I HAD a rather interesting interdenominational run-in the other day.
There was one member of Jehovah’s Witness and another from Seventh Day Adventist (SDA).
The SDA member claimed that the devil was very clever and had led most Christians away from the Sabbath Day (Saturday).
As expected, he drew on a number of Bible verses to drive home his points and condemn all those who thought they were Christians, but worshipped on any other day other than Saturday.
During the course of this, I mentioned that I am a member of Johanne Masowe eChishanu.
At this, they both found common religious ground and turned against me.
I was lectured at length on how the devil had, in effect, assumed control over us members of Johanne Masowe eChishanu by getting us to abandon the Bible.
This exchange was typical in its content, spite and arrogance.
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When I grew tired of the lecturing, I asked them why it was that Christians not only used the Bible to worship, but also used it to condemn each other.
The very same text, the very same authors and inspired by God’s unfathomable love for humans.
The SDAs write books quoting scripture eviscerating the Catholics and the Pentecostals similarly rip the SDAs apart.
And the poor Jehovah’s Witness are dismissed by all and sundry as being not Christians but a cult.
My question became: If this is the holy and sacred word of God, how can they all find within it the venom and spite to attack each other so?
In the end I despaired of the discussion and left them trading verses, those condemning all the other denominations and edifying theirs in equal measure.
It was a depressing display of the malignity of religious exceptionalism.
All religions found among literary peoples have holy or sacred texts.
Text has been, since its invention, used by humans to convey and store information.
Religious texts in that respect, therefore, are not unique.
The Christians have the Bible, Muslims the Quran, Jews the Torah.
Words are not contained in a sacred book because they are sacred, but because they are information that is deemed important enough to disseminate and/or store.
The process of qualifying those words as sacred is entirely subjective.
A universal principle among the major religions is that these texts are divinely inspired.
In other words, their origins are not terrestrial but supernatural or extra dimensional.
They are held to reveal divine matters to human beings.
They are not only revelatory, but also prescriptive in that they tell people how they are to lead their lives.
This is a common denominator across religions.
But a more prosaic perspective can also argue that these texts are an attempt by humans to answer two questions.
The first is the reason for our existence, the question of why all things are.
The second is what happens when we die.
All holy texts, therefore, contain creation stories and paint a picture of the afterlife that justifies our having existed on Earth.
These questions arise out of a surfeit of intelligence on our part.
We had to ask these questions.
These texts are a means of propagating the religions, authenticating them and also a means of ensuring doctrinal fealty and the internal integrity of the religions themselves.
If most religions have sacred writings, it means that the writings in themselves cannot be held to be a unique descriptor of any religion.
This is the same elemental error made by all religions.
It is as if having a religious text is an indubitable substantiation of that religion.
This is the reasoning error made by zealots across the religions.
They are, instead, a mundane feature of all religions.
Texts are a basic feature of religions without which the world would most probably not be as religious as it is.
They neither qualify a religion as true, nor validate the deity worshipped.
This being the case, we must, therefore, rate them as equals because at their most basic, they are all just religious texts.
These texts do not mean anything to an adherent of another religion any more than they would to a Martian.
The truth is that none of humanity’s sacred texts contain objective truths.
Indeed, their meaning is very much subject to even denominational interpretation intra-religiously.
They do not of themselves possess any immanently nor objectively sacred or supernatural qualities.
As an example, the SDA experiences the Old Testament differently from the Catholic despite it being the same document.
The same happens between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
The meanings, qualities and values they possess are, therefore, subjectively derived.
If this is a cogent argument to make, it is then a rather curious fact how all religions view their text as absolute and objective truth.
Some go to the extent of condemning to death anyone deemed guilty of any infraction against them.
A mistake that too many religious people make is that of putting the medium of conveying the message above the message itself.
A simple example is this: Religions generally the world over extoll love, peace and the sanctity of human life.
That is the message that is carried by the religious text.
Indeed, the text exists only insofar as it is a suitable medium for the message, it exists only for this end.
A religious text cannot have an apotheosis or identity in and of itself separate from the religious message it conveys.
But if some idiot somewhere for the sake of raising caine or getting a few views on social media burns a religious text, there are riots, livelihoods are destroyed and in most cases, dozens of people are killed.
The holy book, whatever it may be, is apparently more sacred than the message it carries.
It is a natural right for a person to defend the right to religion, but an abrogation of religiosity to defend a religion or religious text.
It well behoves a religious person’s faith to leave the defence of religion to the deities themselves if they care at all to defend their own worship.
It is perhaps time for a new religious consciousness that focuses on that which created us and not the forms and habits of worship.
These are tragically divisive. A time for common sense to precede religious fervour.
A time to end the killing, hatred and general savagery in the name of the Gods that love everyone of us.
Too many people have died and suffered indescribable horrors in the name of the loving gods who created them, but not at the hands of the gods themselves.
That ought to tell humanity something, but humanity really does not want to hear our Gods’ silence in their own defence.
