It has recently been in the news that Afghani Muslims attacked and killed 20 United Nation employees serving in Afghanistan, in retribution for the burning of a Holy Koran in a Florida church.
The reasoning behind the U.N workers being killed can be presumed to be the anger felt by the Afghanis over the perceived indignity and disgrace shown to their religion, in this case by Christians, towards Allah and Islam.
This reaction strikes us in the U.S and other modern countries as absurd and idiotic on so many levels, the most obvious being that any symbolic act or verbal insult would result in one resorting to violence and the killing of anyone, let alone 20 people.
It is at another level, however, that we find the killings to be bizarre, irrational and backward.
Whether we know it or not, most of us, philosophically, are moral relativists, meaning that we don’t believe that there is one absolute truth for all people, for eternity. Furthermore, we have grown up in an American and modern cultural tradition that does not allow for absolutism. Hence, though most American Evangelical Christians, Hassidic and Orthodox Jews, Devout Catholics and Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims believe there is one truth that can always be known, forever and always- which is the word of God- that truth is only their own and not everyone else’s.
Although each religion, as practiced in America, believes, that it knows what God means and wants- and they all agree that truth is easily knowable by reading the word of God in one portion of the Bible or Koran- they do not believe it is right to impose their belief on others by force.
In fact, most Americans, or Europeans or Asians for that matter, do not believe that there is a single uniform truth that is the only correct one. We believe that truth is a hard thing to know and that perhaps pursing the truth, while never really getting there, is the best we can do. Put another way, there are different and smaller truths that charge over time. History judges who knew right from wrong or who was correct in their view of truth many years down the road. All we can do at present is try to evaluate and decide our present course of action, both in our personal lives and in our public policy.
The Constitution of the United States follows this philosophy and sets out laws to (1) allow freedom of virtually any speech, especially political or religious speech; (2) separation of church and state and (3) by the implementation of divided government- three branches – so that no one entity or person gets too much power. Absolute power is to be feared and is prevented by our Constitution.
Freedom of speech is so vital to who we are that even burning the American Flag- the flag that so many brave men and women have fought for and some lost their lives under- is allowed. The ability to not say the pledge of allegiance, and not being forced to say a prayer at public school, is protected by our Constitution.
The United States Constitution presumes that no one knows the absolute truth, not a king, queen or monarch, not a religious book or leader, not a philosopher or writer, not a politician or a president. Everyone is just expected to take their best shot at the truth, to make their best attempt to know the truth and then if you wish, to convince others you are correct.
It is a modern philosophy that has served us well. The Afghani fundamentalists who killed the U.N workers remind us how far- how gloriously advanced- we have come and progressed from their universally dictated, fundamentalist, all-knowing mentality.
As Thomas Jefferson said in our U.S. Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is Randy Feldman. To read more, go to my blog and website bigmouthmanifesto.com.
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