\n\t The headline read \u201cSuicide Attack at Christian Church in Pakistan Kills Dozens.\u201d Another headline read \u201cJews Challenge Rules to Claim Heart of Jerusalem.\u201d Another \u201cGunmen Kill Dozens in Terror Attack at Kenyan Mall.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\t Despite the obvious commonalities, these headlines share three more: all were in the same newspaper, on the same day, same page (New York Times<\/em>, September 22, 2013, page 1. Online edition). And though Jews wanting access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem might hardly seem in the same category as Muslim terrorists shooting up a church, it\u2019s journalistic spreads such as this, and more, that have helped spur the publication of books such as the late Christopher Hitchens\u2019 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n \n\t How fair, though, is that charge? Does religion poison everything? Or just some things?\n<\/p>\n \n\t From Muslims happily blowing up themselves, and others, on an almost daily basis, to Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps and company picketing (\u201cThank God for Dead Soldiers\u201d) military funerals, to the Jewish extremists among West Bank settlers, to pedophile Catholic priests, to violent Hindu nationalists in India\u2014and more, faith in God above can at times seem to help breed nastiness here below.\n<\/p>\n \n\t This is nothing new. A century before Christ, Roman poet Lucretius wrote: \u201cTo such heights of evil are men driven by religion.\u201d In the 1600s French mystic Blaise Pascal famously warned that \u201cmen never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,\u201d an inconvenient truth that\u2019s been confirmed ad nauseam through the millennia. And before we were one percent through the new millennium, the September 11 terrorists\u2014no doubt screaming about how great God was as they vanished into oblivion\u2014gave those who didn\u2019t like religion to begin with all the ammo that they needed to dislike it even more. In fact, the impetus for the so-called New Atheists was, they themselves say, September 11, which is why it\u2019s no coincidence that many of their books (The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, The End of Faith<\/em>, for example) were published after the twin towers went down.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \n\t \u201cMy respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11,\u201d said Richard Dawkins, the grand pooh-bah of the New Atheists. \u201cThe last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the \u2018Day of Prayer\u2019 in the Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\t Dawkins has a point, but only to a point. No question, religion played a key role in the September 11 attacks. Atheists generally don\u2019t, as a rule, fly jetliners filled with people into buildings or strap explosives to their bodies and walk into mosques and blow up themselves and others. Atheists and agnostics will, though, cram men, women, and children into gas chambers, or purposely starve to death entire populations. One doesn\u2019t need religion to commit atrocities, though, no question, it helps.\n<\/p>\n \n\t However much the faithful are loath to admit it, religion has been and still is a source of evil. Whether this evil is a direct result of religions themselves or a human perversion of faith is a complicated question whose answer depends upon a host of other questions, the most relevant being What exactly does the religion teach?\n<\/p>\n \n\t When, for instance, members of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the name of Jesus, massacred Jews in Czarist Russia, it was hardly relevant to those Jews being tortured, raped, and murdered whether or not Jesus or Christianity as a whole condoned such horrific actions. It mattered to the name of the Russian Orthodox Church, or to Christianity, or to the vast majority of Russian Orthodox who never would have partaken in such things and who found them abhorrent. But to the Jews themselves, the victims, that was distinction without a difference, to be sure.\n<\/p>\n \n\t It\u2019s the same with Islam, unquestionably the center of so much of the violence associated with religion today. Even if one doesn\u2019t believe (to quote President George W. Bush) that \u201cIslam is peace\u201d and that Islam \u201cis a faith based upon love, not hate,\u201d the vast majority of Muslims aren\u2019t involved in the violence, and large numbers certainly don\u2019t condone it either. More Muslims are the victims of violence done in the name of Islam than are, it seems, directly involved in perpetrating that violence.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Also, despite such New Testament texts as \u201cLet nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others\u201d (Philippians 2:3, 4) or \u201cTherefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets\u201d(Matthew 7:12), <\/em>history reeks with examples of how that same book has been twisted and perverted by malevolent forces. Whether prelates in Rome using the Bible to incite crusades in the Middle Ages, to nineteenth-century British industrialists citing Scripture\u2019s promises of a better afterlife in order to justify starvation wages now, Christianity has been a fertile source for what Frenchman Michel Foucault called \u201cregimes of truth,\u201d the discourse used by those in power to control the masses. Also, one doesn\u2019t have to be an expert on the Koran or Islam in order to suspect that Muslims who use their faith to justify blowing up other Muslims in mosques have distorted the writings of Muhammad.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Even if one could justifiably argue that these are perversions of the faith, with thousands of sects and cults in existence it\u2019s not unreasonable to think that some might be \u201cbad,\u201d in that they advocate violence and hatred as doctrine. The Charles Manson cult, for instance, committed horrific crimes in hopes of starting a race war between Whites and Blacks in the United States that would usher in Armageddon and in which Manson, the self-proclaimed reincarnation of Jesus, would reign supreme.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Unfortunately, \u201cbad\u201d faith doesn\u2019t always require such aberrant and abhorrent theology. Religion, particularly the Abrahamic faiths, in which a sovereign God reigns supreme over all, can easily be exploited. When a person believes that he or she is doing God\u2019s will\u2014be it liberating the Holy Land from the Turks, to forcing Jews to convert, to flying jetliners into buildings\u2014then what other choice do they have but to obey? As the New Testament says: \u201cWe ought to obey God rather than men\u201d (Acts 5:29), <\/em>an idea that in and of itself is fine but has proven exceedingly problematic, the biggest one perhaps being How do people know for sure what obeying God entails?<\/em> This is not just subtle theology, not considering all the evil done by those certain that they were doing God\u2019s will.\n<\/p>\n \n\t After burning down a Pequot Indian village and massacring its men, women, and children, American colonist Captain John Mason exulted: \u201cWe were like men in a dream; then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongues with singing; thus we may say that the Lord hath done great things for us among the heathen, whereof we are glad. Praise ye the Lord!\u201d This was, one assumes Mason believed, the same Lord who commanded that \u201cyou shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord\u201d (Leviticus 19:18).\n<\/p>\n \n\t Clearly something crucial had gotten lost along the way.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Of course, humans have found plenty of reasons to exploit and kill each other, with or without evoking the name of the Lord. The idea that if, somehow, religion were eradicated humans would stop the violence and killing is wishful thinking, a fairy-tale concept not based on empirical evidence or history. The French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China, and North Korea prove that atheists are just as ready and willing to kill as their pious and praying neighbors are.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Author David Berlinski wrote that during the Holocaust an old Hasidic Jew said to an SS officer, \u201cGod is watching what you are doing\u201d just before the SS man shot him dead. \u201cWhat Hitler did not <\/em>believe,\u201d wrote Berlinski, \u201cand what Stalin did not<\/em> believe and what Mao did not <\/em>believe and what the SS did not<\/em> believe and what the gestapo did not<\/em> believe and what the NKVD did not<\/em> believe and what . . . a thousand party hacks did not <\/em>believe was that God was watching what they were doing.\u201d Berlinski continued: \u201cAs far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.\n<\/p>\n \n\t \u201cThis is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\t Also, however pithy, Stephen Weinberg\u2019s quote about it taking religion to get \u201cgood people to do evil things\u201d is wrong. \u201cGood people\u201d do evil for reasons that have nothing to do with faith. In To Have or Have Not, <\/em>Ernest Hemingway wrote about a boy, a Cuban Communist revolutionary, who declared: \u201cI love my poor country, and I would do anything, anything, to free it from this tyranny we have now. I do things I hate. But I would do things I hate a thousand times more.\u201d Though the quote\u2019s fiction, people don\u2019t need to evoke transcendence in order to get down and dirty here. It\u2019s a very biblical concept: human beings are sinful and will always rationalize evil. And because religion plays such a large role in many lives, it is readily available for those purposes.\n<\/p>\n \n\t Religion doesn\u2019t poison everything; people do. Religion\u2019s simply a handy excuse, that\u2019s all. And, according to the book of Revelation, it will continue to be just that. The book warns about a powerful end-time conglomeration that will enforce religious worship upon the world, and that those who refuse to conform will face persecution. It reads: \u201cHe was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name\u201d <\/em>(Revelation 13:15-17). <\/em>Though a veritable cottage industry has arisen seeking to interpret these texts, the principle is clear: people will continue to do evil in the name of religion. It\u2019s human nature.\n<\/p>\n \n\t One, then, doesn\u2019t need religious faith to do evil. Some, like Hitchens, might even argue that one does not need religious faith to do good even. But in the battle against the darker angels of our nature, religion\u2014faith in a higher power\u2014has the ability to lift humanity to a level of altruism that does not come naturally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The headline read \u201cSuicide Attack at Christian Church in Pakistan Kills Dozens.\u201d Another headline read \u201cJews Challenge Rules to Claim Heart of Jerusalem.\u201d Another \u201cGunmen Kill Dozens in Terror Attack at Kenyan Mall.\u201d Despite the obvious commonalities, these headlines share three more: all were in the same newspaper, on the same day, same page (New<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[297],"tags":[129],"class_list":["post-6247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-january-february-2014","tag-january-february-2014"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} September 11 and Afterward<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Perversion of Faith<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Bad Faith<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Secular Evil<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Sinful Nature<\/strong><\/h2>\n