Our Daily Train | A blog by Jeremy Styron

The New York Times featured an interesting story recently about these three guys.

A Muslim, a Jew and a Christian say they became close not by avoiding or glossing over their conflicts, but by running straight at them.

They are Sheik Jamal Rahman, the Rev. Don Mackenzie and Rabbi Ted Falcon. It should be easy telling which is which. The three religious leaders are part of a growing interfaith movement around the country, which seeks to foster interfaith cooperation across religions, particularly across Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

These three, who have dubbed themselves the “interfaith amigos,” held a presentation in October at Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tenn. The leaders’ shtick, according to The Times article, is salted with some fun-poking comedy, along with more serious discussion on the importance of interfaith dialogue and how the leaders confront the various theological differences that largely govern each one’s lives.

In this era of religious extremism — or continued extremism blackening millenia — their goal is a noble one, in so far as it seeks to encourage mutual understanding and goodwill among different groups of people that in certain social climates could produce the precise opposite. The central problem, however, with what they are doing simply crashes in the face of what each of these religions’ texts actually say about any potential mutual understanding with unbelievers. To be sure, Sheik Rahman is an unbeliever to Mackenzie, while Falcon is an unbeliever to both. According to each one’s doctrines, only one of three are going to live in some afterlife, so their union is puzzling on, at least, that basic level.

Each of the three did deal with what they thought were misconceptions about their particular religions. According to The Times article,

The minister said that one “untruth” for him was that “Christianity is the only way to God.” The rabbi said for him it was the notion of Jews as “the chosen people.” And the sheik said for him it was the “sword verses” in the Koran, like “kill the unbeliever.”

In fact, each of these, indeed, is most certainly a “truth” about each religion. I will get to that soon. To say that each notion mentioned here is an “untruth” smacks of religion moderation, or as Sam Harris calls it, “failed” fundamentalism: “the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist.”

Here is what Harris has to say about religious moderation in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world — to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish — is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

So, let’s take them one-by-one, to unravel these aforesaid “untruths” to get some mutual understanding. Christ made it clear (and even said it explicitly) in the New Testament that “no one comes to the Father except through me.” He is described as the way, the truth, the life, the gate, the door, the bread of life, the vine, the path to righteousness and the Alpha and Omega. Does this for a second suggest that there is some other path to heaven? So, for the Christian, strike one.

On to the Jews’ “the chosen people” claim. Let’s try Deuteronomy 14:1-2:

You are the children of the LORD your God; you shall not cut yourselves nor shave the front of your head for the dead. For you are a holy people to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

Or, how about this Exodus 19:5-6:

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel.

Or, how about the Jewish prayer book:

You are the Elohim who executes salvations, You have chosen us from among all nations and tongues. And You have brought us closer to Your great Name forever in truth, to thank You and distinguish Your Oneness with love.

Strike two.

How about the sheik’s claim about the “sword verses” in the Koran? These are perhaps the most ridiculous and, paradoxically, untrue of them all. The Koran, however sensible and caring Muslims try to glance over the parts that make them wince, is not absent, but filled with verses about exacting punishment on unbelievers. Witness 9:73:

O Prophet! contend against the infidels and the hypocrites, and be rigorous with them: Hell shall be their dwelling place! Wretched the journey thither!

Or 9:123, or one that speaks directly to the topic of religious understanding, 9:11-13a:

The Jews say, “Ezra (Ozair) is a son of God”; and the Christians say, “The Messiah is a son of God.” Such the sayings in their mouths! They resemble the saying of the Infidels of old! God do battle with them! How are they misguided!

They take their teachers, and their monks, and the Messiah, son of Mary, for Lords beside God, though bidden to worship one God only. There is no God but He!

(Side not: Don’t you love all the exclamation points? Screaming makes argument so much more salient!!!!!)

All this foretells of much of the current brand of radical, irrational religion that is still washed over much of the Middle East. For his part, Sheik Rahman said the verses have been taken out of context and that, perhaps most damning of all to his case, are his words that, “Some verses are literal, some are metaphorical, but the Koran doesn’t say which is which.”

Indeed, and thus, the good sheik has driven a death knell in his own text. With the Koran, as with any other ancient text, if some of the passages are supposedly metaphorical, how are we supposed to tell which is which? Allah sure isn’t offering any clues from above. How are we to know for sure that any passage is or isn’t metaphorical? Nowhere in any religious text does the writer block off certain portions of text and say, “This part is metaphorical, guys. Please don’t go around killing unbelievers.” Jesus points out that some of his words are parables, but the parables don’t exactly command mass homicide, do they?

And besides, what could possibly be construed about “make war on the infidels” (9:123) as metaphorical? Metaphorical for what? By “war,” did Allah just mean a cold stare or is “make war” a nice way of saying Allah demands that Muslims evangelize to the fallen? Who knows, and again, Allah, like every other deity is silent on these questions, and has been, in Islams case, for hundreds of years, in Judaism’s case, thousands.

The only way that we can preserve a religious text as authentic is to claim that it is totally authentic, as the biblical literalists do, quite shockingly in the face of astronomy, paleontology, evolutionary biology, archeology and everything else. The moment we begin blocking of certain passages as metaphorical or as too brutal for our modern sensibilities, we throw the entire work into question. If we deem any of it unauthentic, contradictory, partially metaphorical, or anything else other than totally, 100 percent true and literal, it’s irrelevant, for we have no way of deciphering which bits to believe and live by and which bits to discard as anachronistic or allegorical.