Their Mullahs -- and Ours

This morning I was sitting around minding my own business, bothering nobody, rereading the Constitution of the United States. News of the Middle East was on in the background. I was only half listening but it hit me, how much their mullahs are like our mullahs -- our Christian fundamentalist mullahs, the Catholic bishops, some of our Supreme Court, the political Thought Police -- it's a long list and growing longer.

Probably you realized it, but to me it was a new concept. Mullahs everywhere tend to have a world view based on three core beliefs, about theocracy, infallibility, and patriarchy.

First, theocracy. Mullahs push for a fusion of church and state even if they seem to endorse the separation. A nice example is the First Encyclical of Benedict XVI.

In God Is Love he yokes his peculiar definition of love to secular politics. Love, he says, means helping one's neighbors. But the church decides what is loving and what isn't. (Presumably teaching "abstinence" would be loving, distributing condoms to AIDS-afflicted Africans would not.) After some jaw music about separateness of the state from mother church he says, "Yet at the same time, she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice." In other words, communion should be denied to politicians who are pro-choice.

The church has always sought absolute separation from secular scrutiny when, for instance, its finances are concerned. But now, Benedict says, the church is "duty bound" to intervene at times in secular politics for "the attainment of what is just." It wasn't so long ago that, to them, separation of church and state meant harboring hundreds of pedophile priests who should have been turned over to attorneys general in many states -- and their crimes, well known to their bishops, were covered up for years.

Second, infallibility. Sacred texts come directly from God, whose words are flawlessly written down by prophets and translated into hundreds of modern tongues with perfect accuracy. Mullahs see the Bible, the Qur'an, and the Constitution as perfect in their internal consistency, hold their propositions to be inerrant, and teach that their words are to be interpreted literally with reference to the original intent of the writer.

Belief in the literalness of sacred writings is more than ever before our eyes in the current presidential race. Half the candidates don't "believe in" Darwin's theory of natural selection. Many of them say homosexuality is wrong, based on condemnations of it in three verses in the Old Testament and two in the New Testament. Literal interpretation of these five verses almost outweighs the importance of all the other verses, of which there are a total of 31,174.

Self-serving argument, inconsistent and promiscuous interpretation of precepts, fragments taken out of context, fantastic and tortured logic -- all these are standard tools of mullahs. But if you think religious absolutism is only found in red states and less educated people, brace yourself for the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. I predict tsunamis of outrage from mullahs in academia whose pet interpretations of the Second Amendment may be skewered by a decision against strict gun control.

Of all the complicated arguments for and against a simple and commonsense interpretation of the Second Amendment, the clearest and most persuasive to my mind is context: All the other amendments in the Bill of Rights refer to individual rights, not collective rights. It makes little sense to argue that only the Second Amendment treats of collective rights (of the states to have militias), whereas all the other Amendments guarantee individual rights. It's the same species of mullery to decontextualize a few words about militias as to outweigh five verses in the Bible against the sweep of ideas in the other 31 thousand.

And third, patriarchy. Women are property -- or so it's been through most of human history. In most cultures even today, a woman carries either her father's or her husband's name as part of hers.

Larry Summers stumbled blindly into the pent up resentment of women toward old white dudes (and spare me please about the science of what he literally said). For his pains, Summers lost his job as president of Harvard, to be replaced by Drew Faust. (By the way, she's dropped the maiden name, Gilpin, from her signature in recent letters to the Harvard community.)

It took me forever to realize that many battles of the culture wars reduce to the myth that women belong to men. The idea may be explicit or buried deep in the collective unconscious, but it's there, women are property, and to contradict it causes massive anxiety in many people. Somebody asked me the other day whether I was for gay marriage. "Hell no!" I said, "If they give gays the right to marry, they'll have to give women the vote." Thinking about it later, I wondered how true on some level, how much of homophobia is actually displaced misogyny. Even in gay culture, butch guys have higher status than effeminate ones. And in the larger world, if a pro football player comes out of the closet, it's less cringe-making to your average joe than the very pink Gay Pride parade in Provincetown.

A question emerges from these similarities that want to be differences. Why does one group of mullahs tend to hate -- and hate, and hate -- other mullahs, when their basic beliefs are so similar? The explanation is probably sunk in the steamy swamps of the unconscious, so I'll defer to Freud. This loathing in others of mirrored traits we hide from ourselves he called "the narcissism of small differences."

Comments

[1will]

Our 'Mullahs' are like their 'Mullahs?' I don't think so. If you hate all religion, Western Culture or just Christianity you can find some similarities between Christianity and Islam. I would not say our religious leaders are anything like 'Mullahs.' I also wouldn't say those similarities between Islam and Christianity run very deep.
I spent a little while surfing the web and had a very hard time finding any of our religious leaders advocating the lashing of rape victims, calling for suicide bombings or advocating the cutting off of heads. I also couldn't find any of our religious police beating women for showing a little ankle or hair. Oh yeah, we don't have religious police.
Having just got back from work I was shocked, shocked I say! to find women driving. Aren't our Mullahs against that. Then I turned on the TV and there was a woman running for President. What the hell is she doing out in public, uncovered and unchaperoned by a male relative? Where are the Mullahs? I couldn't take anymore so I changed the channel. Jaime Lynne Spears is pregnant! At 16! Why didn't her family marry her off before puberty as the Ayatollah Khomeini decreed is acceptable and preferred. Oh well, I guess Jaime Spears days are numbered because an 'Honor Killing' should be happening any day now. I just couldn't take anymore so I turned off the TV and got on the internet. There were columnists denying there is a god! Unbelievable! Try as I could I just couldn't find one of our 'Mullahs' advocating the death of these columnists. I'll keep looking, Dr. Groves couldn't be lying to us.

[SmackwaterJack]

Well Doc, ya may be on to something there, still, it all may be a co-winky-dink? :)

[mommadona]

"This loathing in others of mirrored traits we hide from ourselves he called "the narcissism of small differences.""

http://youtube.com/watch?v=M7vs21ZKrKM

[True]

Very nice article. I often have thought that most of the U.S.'s right-wing would be very comfortable in a country exactly like one of the middle east's repressive nations, so long as the Bible replaced the Koran.

[Mullon]

Wow, we are not so different after all. Thank God you came around and introduced this brand new concept.

And the reason they are so similar even if they are so different is because all the recent religions stem from the same belief system and were created around the same time.

And 1950s America called, they want there views on women back.

[alkamm]

Our mullahs may not be directing suicide bombers, but they bomb our most vulnerable resource--sacred works.
Sacred works are designed to blaze pathways in our brains through stories with characters we can relate to in order to face our unique, modern world of uncertainty. The counterfeit religious leaders/false prophets among us, however, only prove that the real exists, as the Sufis say.
So what do real prophets do with sacred works? They encourage us to play the parts of each story. By encouraging the intuitive sharing of the stories' dynamics in our own developing souls, these leaders can show us that the literal truth is so far below the poetic truth as to be insignificant. Focusing on isolated draconian rules long abandoned by even the societies for which they were developed is a great mistake. Sacred works should be read as opportunities to increase our love and understanding rather than decrease our compassion through hate and tortured logic.
To the extent that the Catholic church ferrets out such heresies, it's leadership is admirable. They have successfully fought against the "dominion heresy" which claims that man can do what he will with the world, and argue that "stewardship" of our resources is preferable. When they seek to advance their views on birth control or patriarchal dominance, they lose moral authority striving for political clout.
The hillbilly televangelists are poisoning the minds of people who could learn the real lessons of religion. Those politicians like Karl Rove who court their nonsense do the Republic and religion itself a disservice. They deserve, as Goldwater hinted, a kick a little above the knees they claim to fall on. We need to keep religion current. Just as other literary texts are interpreted within today's world rather than the past, our sacred texts need to be applied with the necessary ability to read nuance, context, and between the lines.
How can we trust the Constitution to such fools?

[realitytrumpsbull]

I think you could probably write a pretty good book about 'organized religion as socio-economic
control mechanism'. One commonality among
these religious groups is that they've got
agendas, agenda kind of sounds like 'again',
as in 'here we go with THIS stupid stuff again',
and boy howdy, are they ever at it in force.
On OUR side of the pond, the wonderful world
of christianity has just about arc-welded itself
into our military, so now you have shiny-eyed
bible-thumping people with lots of money AND
lots of guns, and a double dose of self-righteous ambition for dessert. It's kind of
like if the Moonies had gone and made good
for themselves, as far as I'm concerned, I
don't believe in the Invisible Man, but I DO
believe firmly in the capacity of such institutions to go forth in the name of whatever
crap they're spouting off this week and try
to fuck with other people's lives. That's
what they're all about, they're making a list
and checking it twice...and no, it's not some
fat guy in a red suit, either, it's Christians(R) on a morality tear. And, they've enlisted
their abrahamic buddies to tag-team people,
sort of drive the herd around, there. Nice little government-sanctioned racket, there.

But, such is the world we live in, and here
you thought the Crusades were OVER. Silly
mortal...