17 December 2004
In America, a religious divide has suddenly emerged as politically decisive, and in the world, religion is a runaway engine of violence. A fanatic fringe of Islam asserts its doctrine by joining suicide to murder in Allah's name. In Gaza and the West Bank, some hypernationalist religious Jews stake claims to land with God as guarantor -- disastrous consequences to Palestinians and Israel both be damned. Similarly, America's war in Iraq has evolved into a two-sided holy war, even if only one side explicitly defines it as such...
Such ferocity of human arguments over God, whether in affirmation or denial, reflects a terrible forgetfulness. Religion is to God what the clock is to time. Religion participates in the mystery of what it represents but does not embody that mystery. Not even Christianity, with its self-understanding as a religion of the incarnate Word, does more than enshrine that Word in symbol and sacrament...
We humans naturally reach toward transcendence, seeking symbols with which to make it present. Religion and science are ways of doing this. So are poetry and music. So, for that matter, is clockmaking. Yet transcendence, by definition, transcends. We should be modest, therefore, in the claims we make on the absolute. And equally modest in the claims we make on one another in its name.
- James Carroll, God's Clock.
(AP Photo/Laura Rauch: A supporter holds up a sign while President Bush speaks to a crowd at a campaign rally in Findlay, Ohio on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004.)
