Sex, Saints and Sacks Friday 3rd November 2017 @ 8:51 am
Today in the BBC news.
Egyptian female TV host given jail term for commenting on sex before marriage. Religiously conservative Egypt has ruled that Doaa Salah is having public conversation that threatens the fabric of Eqyptian life, fined her, and she now faces a jail term.
A Russian film on an affair between Csar Nicholas II & dancer Mathilde Kschessinskaya premiers without the lead star present, because of protests against the film. The problem? The late Csar is a now Saint in the Orthodox tradition. Andrei Kormukhin, the head of a conservative Orthodox Christian organization says the film is assault on Russia’s government, the church and the country’s heritage.
Often I hear people decrying the secular age in which we live. Yet I see the news today, and I live with my eyes open watching the rise of religiously based violence. This is seen in the violent actions involved in trying to establish an ‘Islamic state’ and also in the violent exclusion of immigrants through a desire to rid a country of forces that are seen to make it less ‘Christian.’ I don’t think we’re becoming more secular at all. I think the world is becoming more religious.
Thankfully, it’s not my thought – some really smart people have pointed me toward this. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes:
“Religion has returned because it is hard to live without meaning …
… The religion that has returned is not the gentle, quietist, eirenic and ecumenical form that in the West we had increasingly come to expect. Instead it is religion at it’s most adversarial and aggressive, prepared to do battle with the enemies of the Lord, bring on the apocalypse, end the reign of decadence and win the final victory for God, truth and divine will … undeniably [] the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world is radical politicized religion.”
