Is the dominance-trait an essential characteristic?

“Is the dominance-trait an essential characteristic or basic element of these religions? If they lacked or got rid of it, would they be identically the same in their essence as they are now? Are they viable as religions without the dominance trait? Is the dominance-trait non-essential, a historical accretion due to mere historical development or, at least, is it an element due to human limitations and not issuing necessarily from the religions themselves? After all, these religions claim to be divine in origin, to be messages of salvation received by fallible men from a god who is deemed to be illimitable, eternal, faultless, perfection itself. Perhaps the message itself is free from the dominance-trait; only the recipients suffer from this limitation? Perhaps all three religions adopted physical modes at the priceless moments of their history, and these modes imply a purely human dominance-trait?

This question has a burning importance today when a deep crisis appears to be shaking these religions at their very foundations: one of the aspects of all three religions that seems incompatible with the mind of modern man is this dominance-trait of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Certainly the prejudice, bigotry, cruelty, the massacres and progroms and persecutions, the suffering and the oppression to which this dominance-trait has given rise, have shaken modern man's belief in the authenticity of their absolutist claims.

It is certain that exclusivity is an essential note of these religions. If tomorrow, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam conceded that any one of the others was as good as or better than itself, they would fall apart as we know them. Their entire history would be negated. The Jews would cease to be the Chosen People. Jesus would cease to be God and Savior. Mohammad and his Koran could be pushed aside as historical accidents. Each of the three must singly and for itself claim to have exclusive possession of the one and absolute truth, to exclude the other two and all others besides. The most any one of them could concede is that the others have a fragment or a portion of the truth, that in virtue of good faith and good works, Yahweh (or God or Allah) will have mercy on them.

The pathos of their locked position is sharply focused by their professed belief in one god. There can only be one god, all three maintain obstinately. And this one god can have only one truth. Embedded in each religion, however, are mutually exclusive proportions about that one god: Jews and Muslims reject the divinity of Jesus; Christians and Jews reject the supremacy and final authority of the Koran as the last words of this one god to men; Christians and Muslims reject the Jewish Torah as the ultimate word of this one god; Christians and Muslims believe in the virginity of Mary which the Jews reject; Jews and Muslims reject the idea that the blood of Jesus wiped out all men's sins. The list is endless.”

Malachi Martin, The Encounter, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, 217-18


 

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