\n\tT. S. Eliot wrote a lot of seriously layered poetry. Anyone who takes the merest peek at \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d a 1915 paeon to angst,
\n\tknows this\u2014even if the poet himself claimed to not recognize most of what others dredged up. So I\u2019ll happily quote from him, sure that I\u2019m in good company.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI can empathize with the ennui that went into the line \u201cin the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.\u201d This may be the clich\u00e9 of the
\n\tsuperficial\u2014but it follows on from the \u201coverwhelming question\u201d that haunts the entire poem.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAt the very end we come back to the question. \u201cAnd would it have been worth it, after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain,
\n\tamong some talk of you and me,\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWould it have been worthwhile, to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it toward some overwhelming
\n\tquestion. . . If one, settling a pillow by her head, should say, \u2018That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\tLet\u2019s insert religious liberty here as the overwhelming question. Not a trivial one, you must agree. It\u2019s been quantified lately by the Pew Forum on
\n\tReligion that as many as 70 percent of the world\u2019s people live under severe restrictions to religious liberty. How is it that we don\u2019t hear more about
\n\tthis?\n<\/p>\n
\n\tScheherazade fluffs the pillow and prepares to tell another tale: it\u2019s about religious liberty, but it\u2019s a different viewpoint every night.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI have thought long and hard about religious liberty, and it has finally hit me that this topic means so many different things to so many different people.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tNaturally we are all for religious liberty. I never yet met anyone who opposed it. Easy to say in the United States, a land that inherited the Declaration
\n\tof Independence and a fine Constitution, complete with a First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty. But surprisingly easy for others to say in some
\n\trather dystopian environments. The Soviet Union may have been dedicated to a secular paradise and motivated in its treatment of religionists by Marx\u2019s dour
\n\tquip that religion was the opiate of the masses. Still, in deference to those masses the Soviets long gave a legal guarantee to \u201cfreedom of worship\u201d:
\n\tsadly, honored more in the breach, however. Years ago in Myanmar I remember the reassuring promises of religious freedom repeated to us by the minister of
\n\treligion\u2014even as a platoon of soldiers hovered in front of our Seventh-day Adventist headquarters in Rangoon and others harassed and brutalized religious
\n\tminorities like the Muslim Rohingyas.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019ve come to think that part of the problem in gaining true religious freedom for the 70 percent who don\u2019t have it is that it is so poorly defined. People
\n\tsay they are for religious liberty, but they are not talking about the same thing.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the United States much religious liberty talk centers on the First Amendment and whether the matter is seen from a free exercise or establishment point
\n\tof view. I sometimes think this both disguises another agenda or reveals a limited view of the topic itself.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSeparation of church and state, the goal of the anti-establishment intent of the First Amendment was both the product of the Reformation and the rational
\n\thumanism that accompanied it. It was an applied lesson in historical awareness. The horrors of the middle ages, the Inquisition, the Dark Ages, were
\n\tparticularly enabled when church and state were joined. It boggles my mind today to hear well-meaning religionists speak of the \u201cunfortunate\u201d wall, going
\n\ton to say that it was intended only to restrain the state. These are people with little sense of history. They have also forgotten that this separation is
\n\tnot religious freedom\u2014it was only intended to create an open arena for it to flourish.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tRecently I heard a well-placed leader of a major religion in the U.S.A. say that all the talk of individual civil rights is impeding the prerogatives of
\n\tthe mainline churches. Such logic lay behind the imprisonment of independent preacher John Bunyan in sixteenth century England for his contrarian views and
\n\tlack of a license to preach. Such views in Germany led Lutheran, Catholic, and other mainline members to think the detainment of trade unionists,
\n\tCommunists, and other morally suspect groups actually strengthened their moral voice.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThis magazine treated on the strange bifurcation that was revealed in public statements by officials who substituted \u201cfreedom of worship\u201d for \u201cfreedom of
\n\treligion.\u201d The talk has died down, but I think many are confused on the difference. No regime or society is threatened or changed by restricting people of
\n\tfaith to worship by themselves in catacombs or quiet structures on the periphery of commerce. Freedom of religion is letting faith have its way with
\n\tsociety through free exchange of ideas and allowance of the right of religion to all\u2014even those views the majority find abhorrent.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI stopped by a major bookstore the other day and noted a new book by someone recently noised about as a possible presidential contender. Somehow the page
\n\topened to his views on religious freedom, and I almost recoiled from what I read. Yes, religious freedom is important he proclaimed\u2014and I mentally weighed
\n\twhether this was his voice or a ghostwriter\u2019s\u2014but we need less accommodation and more tolerance!! But the application of the Constitution requires that all
\n\tbe accommodated for their faith. And those of us with a sense of history and knowledge of the worldwide struggle for true religious freedom know that
\n\ttolerance is the poor halfway house to persecution. It implies no respect, but a grudging allowance that can be withdrawn.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIt has often been said that the greatest threat to religious freedom today is secularism. That is not so. Secularism is<\/em> a great threat to \n\tThe overwhelming question? Why, I think it comes back to What is religious liberty? That question has everything to do with what is religion itself. A \n\tI think religious liberty is not derived from humanity but is God-given and God-directed. It must be nourished on respect for the transcendent and an T. S. Eliot wrote a lot of seriously layered poetry. Anyone who takes the merest peek at \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d a 1915 paeon to angst, knows this\u2014even if the poet himself claimed to not recognize most of what others dredged up. So I\u2019ll happily quote from him, sure that I\u2019m in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[126],"class_list":["post-6218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-july-august-2013","tag-july-august-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\treligion\u2014to the structures of religion and its prerogatives of power in society. But not so much threat to religious faith and practice if it is kept alive
\n\tand dynamic. Or put another way, a lot of the posturing in our society is by religious special interests occupied with political power. And that has little
\n\tto do with true religious liberty.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tsociety unclear on that can hardly be expected to allow it to others or for the minority within its midst.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tawareness that we humans are fellow creatures of a Creator. Without this dynamic I fear that even constitutions fade in meaning, international covenants
\n\tbecome pointless and that the very term religious liberty can in Orwellian doublespeak eventually come to mean its opposite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"