By Bert Hetebry

It must be comforting to know in absolute terms that you are right. Right beyond reason, so right that it broaches no argument.

I can’t remember when, but I do recall Scott Morrison claiming that there was no urgency in doing anything about climate change because Jesus will be returning very soon and nothing will matter after that. A belief in the second coming that Christians have been anticipating for almost 2,000 years, but it’s going to happen in the next twenty five years or so and the world as we know it will end, the New Jerusalem will descend from the heavens and unbelievers will be wiped out.

It’s described in the last book of the Bible, Revelations 21, ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…’, and so it goes.

The same fundamentalist belief ages the universe at about 6,000 years. The tidiness of this belief is that the first 2,000 years of creation takes us about to the time of Abraham, the second 2,000 to the time of Christ being on earth for about 30 years and the last 2,000 takes us to the present time.

Islam too has grown more fundamentalist in recent years, the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran, ISIS, the Taliban and in Africa the Islamic States group and Boko Haram, radical Islam has turned to the Koran and read it literally, the growth of Sharia law, the seeking of ‘true’ Islam has led the various Islamic sects asserting their ‘true-ness’, their authenticity in living the faith of the Koran. Wars between Iraq and Iran were fought over religious ‘purity’, Shi’a versus Sunni. In Africa Islamic fundamentalists are fighting holy wars to become the dominant faith across central and northern Africa, including the capture of young girls as ‘brides’ and boys as child soldiers.

Judaism and the political interpretation of its teachings as Zionism too is fundamentalism, a sense of being God’s chosen people now demanding their claim to the promised land on Israel from the river to the sea, using the promise to Abraham as written in Genesis as their legitimate claim and the removal of other people from the land, the ethnic cleansing, the removal by whatever means of the Palestinians.

In India the rise of Hindu Nationalism, Hindutva, claims legitimacy through their teachings to the Indian Subcontinent, purging it of Moslems and Sikhs, replacing Mosques and Sikh temples with Hindu ones, waging wars to purify the land of those ‘false’ religions. A true Indian is one who partakes of their Hindu-ness, living a life based on Indian culture, national and religious identity. The relationship between Hindu and India is like that of Zionism to Israel.

Religious fundamentalism confines the expression of faith as being absolute. There can be no deviance from the teachings.

Much the same in the move to the right in Europe, we see a strident expression of nationalism, a return to a true ethnicity based on mythical premises, much as the Nazi embrace of ancient Germanic myths and legends held up Aryan as the master race, allowing justifying the eradication of ‘less than pure’ people: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally disturbed. In Russia, the Putin doctrine of re-establishing a pure form of Russia, as a nation dominated by the state religion of Russian Orthodox and territorially reclaiming the Russia of the Czars.

Apartheid in South Africa was justified on religious grounds, white Protestants were elected by God, superior to the indigenous black people. White, Christian superiority had long been an accepted doctrine, beginning in the 1100s where Papal Bulls established the Doctrine of Discovery, giving legal sanction for colonisation and included sanctions giving European Christians power over discovered lands and their indigenous populations. In the 1400s these powers were extended through Pope Nicholas V issuing his “Romianus Pontifex” in 1455 giving Portugal a monopoly of trade and authorising the enslavement of local peoples, and in 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a bull “Inter Caetera” justifying European claims on lands and waterways they ‘discovered’.

The European dominance over these newly ‘discovered’ territories was seen in religious terms as Europeans being God’s people, entitled to dominate the world bringing with them religious teachings to supplant the pagan practice which led to the decimation of indigenous populations. All by an unquestioning belief that salvation through Christ allowed the enforcement of their faith as commanded in the great commission in Matthew 28, where Jesus is recorded as saying “All authority has been in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The settlement of North America followed similar invasions of indigenous territories under the term Manifest Destiny. While not overtly religious, the concept carried religious overtones and an assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States and faith in the new nations ‘divinely ordained destiny’, a belief rooted in American Exceptionalism and republican nationalism. The fundamental belief that white Christians were destined to take the lands from the pagan Indians.

In each case, the rights of people other than the fundamentalists are considered to be non existent. Again, when we look at Biblical examples, we see that shortly after the Ten Commandments were delivered to the Israelites by Moses as recorded in Exodus, commandments which included not to kill or commit adultery, a group called the Ammonites stood in their way and the command was given to kill them all, and in a later war, in the book of Daniel, to kill all except young virgins who would be taken at will, so it appears that the laws given apply only to God’s people, to those faithful followers. Religious exceptionalism it seems is the rule of law, applying just to them, but denied non believers.

That attitude has prevailed through European colonial expansion and continues today in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza and The West Bank, in the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, in Iran and Afghanistan where Sharia Law is enforced.

It is evident in the right of politics where the hard fought rights of women and LGBTQIA+ are under threat in America and are being challenged here in Australia, where the Biblical definitions of sexual roles and sexual behaviour are sought.

It is evident in the shunning of the refugees and stateless people being denied refugee status basic human rights as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, as the purity of national identity is threatened.

It must be of great comfort to hide behind those fundamental beliefs as non believers are punished for their unbelief. To be so sure of the ‘rightness’ or righteousness of the persecution of ‘others’, whoever they may be, they are not worthy of respect. Not obeying “Everything I have commanded you” is severely punished through persecution and the denial of their humanity.