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Date:         Sat, 19 Dec 1992 14:45:00 PDT
From:         AKARP@GONZAGA.BITNET
Subject:      Militantly tolerant

Today is the first day of Hanukkah.
It is a day that celebrates religious freedom from subjugation.
Religious diversity is marvellous, so long as it doesn't infringe upon
others' rights to believe and practice in peace.
As Rabbi A. James Rudin, interreligious affairs director of the American
Jewish Committee mentioned: "What Hanukkah says is that

        What Hanukkah says is that everybody is entitled to be what
        they want to be.  It established the point that every group
        has the right to its own tradition, worship, and spiritual life.

With the ethno-religious conflicts in Ireland, Israel, India, Pakistan, Sri Lank
   a, Iraq, Bangladesh and Bhutan, not to mention on the ethernet, can we afford
in the coming 21st century to continue the absolutism that even this moment
is tearing apart families and lives in Bosnia?

I thank Garry for speaking up in regard to Douglass's comment about the
Judeo God, for although the Torah may document a copious amount of seeming
intolerance and cruelty by God, the proof of what the Torah's followers
have shown in the capacities of love, tolerance, and benevolence cannot
be forgotten; the message of "tikkun olam," making repair of the world,
is an imperative of the Judeo God; I suppose ruth's god is some vengeful
SOB weighing the malevolent forces of the world in her corner so as to
raze the homes and businesses of those who defy It, to destroy others
who won't buckle under to the one word of an estranged God.

Ruth preaches that I am the bigot, likening me to a liberal Himmler, which
I take great offense to.  When I refer to the reactionary Christian Right
as holy guerrillas attempting to disenfranchise the rest of the non-Christian
realm, I believe there is a time to speak up.  Consistent with your Holocaust
allusion, I wish that the rest of the world had acted sooner to remove
Hitler from power and save the millions of Jews and homosexuals, Jehovah's,
political prisoners, and intellectuals.  You mention that I am doing as
HItler's SS did, by labeling a Christian sect as the Jews were so labelled.
What an ignominious accusation!  Certain contingencies of the Christian right
have begun to undermine and dupe other mainstream Christians by placing the
blame for the world's problems on feminists, Unitarians, homosexuals, and
other Christians who don't see the BIBLE their way.  The time to fight the
Right is now (defending those who are being raped by the dogmatism of a
lost, disturbed minority is a must!) for if we wait too long, their Final
Solution may become a reality.

You feel free to criticize the Torah, commiserating with the God who youu
say is infinitely tolerant, and for good reason: "A bigger bunch of whiners
and mutterers and complainers I've never seen. Any God who put up with that
crew, and even blessed them, has to be pretty tolerant indeed."
Nice anti-semitism if you ask me.

Your comments and forays into the nature of true religious experience reak
of hatred.  If you claim that I am being equally as bigoted by calling a
spade a spade, then perhaps we are both playing with a different stack of
cards.  Whoever's God or belief-system claims superiority over others and
calls for their afterlife destruction (wishing them agony and total
desolation) is certainly no friend of global peace and goodwill.  Such
commentary is pretext for armageddon.  The only overarching context of
religious expression that can exist today (for the sake of humanity) is the
one which each person the religious/secular freedom to experience the
(super)natural as they see fit; as soon as we merge Church and State and
call for a national religion the sooner the demise of the country.

Responding in point: A) The Gospels are contradictory; various passages
do conflict on key points regarding what Jesus said.
B) Your concentration camp survivor-friends are surely thankful to be alive
after going through such a horror on Earth.  I just can't understand how
they could feel comfortable around a person who mutters under her breath
how the Holocaust was the Christian God's retribution against the
incorrigible Jews; do you consider these friends doomed to a post-deathm
Hell as well?  If so, then they must be able to see behind the veneer of
a stone-walled, maddened heart.
C) There is hatred suppurating within you.  I can see it.  Tell me how
Christ, who represented unconditional love, could condone such blasphemy
in his memory?

I am militantly tolerant (granted, this is an oxymoron, to a degree) and
cannot stand to watch as the power brokers of religious supremacy slowly
impugn the truly benevolent, unifying convictions of those who seek
peace, the absolutists who cast a shroud over others's existences.  At
what point must we defend and consolidate our efforts in order to derail
the damnable train of intolerance?  There is a time. SILENCE=COMPLICITY.
Why can't absolutism be PERSONAL not GLOBAL (i.e., this is absolutely all
I can believe in; what works for you, on the other hand, is fine)??

Tikkun Olam; ERACISM; NEVER FORGET-NEVER AGAIN.
*)*)-> The Miscegenator <-(*(*
Adam Karp  [akarp@gonzaga.edu]
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