Religions are Usually Just Nationalisms and Should Not Benefit from Tax Exempt Status
(Why Judaism, Catholicism, the African American Church and Islam are Not Genuine Religions or, at least, not religions deserving of special privileges)
By
David Gottfried
Much of what passes for religions should not be deemed religions.
One would think that religions should concentrate their energies on the almighty or advancing goodness. Certainly, if we want to advance the public interest, we will want to aid and facilitate the growth of those phenomena which heighten goodness.
However, although the foregoing “religions” (Hereinafter Judaism, Catholicism, the African American Church and Islam will be referred to as “the mobs”) do at times profess an interest in the almighty, their commitment to doing good is transitory and is far less important than their main objective.
The main objective of the mobs is the furtherance of their group, the exaltation of their group and the concomitant degradation of everyone outside of the group. In other words, what are called religions are nationalist enterprises.
JUDAISM
When I was young, Judaism assumed a prominent place in my life. Although my background was not Orthodox, it was clearly much more Jewish that the background of the bourgeois, assimilated American Jewish norm whose Judaism is reducible to Barbara Streisand, Jackie Mason and what are to me boring, insipid jokes from the Borscht Belt. The only “Jewish” words they seem to be acquainted with are “Shvatza,” “Schlemeil” and “Oy vey.”
I went to the synagogue five days a week: Three days for Hebrew School, Sabbath services every Saturday and “Youth night” every Tuesday.
I don’t recall my Hebrew School teachers, my Rabbi or any other adults stressing the salient components of moral behavior. They did not stress that lying, or cheating, or killing were wrong. The synagogue had another, more urgent moral compass to instill.
The synagogue saw as its primary objective the inculcation of a love of Jews, a love of Israel, an identification with all things Jewish and a concomitant derogation and diminution of respect for those poor souls outside of the Hallowed clan.
We were told to give money to Israel whenever possible. (We used to scurry around the neighborhood with blue and white boxes to collect money for the Jewish National Fund) We were told that there was sin in the world which must be condemned and avoided at all costs. Those sins were shellfish, pork and mixing meat and milk. Also, there were sins of omission and they consisted of the failure to perform a hundred and one obscure religious rites and the neurotic zealousness with which we kowtowed to these rites made people with an obsessive-compulsive neurosis appear easygoing. We could not ignite fire, turn on a light, operate electrical equipment, carry money or perform any number of ordinary tasks on the Sabbath because we had to rest on the Sabbath and our Sabbath rest, or enforced abstention from life, was, if anything, not restful.
I will concede that many of our rites were based on right and wrong. For example, the prohibition on mixing meat and milk stems from the observation that it is “obscene to eat the young in its Mother’s milk.” I think this is a very fine thought and when I have seen non-Jews feast on cheeseburgers and chipped beef and other culinary monstrosities, they seem like savages. However, in Judaism the rite at times supersedes the reason for the rite. In other words, we become so obsessed with attending to religious symbols that we forget the moral underpinning for those symbols.
CATHOLICISM
The same thing transpires in Catholicism. In Catholicism adherence to the rite often supersedes the moral imperative which gave rise to the rite. One does not have to do good; one must merely manipulate one’s rosary beads in the prescribed fashion.
The Catholic faith always reminded me of an old Rolling Stones song:
The Gangster looks so frightening
With his luger in his hand
But when he gets home to his children
He’s a family man
But when it comes to the nitty gritty
He will shove in his knife
Yes he really looks quite religious
He’s been an outcast all his life.
“Jigsaw Puzzle,” Jagger/Richards, 1968
(When I heard this song, in my youth, I always shouted out, “He’s a good Mafia Catholic,” after Jagger sang, “Yes he really looks quite religious.”)
Of course, Catholicism does adhere to certain beliefs. First and foremost, Catholicism, classically, believes in nothing but blind obedience to clergy. One did not need to know what the Priest was saying; indeed, until recent times the priest conducted masses in Latin and the great mass of unwashed and obedient Catholic peasants did not know Latin. In their blind subservience to the dictates of the clergy, Catholics seemed pre-Democratic and distinctly medieval. Why would the United States, which is supposedly a nation that believes if not in Democracy at least in a polity in which people think for themselves and have a healthy modicum of independence, further or aid a religion, such as the Catholic faith, which tends to belittle and inhibit independent thought. Actually, Catholicism, in its subjugation of the individual to the group, its parishioners who accede to the edicts of the clergy like a communist collective acquiescing before a Commissar, seems inimical to the most fundamental ideal of the American political dream: Independence.
The group-think encouraged by the clergy has shaped American politics in pivotal ways. Colleagues have told me that in Chicago, in 1960, the election of John F Kennedy was touted as the number one obligation of all good Irish Catholics. The nuns in the parochial schools told their pupils to tell their parents to vote for Kennedy. More ominously, in many solidly Democratic, Irish-Catholic wards there were a severe paucity of Republican poll watchers and many political commentators opine that the election was stolen by Kennedy under the steepled roofs of the powerful Catholic Churches. I have no special ill will against the Kennedys; I loved his Brother Robert very much. However, John F Kennedy was one of the least deserving candidates who ever made it to the presidency, he got off to a very perilous start (The Bay of Pigs, the neutralization of Laos, The June 1961 meeting with Khrushchev, and the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 all transpired in the first 8 months of his tenure) and the great achievements of his administration (The resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, landmark reforms in Civil Rights) were almost entirely due to Robert Kennedy’s drive. John Kennedy was resting in his rocking chair.
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH
The African American Church is strongly invested in the uplift of Black Americans. Surely, black Americans are in need of uplift. At first blush, the case for the black American church seems a tad stronger than the case for the Synagogue or the Church of Rome.
But the African American Church is, if anything, more wedded to collectivist thought and enforced ideology than the synagogue and Catholic Church. When elections draw near, they are, of course, heavily invested in bringing out the black vote for those candidates most amenable to black objectives. Perhaps this is all well and good; why shouldn’t they try to elect people whose policies might alleviate the pronounced pathology of persecuted black America.
However, it is not well and good when they employ such shoddy and regressive tactics to attain their goals. For example, black churches not only demand that they be afforded early voting; they want to march from the church directly to the ballot box on Sundays. In many jurisdictions, particularly in the land where bacon grease is a salad dressing, the intellectually backward American South, blacks want to parade from their churches to their polls, kept open for them on Sunday, to hone and buttress the power of their Stalinoid unanimity.
They will not only listen to their “preacher” at Church. They will listen to their pastor as he shepherds them like docile animals to the polls. They will chant the slogans booming from his bullhorn, they will endorse political proposals as if they were codified by Jesus, they will be a pliable mush of molded, mangled minds.
Indeed, everything about their church services is hostile to intellectual rigor and analysis. One does not think about what the “preacher man” says; one shouts amen with gusto and relish before one even begins to comprehend what the pastor is saying.
Also, the preacher man, or preacher woman, or loud garish slob of faith uses plainly dishonest tactics to make the congregation fall into line.
For example, sometimes black preachers, before saying something, austerely and almost angrily announce that “God told me to tell you this.” This rhetorical crudity is employed by even the very best black ministers. For example, although I for the most part revere Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon, in April 1967 in Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which condemned our involvement in Vietnam, I abhor his introductory comment that he will convey the history of our involvement in Indochina, even though Lyndon Johnson, perhaps, wants to muzzle his words, “Because G-d told me to tell you.”
Do we really believe that Martin Luther King spoke to G-d. Of course, if G-d is almighty, I suppose he could speak to anyone he damn well chooses to speak to. However, the fact remains that very, very few people have spoken to G-d and a very high proportion of them wet the bed, or want to sleep with their Mothers and like to finger paint at the age of fifty.
It is only a hop, skip and a jump from believing that G-d told you to vote Democratic to believing that Republicans should be disenfranchised, or that a minimum wage of 613 dollars a week is biblically mandated because there are 613 mitzvahs in the Torah (Some Jews get carried away with the number 613 because the Torah gives us 613 good deeds to perform)
ISLAM
Similarly, Islam is perhaps more of a nationalist enterprise than any of the aforementioned religions. Indeed, some historians contend that Arabic does not conceive of separate secular and ecclesiastical worlds; both are welded together and the advancement of the Muslim faith is inextricably linked to the advancement of a Muslim state. If a Muslim resides in a non-Muslim state, he should either leave that non-Muslim state or endeavor to convert that state to Islam. When Muslim armies achieve a military victory, a mosque should be erected at the site of the military victory. (Hence, muslim activists demanded that a mosque be constructed about a tenth of a mile from the World Trade Center.)
Islam is inextricably linked with the military campaigns and ruthlessness of Muhammed. For example, early in his career, he promised peace with a rival faction, he broke his promise and he augmented his power. Muslim’s cite this as a justification to lie in diplomacy. Of course, many supposedly refined and elegant gentlemen of the Chamberlain orientation will think it crass and coarse of me to doubt the sincerity of Muslims on the grounds that their holy books cite the advisability of lying, but of course Chamberlain and his ilk were responsible for World Wat Two because they trusted Adolf Hitler. Whereas Jesus is hailed by Christians as a prince of Peace, the Levant Lauds Muhammed as a Lord of Blood and gore.
Just a passing glance at Friday services at mosques proves that Islam is a political force and hardly a religion. What is the crowning crescendo of Friday services? What is the celebratory zenith of religious exultation that everything has been leading up to? The all-consuming mass temper tantrums in which the Muslim mob burns American and Israeli flags and curse the Great Satan.
In closing, I will concede that many religions have, as of late, become more concerned with right and wrong as opposed to ceremonies and rites. Catholic education today is a lot more than regimentation designed to make one a serf of the “ancien regime.” The mass is no longer in latin and the ideals of Jesus are conveyed to the parishioners. Likewise, the synagogue of today is not the synagogue of my youth when it seemed more like a collection agency for the state of Israel, giving Jews guilt for not following the faith and inducing them to cough up hefty checks.
However, religions are, to a large extent, what they always were: nationalist enterprises that simply exalt their own group or cliques and delight in persecuting people outside of their group.
Quite frankly, if we are going to subsidize an organization because it follows a religion (which is a sort of other worldly ideology; theology is to religion what ideology is to politics), celebrates the history of a certain group of people, and increases scorn and disparagement of those outside of the charmed group, why not subsidize a club or party seeking the advancement of Communism and Russian Nationalism.