Intractable Dilemmas We have created an interconnected world. It is true that we are dangerously polarized, but we are also linked together more closely than ever before. When shares fall in one region, markets plummet all around the globe. What happens in Palestine and Iraq today can have repercussions tomorrow in New York, London, or Madrid. We are connected electronically so that images of suffering and devastation in a remote Syrian village or an Iraqi prison are instantly beamed around the world. We all face the possibility of environmental or nuclear catastrophe. But our perceptions have not caught up with the realities of our situation, so that in the First World we still tend to put ourselves in a special privileged category. Our policies have helped to create widespread rage and frustration, and in the West we bear some responsibility for the suffering in the Muslim world that Bin Laden was able to exploit. Am I my brothers guardian? The answer must surely be yes. War, it has been said, is caused by our inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. Our relationship with our fellowmen. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death. [John Fowles, The Magus] We need ideologies today, religion or secular, that help people to face up to the intractable dilemmas of our current economic and historical situation as the prophets did in the past. Even though we no longer have to contend with the oppressive injustice of the agrarian empire, there is still massive inequality and an unfair imbalance of power. But the dispossessed are no longer helpless peasants; they have found ways of fighting back. If we want a viable world, we have to take responsibility for the pain of others and learn to listen to narratives that challenge our sense of ourselves. All this requires the surrender, selflessness, and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades and jihads. Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion - at its best - has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and equanimity for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current predicament of the world. Compiled From: Fields of Blood - Karen Armstrong, pp. 399-401
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 07:57:19 +0000
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