The Reactionary Utopian
                     November 8, 1007


RELIGION, OLD AND NEW
by Joe Sobran

     Yet again a group we'd never heard of has become, 
overnight, the topic of obsessive national discussion. 
The mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate "cult" also throws 
an interesting light on "pluralism."

     Those who killed themselves wouldn't describe their 
deaths as "suicide." The word begs the question of 
religious truth. Their definition of the act was that it 
was a "graduation" to a "level above human." They weren't 
ceasing to live, but advancing to a higher life. 

     Maybe this doctrine is true, and the rest of us have 
missed the celestial boat. But at a more humdrum level, 
I'd venture to predict that Heaven's Gate won't have the 
staying power of, say, Judaism.

     Days after the Heaven's Gate graduation, the Union 
of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada 
created a storm by declaring that Reform and Conservative 
Judaism aren't Judaism at all, but "another religion" -- 
even an "alien religion."

     You don't say such things in this ecumenical age. 
Reform and Conservative Jews were quick to denounce the 
declaration. It was doing "damage" by refusing to accept 
certain converts as Jews, said one Reform rabbi. Another 
said that millions of Jews find "religious meaning and 
authenticity" in Reform and Conservative Judaism.

     The Orthodox find such objections beside the point. 
They consider the obligations of the Torah, 613 
commandments in all, divinely ordained. It isn't a matter 
of feelings, secular utility, or pluralism. It's a matter 
of truth. 

     To the modern eye, Orthodox beliefs may seem as 
irrational as the creed of Heaven's Gate. There's one 
little difference. Torah Judaism is well into its third 
millennium. It has proved its power to sustain its 
adherents. Its "irrational" traditions may be 
indefensible in terms of modern ideology, but this may 
merely mean that modern ideology doesn't comprehend the 
inner strength of those traditions.

     The creed of the sexual revolution, for example, 
seems like common sense to most educated people today, 
but it has brought nothing but social destruction. The 
strict sexual and tribal morality of the Orthodox, on the 
other hand, has preserved them not only from the curses 
of disease, abortion, and family dissolution, but also 
from the deeper loss of modernity: loss of identity.

     The Orthodox don't define themselves in terms of 
negatives like anti-Semitism, persecution, victimhood, 
and the Holocaust. They don't let the Hitlers determine 
their identity. They define themselves by allegiance to 
the covenant of Abraham and the law of Moses. And their 
instinct tells them to preserve their tradition to the 
letter, against all modern pressures.

     To many moderns, the very fact that a belief is old 
is almost enough to condemn it, or at least reduce it to 
the status of an uninteresting irrelevancy. This is an 
amazingly superficial attitude. If we can find historical 
and archeological fascination in the records of societies 
long since defunct, we should have not only fascination 
but also profound respect for an ancient way of life that 
still works -- and may well survive when modern 
civilization is gone.

     Assuming, that is, that when modern civilization 
goes, it doesn't take everything else with it. The demise 
of the Heaven's Gate cult may prefigure the end of a 
civilization that has forgotten the most basic truths 
about human nature in pursuit of a thousand fads. As 
G.K. Chesterton remarked, when people stop believing in 
God, they don't believe in nothing -- they'll believe in 
anything.

     The faith of the Enlightenment was that once man 
cast off the superstitions of religion, rational common 
sense and general harmony would prevail. "Reason" and 
"science" would improve on tradition and create a better 
world. That attitude may have been understandable after 
centuries of religious war. But some people still hold it 
after a century of wars that make the Reformation wars 
seem like the Era of Good Feeling.

     "Religion" can mean many contradictory things, from 
the latest fads to the most fad-proof fidelity to the 
eternal. The most ghastly thing about the Heaven's Gate 
sect is that its members sacrificed themselves to beliefs 
so evidently silly. It was like a mass suicide at a STAR 
TREK convention. One more warning that it's risky to roll 
your own religion.

[This column was originally published by Universal Press 
Syndicate April 1, 1998.]

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