The trendy 19th century Protestant philosophical theologian Søren Kiergekaard published a Danish book in 1843 entitled Either/Or. His faith-based binary is not the the standard good vs evil, God vs. Satan model that had long been enshrined in Christianity, but rather a dialogue between an aesthetic hedonist and a duty-bound ethicist. His point, or at least one of them, is that by rigidly following either life trajectory one can simply go too far and not realize one’s true self. He was aware of the binary bind that haunts many, if not most, religions and worldviews. In politics the mantra would be “my country, love it or leave it,” or more crudely, “my way or the highway.” In economics, capitalism vs communism. In all cases binaries bind us to intolerance and the hubris that I am right and you are wrong.
At least the Manicheans dared to assert the obvious that good and evil, like light and darkness, are locked in an eternal duel rather than an ultimate triumph of good. But this was deemed a heresy. The simple solution, what might be called the Salafi fix in Islam, is the fixation on a single standard of truth. Even if one takes the Quran as the literal word of Allah, it must still be interpreted. The history of Islamic exegesis demonstrates that very little is obvious in a text that was not originally written down as it was received in a linguistic idiom now fourteen centuries past. Yet, like the Bible thumpers in American Fundamentalism, there are always those who think they have the right interpretation and that alone must be followed. Continue reading Bipolar Religion
