Religion seems to exacerbate a radical individualism in our culture - an individualism that is quite disturbing and profoundly contradictory to the very writings that continue to fuel and nourish those religious foundations. How to get out of this situation is a question not easily asked. Individualism as it is can be understood two ways. First, is an individualism that understands the validity and irreducible nature of difference and sees the self in relation to difference. This frees not only the other to choose for oneself, but frees the individual to to the same in relation to the other. This allows the freedom both for the self to exists and to co-exist with others in freedom and in relation to the other. Second, it is a radicalization of difference into so many incommensurate entities that choose not to relate to and other in terms of the other. But this seems to cut against the grain of any sense of the other at all. In other words, individualism would rationally assume that there are other individuals. But this radicalization of individualism restricts the relation to the other as an extension of the self’s desire and so, the other is not an individual so conceived. It is this last to which the understanding of self as individual has found its current telos. I contend that religious oppression and is at once symptom and cause of the same primary problem with is otherness.

Individualism is the opposite of living with difference. Relating to the other means that one must see one’s self as an other first before one sees one’s self as the center. This de-centering conditions the relation of the individual to the other as an other and not that which it must assimilate into itself. Individualism so conceived anchors the ego as a static entity that conforms reality to itself. In so doing it dissolves difference into the self.

Difference is an idea produced from within modernity and those who would try to expunge it in the name of homogeneity were not all that successful. Homogeneity would ensure that like minded individuals are not individuals, but so many nodes in the System. Such forced homogeneity continually finds a rational conclusion that ironically proves both Marx and Kierkegaard correct even if they were fundamentally oppositional in their understandings of the self as it relates to history. Yet the beat of homogeneity in the face of difference continues on in an increasingly Westernized world culture that opposes it in the form of individualism of the second kind as described above and from whichever source it derives.

This is the fundamental problem and religion may act as both symptom and cause acts of the undeniable foundation from which the agenda of homogeneity springs. The current chaos in Iraq is the physical instantiation of the problem as it exists and the logical progression of difference in the face of sameness that we encounter in so many interactions people have in all matters mundane and significant.

Difference is inherently good since everything in the order of reality is fundamentally different. To reject difference is to simultaneously reject this fundamental quality in the structure of reality, but in so far as human cognition and consciousness are concerned, rejects the fundamental organizing activity of the brain that must not only describe reality in terms of difference, but then must synthesize that difference into often constant mutating combinations as new experiences cause this activity to re-initiate often with the same materials and previous syntheses. Human consciousness and rational activity is Difference and the very perception of difference as a fundamental quality of reality. When this is not perceived by matter of choice or conditioning from whichever medium, this fundamental quality of human relatedness is lost as is the freedom to be a true self as a self which is rooted in difference from an other.

Demanding homogeneity by force or other means reduces the other as other to a projection of the self thus destroying that which constitutes what is fundamentally good in the human being. This destruction of the other in a distorted relation of self to other renders the other as so many versions of self and thus crumbles the very foundations of humanity in general one relationship at a time. Hence the self cannot choose between alternatives since there is but one movement of self that truly exists. And that is fundamentally the eradication of the self.

The first amendment at its core ensures that difference so conceived is more or less normative for our civil interactions with one another. But this does not exclude by necessity warring factions who would assume that an other must needs qualify as an other only in relation to the self. This is so many masked agendas that demand homogeneity since the admission of difference would be identical to loss of power.