Alfred North Whitehead in his quote below reminds us that we continue to struggle with the same issues that both plague and enhance (at times) humanity. We think our problems are new, yet, history always enlightens us as to the commonality of the universal and seemingly eternal challenges that we face as a species. All religions have their good and their bad. Those within their own religion must always be the most critical of their fellow followers so as to keep the integrity and clearest meaning of the core of their tradition. We have to 'own up' to our short comings and failures (the Inquisition, persecution of the Jews, slavery, women's oppression, and the many more we'd rather all not name.) Only by those of us within the tradition being open and honest about the good AND the bad will be able to move forward without committing the same indiscretions and discrimination that we are all prone to. Ponder the various realities that Whitehead call us to discern:
“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....”
― Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead by Alfred North Whitehead.
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