War And Religon

One of the most disheartening and perplexing admissions that a sincere person of any faith must make is that despite all the good it has done, religion has caused enormous evil in our world. Here are six examples with representative perpetrators and victims:

Ð'* Nigerian Muslims killed over 200 Christians when an article in a Lagos newspaper said that the Prophet Mohammed would have approved of the Miss World contest being held there and might have chosen to marry one of the contestants (December 2002).

Ð'* Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 people in four days at the consecration of a temple in Mexico in 1487.1

Ð'* Baruch Goldstein, an American doctor, entered a mosque in Israel and opened fire with an automatic weapon. He killed 29 Muslims who were at prayer (February 25, 1994). Today some extremists consider him a hero and over 10,000 people have visited his grave which they consider a shrine. A marble plaque above his grave reads, "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel."2

Ð'* Asahara Shoko and the Aum Shinrikyo, a fringe Buddhist sect, killed 12 people and injured 5,000 in the Tokyo subway sarin attack (March 20, 1995).

Ð'* Christians killed thousands in the Crusades and Inquisitions, defended slavery, were at least complicit in the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, and have murdered abortion doctors and gays.

Ð'* In a jungle in Guyana, 914 followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple committed mass suicide (November 18, 1978).

As we can see, whether ancient or modern, violence in the name of religion knows no boundaries and plays no favorites. Widow burning, caste systems, female genital mutilation, witch hunts, ritual abuse, ethnic cleansing, suicide bombers, apartheid Ð'-- the list is depressingly long.3

It is important to make at least four distinctions. First, we should judge religions by their most authentic examples rather than by their worst corruptions. Islam, for example, flourished from Spain to India and led the world in almost every area of human culture until the sixteenth century and later. Or to take another example, Gandhi represents Hindus better than some fanatics in Kashmir do.

Second, we should beware of glaring generalizations. Many overstate the connection between religion and violence, as when Charles Kimball writes that "more evil [has been] perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history."4 Third, at the other extreme, some people deny or ignore the connection between religion and violence. Osama bin Laden punctured the bliss of such an illusion. Religion wields tremendous power, for good and (all must now admit) for ill.

Finally, there is a difference between evil committed by people who happen to be religious and evil promoted in the name of religion. However vicious, the Catholic clergy charged with sexual abuses at least did not justify their actions with religion. Sometimes the connection between religion and violence is tenuous, sometimes it is explicit. It is almost always complex and bound up with other causes (social, historical, economic, cultural, or political), but at the end of the day we must admit that there is far too much violence in the world that is fomented with a specifically religious rationale, motivation, or justification.

Why and how people commit violence and evil in the name of religion might seem inexplicable. At a minimum we should not remain silent when we see religious violence but rather name it for what it is. We can all learn and reflect upon some of the signs that religion has become evil, and evil religious:

Ð'* Fanatical claims of absolute truth. I do not mean here the belief in absolute truths, which I think is tenable. Rather, I mean the doubt-free and uncritical confidence that one has understood such absolute-truth claims absolutely.

Ð'* Blind