This will be a short post, but I felt compelled to put something out there given the recent events in Paris and reactions to what is deemed religiously motivated violence in general. I've been reading some comments on news articles (primarily on Facebook), and the top comment on each of these posts seems to be something along the lines of, "religion is the scourge of mankind" or "until we get rid of religion, this will never stop."
As a Christian, I find this extremely frustrating. There's no denying that people have committed heinous crimes claiming to act in the name of religion throughout history. This does not mean, however, that religion is fundamentally bad. Quite the contrary, even for you materialists out there, but that's another issue. It also does not mean that religion is the cause of all of this violence. Such an assumption constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. "Religion" is not the reason people fly planes into skyscrapers, blow up train stations, run amok in newspaper magazine headquarters, or commit mass murder in general. One glance at the twentieth century reveals as much. The Communist regimes of Mao and Stalin that sought to eliminate God from their societies? They murdered around 60 million of their own people. Hitler's Nazi Germany? Let's just say the Holocaust was hardly perpetrated in the name of God. Faith isn't what causes people to do these things. It is a perversion, misappropriation, or exploitation of an ideology that drives people to commit mass murders such as the above. This ideology does not have to be theistic in nature, as Mao, Stalin, and Hitler demonstrate. It also does not have to be related to faith or religious belief, as it is commonly understood. As long as beliefs, opinions, and ideologies of any kind exist - theistic or secular - in other words, as long as humans continue to think, some people will find ways to abuse these ideas and justify committing terrible crimes in their name. No, religion is not the problem. Human nature is the problem. And until we collectively understand that, this oversimplified and endless blaming and maligning of vast collectives of people - which only serves to produce more anger, hostility, and hatred - will unfortunately continue.
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AuthorChristopher is a student in the Ph.D. program in History at the University of North Carolina. He enjoys following sports, going to church on Sundays, and discussing contemporary issues in American society. Archives
Mai 2015
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