Blind faith is the new power base
September 29, 2005
Terrorism is the most dramatic manifestation of religious fervour, but it's just one way believers can skew democracy, writes Francesca Beddie.
THE Pope says Australia is a Godless country. I take that as a compliment. What use does the Antipodean state have for religion? Do we want to be divided like Ireland? Or too frightened to get on a bus like people in Tel Aviv? Or in constant vigilance for the Rapture?
The what? I was talking to a 15-year-old Quaker in Washington. "It's what those Bush-loving Christians believe in. The day the world ends and they are beamed up to heaven." He told me to look on the web. The Rapture nerds have a site where those who will be saved can organise to have an email sent to their sinner relatives left behind on Doomsday. How that'll help I'm not sure but, while they are still on this earth, it seems to offer solace.
The conversation continued over dinner with adults. They railed against the extremism of Christian fundamentalism, which wants to get Darwin banned from public schools; worried about the fabric of society in the wake of another conservative appointment to the US Supreme Court; were fearful of the consequences of massive US debt being bought by the Chinese; and opposed the war in Iraq.
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I left Washington more shaken than I had felt in Jerusalem, where another set of fanatics defies logic. Men clad in the black garb of 19th-century Poland shuffle through the Old City, in a hurry to get to the Wailing Wall, to show devotion to God. But as they move through the Arab quarter, there is no love for one's fellow man. Their movements are shadowed by Israeli soldiers armed with machine-guns.
So these are the chosen ones. Chosen for what? Eternal fighting over arid lands which only technology has made habitable? Chosen to pick the bits of modernity that suit? They carry mobile phones yet adhere so strictly to the Sabbath, when it is forbidden to cause a machine, kettle, lift or car to work, that the police close off their part of Jerusalem to dissuade drivers entering and invoking the wrath of the ultra-orthodox.