http://www.the-broadside.com/religionandhate.htm
The long violent history of religion and hate
November 3,
2002
James A. Haught
The Bill Moyers public television agency
flew me to New York to join a
circle of theologians and scholars discussing a
baffling question: Why is
religion - which universally teaches love,
forgiveness and brotherhood -
entwined in so much murder and hate around the
world?
As cameras rolled, our eight-member
group debated for two hours, but found
few answers. At the end, we had no
solutions. The contradiction can't even
be explained, let alone corrected.
My role, as a news editor, was to
outline the enormity of the problem,
which unfolds day after day in
international news reports. My outline went
like this:
Since the Cold War
ended, most of the horrors around the planet have
involved religion, in one
way or another. America's Sept. 11 al-Qaida
tragedy was a grotesque and
spectacular example, but there are many
others:
• Muslims and Christians kill each
other daily in Sudan.
• Hindu Tamils and Buddhist
Sinhalese kill each other in Sri Lanka.
• Catholics and Protestants still
kill each other occasionally in Ulster.
• The tragic civil war that
shattered Yugoslavia in the 1990s was between
Orthodox Christian Serbs,
Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians and
Kosovars.
• Previously, the tragic civil war
that shattered Lebanon in the 1980s
was between militias of Maronite
Christians, Shi'ite Muslims, Sunni
Muslims, Alawite Muslims, Druses, etc.
• India is cursed by recurring
bloodshed between Hindus, Muslims and
occasionally Sikhs. Three of India's
Gandhis - Mohandas, Indira and Rajiv
were killed by zealots.
• Muslim fanatics have killed about
100,000 people in Algeria since the
early 1990s. True believers shot high
school girls in the face for not
wearing veils.
• Muslim fanatics killed
defenseless tourists in Egypt, plus Coptic
Christians. They assassinated
President Anwar Sadat.
• Muslims and Christians kill each
other sporadically in Nigeria, and
Indonesia, and Azerbaijan, and the
Philippines, etc.
• On Cyprus, U.N. peacekeeping
troops have been holding Christian
and Muslim Turks apart for three decades,
lest they slaughter each other.
• The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
created the world's cruelest
dictatorship in Iran - then the Taliban created
an even-crueler one in
Afghanistan. The theocracies were stunningly evil.
•Fundamentalist extremists
occasionally kill doctors and nurses at
American abortion clinics.
Cults add to the horror. The Waco
cult massacre was somewhat a replay of
the Jonestown cult massacre. Supreme
Truth cultists planted nerve gas in
Tokyo's subway to kill commuters. Baghwan
Rajneesh cultists planted
salmonella germs in salad bars at Oregon
restaurants.
In all these nightmares, it's
extremely difficult to determine whether
religion is a major cause, or merely
a fringe factor. Most religio-ethnic
conflicts also involve politics,
language, economics, power-grabbing,
demagoguery and other elements.
For example, Israel's ghastly
conflict is chiefly between Jews and
Muslims, yet it's basically a struggle
for land. (But recruitment of
suicide bombers is easier with the promise that
"martyrs" enjoy heaven
with lovely houri nymphs. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
was assassinated by
a fanatic Jew.)
"Religious tribalism" is a phrase
sometimes applied to the
Catholic-Protestant strife in Ulster. Many of the
hate-filled adversaries
never attend church - yet their family religious
labels pit them against
each other. From childhood, each Ulsterite knows
who's "the enemy" - it's
the people in the opposing religious neighborhoods.
Religion separates
them into hostile "tribes."
Actually, religious killing and
persecution are as old as history. A
pattern can be traced through the era of
human sacrifice, the Crusades,
the Inquisition, jihads, Reformation wars,
pogroms, etc.
Did you know that
Catholic-Protestant strife caused a deadly cannon battle
in Philadelphia in
1844? Or that Shi'ite Muslims have massacred thousands
of Baha'is in Iran
since the offshoot religion began? Or that the world's
worst religious war,
the Taiping Rebellion, killed an estimated 20 million
Chinese in the 1850s?
Don't forget the West Virginia
textbook war in 1974. Fundamentalists
decided that new Kanawha County
schoolbooks were "godless." They held
stormy protests, staged a school
boycott and turned violent. Schools were
dynamited. Two people were shot.
School buses had bullet holes. A preacher
and his followers went to federal
prison. Court testimony said they
discussed wiring dynamite caps into the gas
tanks of cars in which
families drove their children to school, defying the
boycott. Thank
heaven, the militants didn't actually burn kids to death to
prove how
morally superior they were.
When 200 young nightclubbers were
killed in Bali last month, it was
assumed that the bombs were planted by
alcohol-hating, sex-hating,
fun-hating, Islamic extremists.
When Chechnyan militants seized a
Moscow theater in October, they carried
Korans and vowed to become "martyrs"
while killing "infidels."
I won't be surprised if the
Washington-area snipers proclaim that they did
it for God.
The Bill Moyers discussion is
expected to air later this year. But it
won't settle anything. All the
participants - Moyers, a Muslim scholar, a
Princeton philosopher, three
Christian theologians, an international
writer and I - were at a loss to
decipher the riddle.
If anyone knows why religion, which
espouses kindness, is stained with so
much gore, I wish you'd explain it to
me.
God's Favorite Ways To
Kill
Test your knowledge as a Bible Scholar
and/or Christian.
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news1102/carnagequiz.html
