The religous right is wrong.

Another Islamic up rising in Africa? Anyone surprised?

So what is driving the Islamic Fundamentalist Movement to become so radical? It was a question voiced at dinner the other night. I certainly didn’t have the answer, but a gentleman at the table did respond in a way I found most interesting. “It is the  same thing that causes the right-wing Christian Fundamentalist to behave the way in which they are in our country. They all fear repression. They all fear they are losing their values to secularism.”

It is an interesting notion. That the Islamic and Christian fundamentalists are really not that different from each other. They are driven by the same fuel and guided by the same principles. One acts out because of the Quran and the other because of the New Testament. But their end goal is the same. Religious domination over secular beliefs.

To each of these groups, humanistic values are sinful. In their eyes, God can’t stand man to become dominate in the equation of spiritual survival. When and if he does, church and masque become secondary to community. And when the spiritual institution become secondary, their political power erodes and their position in the state becomes diminished.

Science is to blame. Teachers in schools are to blame. Lack of public prayer and outward signs of devotion to a religious cause are to blame. Liberalism is to blame. News media is to blame. Hollywood is to blame. Everything under the sun that is not nailed down to their very narrow worldviews is to blame. That gives them a very wide target to which to strike out and attack. “If you are not like me, you are evil.” That is the mantra.

To be sure, the zealots who flew jetliners into buildings on 911 are perhaps more demented than the Speaker of the House in Kansas who wanted to pray for President Obama’s death, but the aside from the acts themselves, the values behind those acts are exactly the same: ‘Destroy the infidels who do not believe as we do.’

With this extreme intolerance toward others and other philosophies, the fundamentalist can attack almost anything as being ungodly and wrong. I know Christian fundamentalists who are on both sides of the gun fight in America right now. They both call on God’s name to either take the guns away or to give us more guns. Not sure how God is going to reconcile this.  These two sides are screaming at the top of their lungs that sin is the reason we are losing children in our schools to bullets. Their rationale, is that if we had prayer in schools, this would never have happened. It doesn’t take one long (or far) to travel to the point where the Jihadist of the Islamic Militaristic movement would say the same type of things. Islamic Spring has spoken and want to enact Sharia Law to make sure the rule of law is the rule of the holy scriptures. (Not unlike, say, mandating the Ten Commandments in every courtroom –parallel? Or suggesting that our country was born of Christian principles. It was not.)

Not saying prayers before high school football games is going to drive America into hell, if you believe the fundamentalists. The Islamic radicals would say the same thing, only their prayers go to a different deity. So the impasse becomes what is a liberal, free-thinking society to do with the backward values these sects wish to impose upon us. And what happens when these two camps run head-long into one another? Remember the Crusades? Are we headed there again?

Both the Christian right and the Islamic right feel as if they are persecuted. Both feel threatened. Both feel that they must strike out and defend what little spiritual ground they have left. Both feel that it is their sworn duty to their gods and lords to convert every last one of us to march in the way in which they walk. And that is where the real rub comes.

A lot of us don’t wish to wallow in the spiritual babble of the right— either Christian or Islamic. Or Jewish of Buddhist or Hindi or Mormon or any other religion, for that matter. We wish to be left alone and not bothered by the deeply devoted and deeply disturbed. We are quite happy in our existence without the need for an organized religion to tell us how to live and when to pray and what to pray and to whom to pray. Our founding fathers even set it up so that religion was not to be a part of the governance of our land: They set it forth plainly in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution: "... No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

As Kerry Michael Berger wrote on CNN’s web site, “Our nation's motto was E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), which is far more representative of our secular nation than "In God We Trust". It is only as a result of paranoia about Communism during the Cold War that invoking the name of God became more popular, and it is being used by Fundamentalists today to chip away at the Secular Foundations of our country and turn us into another intolerant religious tyranny.”

Radicals on both sides of these two fundamentalists camps would disagreed with this premise. Both would declare it blasphemy. But let us not forget that both can be shaved, redressed and transplanted into each other groups. That is how similar their philosophies for control are. (The gods they worship my be different, but the political ideology is exactly the same.) And in America, that is a scary notion. Our country was founded by a bunch of deists who didn’t want to live under the rule of thumb of the King of England (The titular head of the church) and be told how to worship.  So the freedom of religion is also understood to be the freedom FROM religion in the United States.

Too bad it is not that way around the world.

But remember, the very thing that causes the conflicts in the Middle East with the Islamic Militants, is exactly the same thing that is transpiring on the far right fringe of America’s Christian Evangelical movement. And both camps are being fueled by hatred…not love.