Religion & politics -- a worldwide conundrum

On bigotry in Malaysia -- and its counterpart in the US, MGG Pillai had this to say, recently:

" A mosque and temple or church may have existed side by side for decades, but now the pressure is on for the temple or church to move. Shah Alam in Selangor, built as a Malay dominated city, had earmarked for a church, but decades of patient negotiations later, there is still none.

This has nothing to do with religion or culture. It is part of a reaction to social change, a sort of Malay-Muslim counter-reformation of sorts against the way society around him evolves. We see evidence of this elsewhere: the Hindus fighting for religious purity against a fast evolving and increasingly secular India; the rise of Al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist creeds that wants to keep the faithful within. This cannot, indeed should not, be dismissed as the work of errant religionists, for it is fueled from its heartland. Underlying it is a genuine fear that all religions, even Christianity, are losing out to 'Western values'. The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which President George W Bush espouses, is in one sense no different than the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Malaysia: both reject Western secular values, and fear their faith would be swamped."


"What drives them on and indeed is at the core of this puritanism is this nostalgia for an imaginary glorious past. The Hindus seek the mythical Rama Rajya (the Kingdom of Ram) as Muslims the "ummah" of the Prophet Muhammad's age. How they go about it is as different as chalk and cheese, but the aim is the same. When the modern world slips away from them and seemingly makes religion and culture irrelevant, they find solace in the comfortable myths and religious beliefs of the past.


But the time to fear is when this hankering of the mythical past is the only acceptable worldview. The BN [Barisan Nacional -- National Front, the ruling coalition in Malaysia] government, caught up in its byzantine irrelevancies, cannot counter it, and all but adopts it when it suits them but under no circumstances would decry it. It would often, as in the Chin Peng saga, be driven by other than racial or religious reasons but to keep a coalition partner in good spirits. Islam or culture does not intrude."




I think I would beg to differ with him, slightly, about the Christianity of our prez, since it seems to me Dubya is applying the faith toward helping all people become free (one of those Christian offshoots is that we are all brothers, and that no man shall be free until all his brothers are free)... (well, sisters, too, I hope). Some of our hard-core fundies, though, (Buchanan, Robertson, Falwell, etc.) very much meet Pillai's criteria. The same can be said about the fanatical leftist moonbats. You don't have to have a god, to be a bigoted religious zealot. You just have to have a humanly unattainable vision and a contempt for those who don't share it.