Religion vs Religion or Religion vs Secularity?
Reader comment on item: The End of American Jewry's Golden Era

Submitted by A.Hamilton Mencher (Peru), May 2, 2004 at 22:05

While it is difficult, if not impossible to refute the content of the article,I do not consider Militant Islam as anything else but a fanatic extension of a religious faith.

Just as there is no such thing as a Jewish Periodic Table of the Elements or a Catholic Law of Thermodynamics, there can be no Islamic DNA.

The division of State and Religion was perhaps first verbalized in the New Testament with the statement render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The economic,scientific, and tecnologic evolution did not occur under the ethical principles of Buddhism or the militant proselitism of Islam. The 7 centuries of Islamic control of Spain produced no precepts of good government nor a social behavior that evolved into a democracy.
Or a social organization that produced a surplus of goods and services and advancement in the industrial arts.

The rigid vertical organization, under Allah, in the Middle East, despite the good fortune to have under them the greater part of the world's petroleum reserves, has not produced a millimetric advance towards "..forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, support internal tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and assure for ourselves and our posterity the beenfits of Freedom...".

In the Declaration fo Independence Jefferson referred to God when he used the word "Creator" who, he said,"... endowed men with certain inalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

He was referring to this earth where Homo sapiens is present in various conditions of ethnicity, language, culture( including religion), and social organization, the latter principally designed for the survival of the group.

If there has been a successful theocracy in man's history on earth, I am unaware of it.
America would not last a decade if the Republicans and Democrats acted like Shiites and Sunnites, uninterested in the earthly problems of government.

Again I refer to Jefferson whose clarity of thought and speech states that to guarantee Life,Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness "... governments are instituted among men who derive their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

This has proven to be impossible under a dictatorship with a state "religion" in Germany (National Socialism) or in the Soviet Union ( Communism)? It has proven impossible in the Desert kingdoms of the Middle east and North Africa.

It is unthinkable that any theocracy could offer the environment described by Jefferson. Psychiatrist Carl Jung in The Undiscovered Self almost describes Islam when he speaks of religion that stands"...for tradition and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief." Unreflecting belief engenders the irrationality which denies the logic of knowledge and Jung relfected that unqualified submission to faith curtails man's freedom.

To paraphrase Carl Jung, "The disadvantage of a creed as a public institution is...that it derives its existence from the relationship of man to god..." and not the relationship of man to his fellow men.

And it is towards resolving the problems of living with one's fellow man here on earth that we should dierct our utmost endeavor and to which democratic peoples should "...pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor."


A.Hamilton Mencher H.
Lima,Peru

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