Scimitar Religion, Christian Faith

The Bible is, as friend and mentor Gil Bailie has said,

... an anthropological encyclopedia. The {unvarnished} story it tells is the story of we humans trying to awaken from primitive religion, and to come to know the God of love. And it tells us the whole thing. It tells us the journey we’ve been on, and we see ourselves slowly extricating ourselves from primitive religion and “one step forward and two steps back” sometimes. It’s all there.

So it is certainly possible to find verses in the Bible that speak of sacred violence against enemies, you bet. And it's equally certain that if you go to certain places in Indiana you will chance upon paint-ball militia types who want to keep these elements of human nature's worst elements firmly ensconced in their sacred writs.

But the vast majority of Christianities world-wide have come to an unwritten but firmly agreed upon stance that progressive revelation shows our antennae were turned away from the spirit of the living God and toward our baser instincts and passions in those passages. Or, as Pascal said somewhere, you can always prove the Bible wrong but only by invoking the Bible.

Trouble is, there is a billion-strong religion in the world - some say a totalitarian system - which I call the Scimitar, that hasn't the providence to see its more violent passages as changing. At all. Not one wit.

For a lean article that seems measured and cool, I suggest that of Dr. Sami Alrabaa, a practitioner of the Scimitar religion.

The fact that he risks publishing a reformist tract gives one hope. Perhaps the biblical spirit can help swing people of goodwill toward a peaceful co-existence. We are, after all, on the same divide as monotheists. Perhaps we can one day agree to point our antennae in the same direction and receive the same Signal.