Bournagain

Had a great weekend in Lower Hutt, and some interesting discussions including a chat on the subject of tolerance with a friend of a friend. We got there by a fairly circuitous route, touching on the war on terror, world peace and the role of religion in armed conflicts. But what got us onto tolerance was those statues of Buddha that were vandalised by the Taleban in Afghanistan. Intolerance was seen as the vice behind this act, and present in all the major world religions. “If the religions would just teach tolerance, the world would be a better place” was the basic idea.

This got me thinking. Sooner or later something or someone will step onto the world scene to fill the present vacuum of leadership. The chaos we see today (the war on terror, Iran, AIDS, Israel/Palestine, global warming etc.) will continue to escalate until some agency, be it a man, a consortium, or even a government, arrives on the scene proposing some concrete solutions. It is only a matter of time before these situations become so desperate that the world will be willing to accept peace at almost any price, and it is in precisely this context that this agency (let’s call it a “Man of Peace”) will come with a clear and seemingly effective strategy to unite national and international powers to to resolve once and for all the problems that plague the world.

But these solutions will come with a price tag, and it is here that the current love affair that we have with this notion of tolerance will come to a brutal end. Freedom to believe whatever one chooses to believe is central to the credo of Western culture. This is a direct result of the influence of the Christian gospel in which faith is a matter of choice, where we are free even to believe things which are manifestly wrong if we so choose. Whenever the Christian Church has sought to impose beliefs, it has done so in spite of biblical revelation, not because of it.

World peace will only be achieved if this “man of peace” (in whatever form or guise he may come - I use a personal pronoun metaphorically, although it may well turn out to be a man) succeeds in uniting the warring factions. He will be able to do this because the hour will be so desperate, and because of the originality of the solutions he proposes. The respect he commands will enable him to demand extraordinary powers to override national interests, and he will be given it. He will demand that we forgo certain freedoms in order for peace to be attained. The primary freedom that we will be required to sacrifice will be the freedom to believe as we choose. Tolerance will be sacrificed at the altar of peace, and we will all be called upon to believe what the Man of Peace tells us we must, in order to avert impending doom on the world scene.

At this point we will all be forced to consider whether we think this is a price worth paying. At least, that’s how I imagine it happening.