A Modest Proposal: The world needs a new Bible, a new Torah, and a new Quran. [View all]
This is an idea I have been kicking around for a few years now, and the latest round in the endless game of "are religious extremists 'legitimate' members of Religion-X?" makes me feel like now is as good a time as any to bring it up.
It is no secret that something like 99% of the members of any religion are not dangerous extremists, but that all of them subscribe to some Holy Text that has, by virtue of historical baggage, some amount of content that extremists always, always love to latch onto. Whenever a bunch of extremists start to give the rest of them a bad rap, in the name of some bits and pieces of ancient text, it generates all this friction.
Well, what if the 99% actually did something about that, and gave their holy texts a good, major, modern editing? Just to take the Christian bible as the example I'm most familiar with, what if Christians excised, say, most or all of the Old Testament, and Revelations? I mean, take the whole "new testament supercedes the old testament covenants" thing seriously.
No, I am not proposing that this will solve all of humanity's problems with religion, and give us an extremist-free utopia, but I am proposing that it would get real traction on at least a couple problems. (1) it would side-step this useless counterproductive debate about whether extremists are "real" members of Religion X, because these people would no longer have the cover of iron-age tribal texts to fall back on. (2) It would go some way to de-weaponizing religion. If your holy book doesn't contain any iron-age baggage, that's all the fewer ways for people to latch onto said obsolete iron-age baggage. And if they do, they don't get to pretend they have the backing of Religion X. At best, they have to officially identify with an obsoleted extremist sect. They can't pretend that they are just following the same text as the other sane 99%.
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