To believe in the beautiful variety of humanity is to cherish every single person as a unique child of God with a unique path.
Each Abrahamic religion embraces and celebrates variety.
The Catholic church has many faces. Celibate priests lead the flock, married deacons run Catholic schools, celibate nuns minister in hospitals and schools, or they may be cloistered and involved in deep prayer and introspection. Married Catholic women may have large broods, or they may have limited their family size via natural means.
That is variety. The institutional variety within the Catholic church means that this institution recognizes the variety of people, their uniqueness, and thus their unique roles. A Catholic will declare that you need both priest and deacon, both ministering nun, cloistered nun, and mother of children. There are Catholic women physicians, supreme court judges, the list goes on.
Now for the Muslims. Sufis are both faithful and eclectic, Shia Muslims respect the final resting places of their righteous ones, but Sunni Muslims do not hold that a gravesite has any special sanctity. Uighur Muslims live in China, having migrated from Turkish lands. Ismaili Muslims feel a connection to their spiritual father, the Aga Khan. Some Muslim women cover their hair all the time, some hold that hair not be completely covered, and not all the time, some do not cover, and all have sources in scripture and tradition for this.
If you ask Muslims, what is the difference between your groups, most will retort that the different Muslim peoples had different traditions from their forebears, and then they will state that the important aspects of Islam are belief in one God, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. Variety remains an ornament of the human experience that promotes debate but not necessarily hate.
Now to the Jews - let’s look at Passover. Unleavened cakes are the crown of the Passover celebration. Yemenite Jews made these as soft and malleable pita, European Jews made them as hardened large crackers, and usually half burnt, but we eat it anyway. Yemenite Jewish men wear white robes on our Sabbath, Chassidic Jewish men wear long black shiny coats over black trousers. Variety means we are special and unique, carrying unique traditions that enhance our happiness.
When we differ, we actually become more important. Variety enhances happiness itself.
Of course variety between male and female is special, good, and should be preserved and celebrated.
A leftist mindset dictates that everyone should be the same. Differences spell conflict, so let’s wipe out the differences between religion, between gender, between cultures, so that our sameness will reign and there will be no more conflict.
This sounds like it means well, but the goal of let’s not have conflict is actually not such a noble goal. Conflict builds our minds, challenges us, helps us grow. When a Sunni Muslim is in contact with a Shia and they discuss whether the resting place of a saint is important, both are challenged and both grow.
The Uigurs are being forced to abort and their women are being forced into sterilization. This can happen in a Communist country in which everyone is interchangeable, an extension of the state, and not an extension on the model of, say, the Catholic church, which assumes variety, but along the model of - everyone will be the same, or else.
All Abrahamic religions appreciate the handicapped, the elderly, the frail and infirm. Since each person has an eternal soul, each person is precious no matter how capable physically or mentally. Those who need a great amount of care still have gifts to offer, the gift of giving, or compassion, and of seeing their humanity within the handicapped. The world cannot become a sterile place in which everyone is supremely able bodied all with the same secular outlook.
The death of a human being is regarded in all Abrahamic religions as a tragedy. All such religions are monotheistic. All such religions believe in the sanctity of human life and how incredibly special each unique individual is.
Abortion can only happen blithely in a society in which people are pressured to conform to a secular individualistic mindset. If you come out as faithful, as I did, if you embrace a faith tradition, you will be seen as a traitor and subject to relentless peer pressure to steer you back to a secular lifestyle.
Peer pressure to conform to a secular lifestyle means that people are simply interchangeable, not unique, and are replaceable. It is in this mindset that abortion can be so rampant, so blithe.
Each human being is unique, special, has an important role to play that no one else can fulfill, and thus every individual should be cherished.
The unborn is a separate person in the womb. She remains a separate person after she is born. Children are not extensions of ourselves. I personally noticed that pro-choicers view children as a hugely profound burden. This stems from their assumption that children are extensions of oneself. Recognizing each individual's uniqueness actually makes a parent happily anticipate the child they will meet, not obsess about how he will manage.
My dream is that faithful members of all Abrahamic religions should unite so strongly that the appreciation of our uniqueness would render abortion unthinkable.
No comments:
Post a Comment