Think a Second Time by Dennis Prager

Author:Dennis Prager [Prager, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-204616-1
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1995-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Christian and Jewish Reactions

The relative lack of response among Christian and Jewish religious leaders to the Khomeini death threat was also discouraging for those of us who look to religion for moral guidance.

Just as liberals need to condemn the left for its evils to maintain their moral credibility, so religious people need to condemn religious evil to maintain their moral credibility.

Interestingly, though unfortunately not surprisingly, those Christian leaders who condemned the death threat tended to be religious conservatives. As the New York Times reported (February 26, 1989), “Liberals appeared less inclined to give unqualified rejection of the Muslim reaction than were more Conservative Christians.” The article cited as examples the contrasting reactions of two prominent Christians, conservative Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, and liberal Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian.

Cox suggested that writers who protested the Khomeini death threat “don’t really seem to engage the actual hurt and rage of the [Muslim] people.” On the other hand, Land “repeatedly said he was ‘appalled’ by this savage attempt to attack the First Amendment rights of American citizens and by what he considered a weak reaction by President Bush and ‘the abject cowardice of the booksellers [who had stopped selling the book].”

Cox the liberal focused on Muslims’ feelings. The conservative focused on the threat to a man’s freedom to live and write. The first spoke as a social worker, the second as if he were guarding Western values. He was.

Many Jewish and Christian leaders do not seem to understand the harm done to their religions when God’s name is attached to evil. The Vatican newspaper’s refusal to cite Khomeini by name while dwelling on Muslim sensitivity, and the tepid Jewish religious responses, left it to nonreligious and antireligious figures such as Norman Mailer to lead what should have been a religious protest against the desecration of God’s name, not to mention the violation of the Sixth Commandment.

One commentator, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, actually likened the Khomeini death threat to Christian protests against the film The Last Temptation of Christ. He was largely alone in finding a moral equivalence between peaceful protest and a death threat (that’s what happens when anger [at the Christian right] overwhelms rational inquiry). Virtually all those who commented on this affair either refrained from mentioning the Christian opposition to The Last Temptation of Christ or noted how instructive those differences were. Not one Christian leader called for the murder of Martin Scorsese or anyone else who made the film. More significantly, had a Christian leader actually done so, he or she would have been censured by Christians throughout the world. Likewise, imagine the chief rabbi of Israel announcing a million-dollar reward to anyone who would murder Jewish author Philip Roth for his scathing depictions of Jewish life. Such a rabbi would be drummed out of Jewish life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.