you must be wrong.  They found it in religious imagery.  In The Gospel of Philip we read. “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images.”  In another Gnostic text, holy Wisdom declares, “I am the word whose appearance is multiple.”  The Gnostics mocked the emerging orthodoxy of the Christian church as “dry canals.” 
            Understandably, this challenge to dogmatic religion provoked a severe response.  The Gnostics were branded as archheretics and persecuted to extinction.  One modern scholar has dubbed them “the crazies of the 2nd and 3rd centuries.”  But if we are to avoid the stark choice between religion and civilization, then this “crazy”  approach to religion deserves a closer look. 
            For a religious faith based on imagery is non-violent.  I may not be moved by the ceremonies and symbols of another faith; I may even be repelled by them.  But provided they are non-violent, I feel no need to attack them; I simply do not participate. 
            In this holy night we celebrate the babe in the manger, the word made flesh, and the song of the heavenly hosts.  If this celebration brings us a peace which passes all understanding (cf. Philippians 4:7), then for us, pace Sam Harris, religion is not an anachronism. 

December 24, 2008

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