How far can you count?

How come we seem able only to count to 2?

Pope Frances is visiting Albania where—CBC News tells us—half the population is Muslim, the other half Christian. Two colours. Black and white. No grays.

Comments posted on North American websites hurl accusations back and forth; the labels—you lefties or you rednecks—suggest a world with only 2 political sides. (Some imply that in Canada, the Greens, the NDP and the Liberals are all "lefties," as opposed to the Harperites who are "that blessed ONE in a world of only 2," and vice versa, of course.)

I'm pretty sure ISIL, or ISIS, sees the world as 2: us and the infidel.

I remarked on this at the dinner table the other day, ill-advisedly declaring in defense of 2 that the entire population was either male or female, and was brought up short in support of all those many who are born with gender characteristics that are ambiguous, even scary to those who tenaciously cling to the fiction of a black and white world, a world of 2.

I grew up in the Mennonite Church in a predominantly Christian community. There we learned that "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters (Luke 11:23, also found in the gospels of Matthew and Mark)." We also learned that, "Jesus answered (Thomas), 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me' (John 14:6, not recorded in the other gospels)." There's really no easy way to interpret these passages other than as a description of a world of 2—those with me and those against me.

I was diligently taught not to count past 2 in these matters.

Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair—speaking on the subject of Christian Church/Aboriginal reconciliation—said that  "Christians and their churches must demonstrate respect for Aboriginal spirituality . . . they must no longer insist that Christianity is the only way for all people."  (Esther Epp-Tiessen in INTOTEMAK, Summer 2014, Vol 43, No 2)

If Justice Sinclair is right, then the kingdom of heaven is not populated by a monochromatic white but by rainbows of colour, not 1 as against 2, but 3, 4, 5 . . . ∞ together, a myriad of persons known not by the greenness of their leaves but by the flavour and nutrition in their fruit. (See Matthew 7: 16 - 20)

I've never been to Albania, but I'm guessing there aren't only Muslims and Christians there, and among those two groups, that there are liberal thinkers and conservative thinkers and any numbers of gradations between, plus Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics and atheists, etc. I’m also guessing that good fruit doesn’t only grow on tree 1 or tree 2.

(What a bit of irony—70+ and still learning to count!)

We do our politics, our religion, our social interactions, our very families great wrong if we can't bring ourselves to count past 2.

You, me and Islam

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief (Robert Frost).

Sometimes things come in bunches, even if you haven't given them a thought for a considerable time, if ever. Like the time you read the word syzygy for the first time, looked it up and then heard the word used on the news that same evening. Some would say, “Coincidence?? I don't think so!”

It happened to me the other day. Jacques Parizeau—former PQ leader and premier of Quebec—published an op ed slamming the proposed Charter of Values and I read a paper given to me by an acquaintance and member of the same church denomination I belong to. Sound unrelated? Not at all.

First, the paper given to me by the acquaintance purportedly summarizes a book by Dr. Peter Hammond called Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and the Contemporary Threat, a book I'd never heard of. The summary details why we should be very afraid of Islam:

“Therefore, after much study and deliberation . . . perhaps we should be very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country (emphasis not mine). They obviously cannot be both 'good' Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you wish, it's still the truth. You had better believe it. The more we understand this, the better it will be for our country and the future.”

Second, the report of Jacques Parizeau's criticism of the Charter of Quebec Values says: “He accuses the Quebec government of reacting to a growing fear of Islam and its spread.”

There's the connection. There are people who are convinced that we Westerners should be very afraid of Islam, that we should buy into the theory that there is a plan afoot to Islamasize the whole world, place us all under Sharia law, dispose of all infidels, etc., etc.

Interestingly, nearly every point made in the paper (anonymous, by the way) to prove that Muslims are unfit to be Americans, can also be made of Christians. For instance, it's declared that a Muslim cannot theologically be a good American because “his allegiance is to Allah.” Substitute “Jesus Christ” for Allah and you have the reason why no Christian can be a good American.

My concern today is not that this hate literature is out there; my immediate concern is that it's being circulated in my church and in my circle of acquaintances. People are reading the apocalyptic literature of Islamic conspiracy and shuddering to know what to do. The paper offers no suggestion of how the reader should react to the “facts” it presents, except that he/she should be aware that our communal home is on fire.

The paper I was handed by a fellow Mennonite is reminiscent of the material through which bigots of the early 20^th Century “educated” Christians on the danger represented by the Jews in their neighbourhoods. The paper speaks of the percentage of Muslims in a country and what's to be expected as their numbers increase:

“After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, as in Ethiopia [where Muslims represent 32.8% of the population.]”

Talk like this is frighting good people, softening them up to accept, even condone, more direct attacks on the Muslim minority in North America. And that's probably why a feeble old separatist politician saw fit to leave his home and spread the caution despite his one-time rant that the referendum was lost because of “the ethnic vote and big money.”

My grandmothers wore the hijab, only it was called a scarf, or in low-German, a Doek. She would no more be seen in public without her head covered than in her nightgown. It was a symbol of her fidelity to the faith in which she'd been steeped for 70 years.

I asked a woman of the Muslim faith recently what went through her mind when she saw nearly-naked women prancing about on TV—or in the street. She said that her first thought was that they would be wise “to protect themselves better.” Her second thought was that if she was free to dress as she does, that freedom needs to exist for everyone . . . or else it doesn't for anyone.

The Arab world is in a state of revolution these days. I asked a Muslim prof teaching at the Veterinary College at the U of S what thoughts he had about the civil war in Syria as he listened to the news. (His mother was Syrian by birth.) He sighed and shook his head. “We went from European colonialism to dictatorship and are just now realizing that freedom is possible,” he said. “I fear there will be much fighting and bloodshed before we find our feet in a new and and different world.” (This isn't a verbatim quote.)

Spreading fear about minorities in a country that considers itself a model of freedom and democracy—like Canada, for instance—is not going to help in the struggle to ensure that “we all get to invite our neighbour to sit under our own fig tree and drink from our own cistern.”

Quebec—and all of us, Christians and Muslims for that matter—should take warning from the holocaust; there is great danger in going down the “persecuting minorities” road. The measuring stick we use to judge others is the same stick with which we will be judged.

This, incidentally, is Biblical.

For now, let's at least get to know our neighbours on a personal level before categorizing them by someone else's standards and doing them some unnecessary injustice.