What is freedom of religion?

Americans often make kneejerk assumptions about these things, and simply think you have the right to believe in whatever you want, and the right to freely exercise (or not exercise) that belief.

In reply to an email I received earlier about the Saudi madrassa, I asked sarcastically whether freedom of religion would allow Aztecs to build pyramids, then drag sacrificial victims up the stairs to cut out their beating hearts.

Obviously, they'd be allowed to build the pyramids, but not even the wildest interpretation of the First Amendment would allow human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism.

Well, suppose that there was a group of "Aztec fundamentalists" who didn't actually eat people or practice human sacrifice in this country, but who were sponsored and funded by Aztec fundamentalists in another country. And suppose the foreign Aztec fundamentalists did eat people and practice human sacrifice, and believed in promoting those things here. Not only that, let's suppose that they were influential enough to bully foreign governments and private citizens into funding their promotional campaign.

I think readers will see where I'm going . . .

I just want to pose a common sense question. Are there limits? If free speech does not include the right to yell "FIRE" in a crowded place of entertainment, should the equivalent be allowed in a crowded place of worship? How about advocacy of genocide?

Does religion afford a cover which would not be available in its absence? Does it make any difference whether you chop out a beating heart because you just always wanted to, as opposed to doing so because you wanted to satisfy the religious demands of Huitzilopochtli?

One of the reasons the Aztec hypothetical is easy is because there is no such religion today. There are no organized Aztec apologists to deny that human sacrifice is part of "mainstream moderate Aztecism" or to claim that the Aztec codices have been "misinterpreted." They won't scream that "sacrifice" in its proper context actually means making real sacrifices by doing things like helping people, feeding the poor, or engaging in self improvement. There's no group to deny that they have any involvement whatsoever with practitioners of actual human sacrifice, nor will they say that the wielders of sacrificial knives have misinterpreted the true Aztec religion.

Stay with the Aztec hypothetical, and assume the existence of the religion and modern Aztec lobbyists making these arguments. Fine; let's agree, then, that the practitioners of human sacrifice and their advocates are engaged in misinterpretation.

Would it really matter whether they were "real Aztecs"? Aren't we entitled to do something about the misinterpreters -- no matter what we might call them? Or would we allow these misinterpretations to be interpreted by the people who lobby on behalf of the religion said to be misinterpreted?

OK. I do not suggest that the Aztec religion is the moral equivalent of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Shintoism. This was not meant as a moral equivalency argument, but as a hypothetical application of the First Amendment.

But let's turn to an example of modern religious interpretation. And a religion often said to be misinterpreted. Here's a spokesman for CAIR:

[Parvez Ahmed, CAIR chairman] said a minority of Muslim extremists helps perpetuate anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, but that it is wrong for Americans to rush to conclusions based on these groups that have distorted or misinterpreted Qur’anic text. He compared it to making judgments on Christians based on the Crusades.

But I have a question:

Would it be permissible to make judgments on the Crusaders themselves based on the Crusades?

OK, Christofascists, radical Christianists, simple renegades -- I don't care what you call them; can't they be condemned? Certainly, we would not take seriously any Christian activist who complained that Christians shouldn't be judged based on the Crusades, but who then turned around and supported the Crusades, would we?

And just as we wouldn't condemn all Christians because some of them burned witches at the stake, then surely we shouldn't judge or condemn all Muslims because some of them engage in the following behavioral patterns:

- executing people for not praying.

Just as I'm sorry that a few misinterpreters of Christianity might support the Crusades, I'm sorry to see that people calling themselves Muslims are doing the above things while claiming that they're justified in the name of Islam. My hope is that they are in fact misinterpreting Islam. In fact, I hope it so much I'd be glad to hear it.

If the CAIR lobbyists don't want me to judge Islam by the actions of the religious renegades in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Somalia, can't they at least state plainly that the above conduct is practiced only by renegades?

Unless religious renegades can be renegades and still be considered members of the religion they're renegades against, I just don't get it.

I hate to think that misinterpreters might be in charge of misinterpretation.

Who gets to interpret these things anyway?

Beats me.

However, it may be that I got a little carried away with the Aztec example. Not because I might have been seen as engaging in a moral equivalency argument, but because I was engaged in ethnocentrism. I had no right to judge the Aztecs at all.

That's because, according to Jack D. Forbes, Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis (and Guggenheim Fellow), the Aztecs were no different from the Christians. Or the Muslims. Or anyone else.

From 1493 onward the Spaniards were guilty of the sacrifice (for their own Roman Catholic religion and for secular wealth and power) of the lives of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Native Americans. And yet the historians and anthropologists speak only of Aztec and Maya human sacrifice, exempting the Spaniards because of their white race and Catholic religion, it would seem.

The failure to talk about human sacrifice today may be, in part, due to the fact that many of our modern practices of human sacrifice are "secular" rather than "religious." But much of modern sacrifice involves the use of elaborate patriotic rituals, lots of military ceremony, and an overriding ideology (such as anti-communism, extreme nationalism or ethnic racism). Very often also the sacrifice is proclaimed as part of a holy war or a sacred cause and various Christian, Jewish, Muslim and now Hindu religious functionaries bless the troops or the killers and ask the Supreme Being to smite the terrible enemy, even if they are women or children.

It is just plain European ethnocentrism to avoid applying the concept of human sacrifice to the Spaniards and to our modern world. The same thing is true of "cannibalism," used to undermine the credibility of Native cultures in the Caribbean, South America and in the Iroquois regions of Ontario and New York. Anthropologists have failed, for example, to see the consuming of the lives of slaves and exploited workers by Europeans as a form of "eating." In the case of infanticide, we have many examples of that today in the inner cities of the United States where poor babies are dying at Third World rates. Similarly, the killing of parents (matricide and patricide) is being practiced on a large scale in the U.S. through the denial of health care and adequate diets to old people. It is wrong to accuse Native people of the north of leaving old ones to die when neglect of elders is an intrinsic part of classic capitalism.

Gee. And all this time I thought the Aztecs were bad! (And so did Justin!)
But this guy's a professor, right? Of Native American Studies, which means he has more right to interpret than I do.

So, according the rules of interpretation, I guess I stand corrected.

(I'll just remain cowering at the bottom of the pyramid. . .)

I MULTICULTURALISM.

(I must always try to put a little heart into everything I write.)