Day 8 - Religious Belief Picklist (or) Build Your Own Religion

It is interesting to me how politically charged the religious choice is.

For instance, Catholics are very much against abortion, and also against family planning and contraception.
This is somewhat related to religious beliefs, I guess. If you believe that life begins at conception,  it is obviously against the law of "do not murder" (do not take a life) to have an abortion. I'm not sure where the Bible discusses condoms, but perhaps I've just missed it.

Muslims are against eating pork. They are joined in this belief by Jews, Hinduists, vegetarians, and members of PETA. This is based on Old Testament directives from God that pork is unclean and to avoid eating it.

While I may or may not believe that saying a prayer over food before its killed, before its cooked, before its sold, or any variation therein, changes the food composition or changes the spiritual attachment of "good" or "evil" to that food, I do see the advantages of abstaining from some of the following list...

Unclean (and thereby inedible) animals in the Old Testament for Jewish people are in The Bible, Leviticus, Chapter 11:

Camels, Coneys, Rabbits (who knew?!), Pig (poor pig, gets a bad rap in every religion), Anything that lives in the water that does not have fins and scales (ie, turtles), Eagles, Vultures, Kites, Ravens, Owls, Hawks, Osprey, Heron, Bat, All insects EXCEPT grasshoppers, locusts, katydids, and crickets; Anything that has paws, Lizards, Weasels, Rats, Geckos, Monitors, Wall Lizard, Skink, Chameleon...

The Muslim list is similar and found in the Qur'an Sura 5, and references throughout. One key difference is that Islam does not allow for consumption of alcohol, saying it is "abominations of Satan's handiwork." It does make reference to alcohol a couple times prior to this that could be construed in favor of drinking: saying don't pray while you're drunk (implication: its ok to be drunk as long as you're not praying), then that alcohol has good and evil but more evil than good (but still, there are some GOOD parts, right?). However, the final ruling appears to be the abomination ruling, and that alcohol is meant to distract you from praying. Makes sense, better safe than sorry, I guess.

While the fact that they don't eat pepperoni on their pizza doesn't earn them an "Un-American Card", similarly benign things seem to polarize the American public about their religion. Take the hijab for instance: It is their choice, just as it is my choice whether I want to wear pink hair or shave my head bald, or wear a baseball cap. Why is wearing a head scarf a more polarizing choice than hamburger as a pizza topping rather than sausage? It doesn't affect the non-hijab wearer any more than your personal pizza topping choice. Yeah, I might be judged if I pulled a Brittney Spears and shaved my hair, but I wouldn't be labeled "Un-American" (unless I also sported a swastika tattoo or something).

How about prayer five times a day? Is the call to prayer, said in a language other than English, the chosen language for America, the part that is Un-American? Or is it the fact that they are praying five times a day? Or perhaps the fact that they call God - the same God as the Christians have, by the way - by the name of "Allah" rather than "God"  (not that it is a different name, only a different language)?

And back to the abortion issue, you don't see Muslims blowing up abortion clinics to save the unborn children, murdering abortion doctors, or making their children hold graphic signs of aborted fetuses on the side of the road to invade the visual freedom of the American public driving by... instead they just encourage their members to make the choice that would please God and they leave the domestic terrorism to the Christians in that department.

It is, in my mind, illogical to associate the Muslim practices with not being American. Religion and Patriotism are not mutually exclusive, or choices dependent upon one another. The first Americans, those that formed this country, while they held strongly to a set of religious beliefs, they were not what we would label "mainstream Christians" today... they were so FAR outside the norm of mainstream Christianity due to their practices and beliefs that they had to move around the globe in order to be accepted! I can pretty much guarantee that  we would look at those first Americans with the same raised eyebrows that we observe the groups who dance with venomous snakes in their services.

By the same token, when did it become acceptable to build your religion like you build a salad at Sweet Tomatoes? "I'm taking the lettuce, but no tomatoes, please."

What? No tomatoes? But Tomatoes are the crux of the salad! In fact, you cannot have a salad without tomatoes! A salad without tomatoes is NOT a salad. It is just a pretend salad. There are no salads without tomatoes because if you have no tomatoes it negates everything else that you have on there. You may have lettuce, cheese, croutons, salad dressing, and bacon bits (none for our Muslim friends), it may be exactly like my salad except you didn't take tomatoes, but in my mind, you do not have a salad. You just have a jumble of veggies on a plate covered with salad dressing.

How silly, in my mind, that we make these distinctions, and yet, as Christians we abandon our own laws and beliefs in favor of more 'culturally relevant' behavior. The New Testament clearly says that women should cover their heads and dress modestly, yet I go to church and I'm not seeing head coverings OR modesty a lot of times. When did our religious context become a salad bar where we ranked the ingredients and said "although some of these are optional (bacon bits, croutons), your salad is not real unless you have tomatoes."

One of the things I admire about Muslims is their adherence to the laws of their religion. They believe God is pleased by x.They desire to please God, therefore they will do x. It makes sense.
But if A = B and B = C, how is it that the conclusion drawn by the modern American Christian church (and probably American religion in general) is:

If A=B and B=C, then
A = Tomato

B and C are irrelevant

I think Paulo Coelho had it right when he said "We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path."