By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
The same week a fed-up atheist claimed that religion causes hatred on a sign he placed alongside the state’s Christmas crèche in Olympia, a panel of three religion scholars at the University of Washington said that it is our flawed human nature that can’t quite put religious values into practice.
A rabbi, an imam, and an urban lay leader-preacher-professor tried to explain the growing disconnect between the world’s three monotheistic faiths and the need for peaceful resolutions to some of the world’s most contentious conflicts.
Why is it that religion can be so easily abused? Why can’t we all just get along?
“We have to acknowledge that we all have significant numbers of skeletons in our cupboards,” said Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. Rosen, who was the chief rabbi of Ireland from 1979 to 1985, now lives in Jerusalem.
“As much as our different religious traditions claim to be the source of blessings in the world,” he said, “we have often been the source…of a certain degree of distress and even a certain degree of justification for some terrible things that have been done in the names of religions.”
But Rosen, a leader and social activist, is quick to point out that all religions are susceptible to corruption and greed.
“Lest anyone here think that any one denomination might be less responsible in that regard, allow me to record an insight from an 11th-century work by poet and philosopher Judah ha-Levi,” said Rosen.
Ha-Levi, he said, wrote in 11th-century Spain that Jews are just as capable of tyranny and the abuse of power as Christians and Muslims — if only they had the power.
“He understands that when power is wedded to religious authority,” added Rosen, “that it can easily pervert the most sublime and the most noble of all values.”
Imam Yahya Hendi is the chairman of Imams for Human Rights, a Muslim chaplain and the Muslim Chaplaincy Director at Georgetown University. He said that we currently live on a sinking ship. He believes, however, that we can still save the ship.
“We have failed to understand the mind of God — the heart and the soul of God,” Hendi said. “God made us different and wanted us to be different. Can we listen to each other’s stories? We need to sit around the table, connecting with one another — brother to brother, sister to sister, woman to woman, family to family, hand to hand, eye to eye.”
Quoting from the Qur’an, Hendi related its instruction that nations and tribes must work to know one another, not to despise one another. He told the audience that unless every religious and ethnic group is heard and given an equal chance to participate in the culture, there will be no peace.
“We must practice the politics of justice, the economics of equity, and covenant of community,” said Hendi. “Everyone has room at the table and no one should be left out of the table.”
Explaining further, the Islamic scriptures instruct us not to merely tolerate each other, but to celebrate our differences.
“Tolerance means I hate your guts,” he said. “God created all of us and God is challenging us to live with one another.”
Prof. James Perkinson taught in an inner-city Eastside Detroit ghetto for over 25 years and is currently an associate professor at Oakland University in Michigan.
According to Perkinson, the planet is “groaning” under the long-term effects of unequal access to the earth’s resources.
“For a globe of 6.8 billion people to live the lifestyle of the average American middle-class family,” said Perkinson, “it would require, in terms of resources and ecological footprint, 5.4 earths. How can my religious conviction be understood so that I could live something like that kind of lifestyle and still feel good about my relationship with God and the rest of the world?
“My grasp of the situation today is simply this: We can’t.”
Perkinson transmuted the Old Testament story of Moses into urban rap poetry, casting Moses, the man from an elite Egyptian heritage, as the reborn working-class hero who kills a slave master only to become a “refugee” and “the original gangster Bedouin.”
He introduced his performance piece as “Exodus 17: 1-7 and the O.G. Bedouin.”
“Taken in by an African clan, he hooked up with a home-girl woman,” he rapped. “Moses went old-school.”
And this: “Exodus reality can bring liberation / and a Holy Spirit that will not tolerate the substitution / of nice manners for Exodus movement.”
The panel was sponsored by the University of Washington Jewish Studies Program, and co-sponsored by the Greater Seattle Chapter of the American Jewish Committee, the UW Comparative Religion Program, and The Center for Global Studies, and The Henry M. Luce Foundation.