ARE THE MONOTHEISTIC RELIGIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST 100% "GOOD" WHEN THEY'RE VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION?

To fully refute the fundamentalists' not-so-clever obfuscations, we must consider Middle Eastern monotheism from the enlightening perspective of comparative religion.

As we have already seen, the original Hebrew polytheism gradually evolved into Hebrew monotheism. Then another transition took place: God gave the Hebrews His Decalogue, then their man-made legalism swallowed His revealed religion. They gradually embedded His simple revelation-based legal code in an elaborate man-made system of rules and beyond the simple elegance of the Decalogue. For the Hebrew elders were not so much priests as they were judges who ran a theocracy; and the Hebrew system of rituals and rules was not so much a revealed religion as it was a man-made legal system.

At this point it would be helpful for us to distinguish between "religion" and "religiosity." The English word "religion" was derived from the Latin root word "re-ligio", which literally means "to bind back to the ultimate source."
Thus, monotheistic religions should have a firsthand experiential component; they should bind their practitioners back to a personal encounter with the ultimate source, the Living Transcendent God.

However, the Hebrews created a theocratic alliance of religion with the state. In their system, the "ultimate source" was not a transcendental reality but rather the human power to enforce the state's laws. Theocracy invariably destroys religion's spiritual insights by enslaving them to the state's power-driven agenda. Wherever one finds theocracy, one also finds that authentic religion's transcendent truths have been replaced by religiosity's sanctimoniously-hypocritical rules and pietistic rituals. Hence, the correct word to define Hebrew theocracy would have to be "RELIGIOSITY."

Let us now compare the Middle East's three monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity arose in the Jewish cultural context as a REFORM movement: the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Synoptic Gospels clearly superseded Judaism's tribalism, legalism, literalism, and bellicosity. It is noteworthy that the Essenes, who were Judaism's first spiritual radicals, were in significant respects far closer to Jesus Christ's reforms than to Hebrew religiosity. Interestingly, the Templars claimed that Jesus WAS an Essene, as Dan Brown correctly notes in "The DaVinci Code."

Among the three monotheistic religions of the Middle East, only authentic CHRISTIANITY spawned a dynamic "liberal" culture, partly because it was supranational, multicultural and trans-racial. And partly because authentic Christianity asserted that salvation does NOT come from a traditional culture's rigid religiosity (i.e., outward observance of man-made rules and rituals), but rather from one's personal faith-relationship with a loving redeemer God who progressively guides us toward inwardly-real righteousness.

THE MONOTHEISTIC RELIGIONS OF ISLAM AND JUDAISM SHARE FOUR MAJOR FLAWS.

Contrastingly, the other monotheistic religions of the Middle East -- ISLAM AND JUDAISM -- spawned static "traditional" cultures that SHARE FOUR VIRTUALLY-IDENTICAL FLAWS. These flaws render their truth-claims incompatible, and lead directly to their long history of mutual hatred:

1) both are extremely TRIBALISTIC (i.e., their religions are a form of ethnocentric self-celebration because they deem either the Arab tribes or the Hebrew tribes to be God's only "Chosen People", and thus our planet's master race,
who have been charged with redeeming all of human history by either converting everyone who is outside of their tribe or destroying them);

2) both are extremely LEGALISTIC (i.e., their priestly caste does not so much maintain a religion as govern a primitive legal system that consists of manmade rules, rituals, and punishments, and in which righteousness can be obtained
only through one's outward show of pietistic observances, like praying five times daily while facing Mecca, or wearing one's skullcap and phylactery while scrupulously keeping the kosher dietary laws);

3) both are extremely LITERALISTIC (i.e., they believe their tribal God is a stern lawmaker who quite literally bestowed upon them "The World's Only Perfect Culture To Preserve The Eternally-Correct Rules" -- namely, the  Shari'a law and the Mosaic law -- and perpetual custody over "The World's Only Sacred Lands" -- namely, their "Holy Cities" of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, plus "The Land of Milk and Honey"); and

4) both are extremely BELLICOSE (e.g., they contain the intolerant, vindictive, genocidal doctrine of "Holy War" [or "Jihad"], as evidenced by numerous Old Testament passages like Exodus 22:20 ["You must kill those who sacrifice to
or worship another god."], Deuteronomy 13:6-10 ["Kill any friends or family that worship a god that is different than your own."], Deuteronomy 13:12-16 ["Kill all the inhabitants of any city where you find people that worship differently than you."], Deuteronomy 17:2-7 ["Kill everyone who has religious views that are different than your own."], Deuteronomy 17:12-13 ["Kill anyone who refuses to listen to a priest."], Deuteronomy 18:20 ["Kill any false prophets."], and as evidenced by strikingly similar passages in the Qu'ran).

In short, Islam and Judaism are remarkably similar, but ultimately incompatible, because they are both TRIBALISTIC-LEGALISTIC-LITERALISTIC-BELLICOSE RELIGIONS. Their tragic commitment to tribalism destined them, from the very beginning, to engage in the bloody conflict that we are still witnessing today in the Mideast.

THE AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALIST RIGHT HAS BACKSLID INTO THE SAME FLAWS.

Sadly, we have joined them as co-jihadists, and certainly not as peacemakers. By now it is obvious that the driving force that propelled Americans into that bloody conflict was the supposedly "good" Monotheistic Right's backsliding devolution into tribalistic-legalistic-literalistic-bellicose religiosity. Moreover, the Right has revived theocratic "Holy War" (a.k.a. the "Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War"), thus idolatrously transforming our nation and its military into False Messiahs. Meanwhile, the supposedly "evil" Western polytheistic yogis are neither waging aggressive war nor committing massacres, but rather peacefully pursuing transcendental self-realization.

Therefore, when we consider the titular question from the enlightened perspective of comparative religion, we must conclude that that the American Right is dead wrong in its self-serving belief that monotheistic fundamentalism is
"good," whereas polytheistic yoga is "evil" -- that is, unless fascist spin-doctors like Ann Coulter have successfully inverted the original meaning of these words such that "evil is good" and "good is evil."