Pete, Better they come into the 21st century, I guess. I wonder, how much do religions need intolerance in order to exist?
Arthur, They need to have the concept of the "other." The other is either to be feared, or to be proselytized or to be seen as an example of what not to be. -----Original Message----- From: pete [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 12:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: one musician and 9 11 On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Ray Evans Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The Moslems in Iran slaughter and jail Bahais with impunity. >This is not like the Kurds who are Moslems themselves. The Bahais are >a different religion and a particular anathema to the Ayatollahs. Ah. I was listening to NPR last week, and was fascinated by a piece on the Kurds, and their religion(s). According to the Kurds, they are often portrayed by regional governments as being moslem, so that they may be considered subject to Islamic law, and assimilated. But, they say, most of us are not moslem at all. The religion they subscribed to they called Yezidi, and it had in common with Zoroastrianism a stringent anti-proselytization policy, to the extent that the teachings are largely secret and accessible only by being born into it, but distinct in having no notion of the Zoroastrian duality of elemental personified evil versus good. This naturally got me curious, and I went off to the web, to discover that, besides a fraction variously pegged between 30 and 50 percent of the group, who are moslem, there are in fact four separate and somewhat related sects among the Kurds, at least two of which are disputed as to whether they should be regarded as Islamic or not, the others being decidedly outside Islam. In addition to the religious differences, the Kurd language is indo-european, distinct from the asiatic Turkic, and the semitic Arabic of Iraq, and more closely resembling the pharsi of Iran. I found the whole subject fascinating, as this seems to be a whole religious culture that has managed to go by under my radar. >There is no substitute for coming into the 20th century and there is no >justification for any religion denying the role and revelations of others >including science, medicine, art and so on. Better they come into the 21st century, I guess. I wonder, how much do religions need intolerance in order to exist? This is something along the lines of the survival and evolution of memes. The religions we have are the ones which successfully indoctrinated their followers deeply enough to perpetuate through time. They presumably contain the necessary appeals to deep motivations which enabled them to persist in hostile environments. Perhaps the same needs which keep religions alive foster ethnocentricism and bigotry.... -Pete Vincent (I say, the proper way to approach the ultimate is via a sect of one. This world is a school, and we ought to do our own homework.)
