Grow, Grow, Grow:  Religion is the Permanent Pluralism

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Father William Feree, S.M., PhD, a long-time leader of the Marist Fathers, based in Dayton, Ohio, and arguably the world’s most astute social philosopher of the past few centuries, wrote that “religion is the permanent pluralism.” 

  His early books, Introduction to Social Justice (1948) and The Act of Social Justice (1942) spell this out and have been applied as a basic fount of wisdom in the Just Third Way by the American Revolutionary Party.  See Introduction to Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/socialjustice/introtosocialjustice.pdf, and
Social Charity, http://www.cesj.org/ferree/socialcharity.pdf

  Ben Gurion, a founder of the Israeli State, wrote, in effect, that there is no role for religion in the Holy Land.  He wrote, as quoted in the latest issue of Time Magazine: 

“Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews, but not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question.  No solution!  There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it. ... We, as a nation, want this country to be ours: the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.”

  This demonic secularism, under the guise of religion, was nowhere better exhibited than by the twentieth century’s Syed Qutb, who militarized the otherwise profound teachings of the two Sufis, Hassan al Banna, his claimed mentor, and Taqiyy ad-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiya, 1263–1328, the Muslim theologian and jurist who taught that the true Islamic caliphate was not a political regime but a moral consensus among the wise scholars.  Qutb wrote:

“There is only one place on earth which can be called the House of Islam (Dar al Islam), and it is that place were an Islamic State is established and the Shari’ah is the authority and God’s laws are observed. ... The rest of the world is the House of War (Dar al Harb).”

  Both Ben Gurion and Syed Qutb, the most quintessential “religious” modernists of the Twentieth Century, relied on themselves as the ultimate power.  They rejected the traditionalist roots of the Abrahamic religions, as well as every other world religion, which have always embodied the wisdom that truth, justice, and power derive from reliance on a transcendent reality.

  These false revolutionaries, like the Neo-Conservatives in America, all of whom are committed to the strategy of creative destruction, would do better to contemplate the following wisdom,:

“Every blade of grass has an angel bending over it whispering grow, grow, grow, and so do you.”