For God's sake, stop violence arising from religious beliefs - Power Plays

Man is certainly stark mad," concluded Michel de Montaigne. "He cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens." And never have any of those gods seemed so far away as they do now. In light (or darkness?) of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the religious warfare in Northern India and the ongoing struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East, how could anyone claim the favor of the Almighty? Frankly, some may begin to doubt that such a being exists.

The Washington Times ran a story on Apr. 11 that detailed how a Hindu sect near Calcutta brutally sacrificed 10 stallions to the god Rama in order to gain his favor. The ceremony, known as "dasaswamedh yajna" (literally, "ceremony of fire and sacrifice of horses"), was attended by at least 10,000 supporters, including several Cabinet Ministers from India's coalition government. The grandmaster of the event, Maharshi Girisurya Swami, made this statement to the assembled masses: "Don't be ignorant and blame poverty, illiteracy, drought and other natural calamities for the backwardness of the state; to be happy and prosperous you need to be blessed by the gods! We have appeased the gods by our ritual and soon we will see peace and prosperity!" Wow. An appropriate follow-up to that statement might be a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."

In many parts of the world-especially the developing nations-religion, ethnicity and class are all tied together, with religion being the most outward manifestation of one's identity. In many societies, religion seems to dictate the schedule of one's life. Individuals use daily rituals such as going regularly to church, praying five times a day at a mosque, or strictly observing the Hebrew Sabbath as a basis for existence, and all seemingly because an ancient book told them so.

In America, Western religions have few holy sites. Only faiths founded in this country, such as the Mormon Church, have claimed any spiritual tie to a spot of land in the United States (along with a handful of back yards and gas stations in New Jersey and Florida where the Virgin Mary has made some cameos). In Europe and the developing world, however, it seems that just about every rock tripped over has intense religious significance to someone who thought it was worth dying (or killing) for. This is compounded by the fact that many holy sites scattered across the globe have simultaneous significance for different faiths-either coincidentally, or on purpose. Take, for example, the fact that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is built upon the site of the Temple of Solomon. This means guaranteed animosity between the faiths involved-all for a plot of land that held some stone tablets at one point, and a (supposedly) floating rock at another. There is also the Church of the Resurrection/Holy Sepulchre-which must go by two names since it is claimed by two different Christian sects; the entire church is divided between the two, down to the tiles on the floor.

The basic point that I'm trying to make is that organized religion-if it's analyzed and viewed objectively-is often nonsensical, perplexing and contradictory; and so many hold it so dear that it's been the cause of human slaughter-and all in the name of God. Case in point: riots erupted in the Indian state of Gujarat when a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindus on their way back from a disputed holy site. The Hindu backlash was inevitable. Time Magazine, in their March 11 issue, ran an article detailing the carnage, entitled "In the Heart of Hate." The opening paragraphs describe in gruesome detail how an 18 year old Muslim girl-seeing her parents and two older brothers beaten, her sisters beaten and raped, and then the lot of them burned alive-escaped with her younger brother to safety. It was only a matter of hours, however, before her Hindu neighbors spotted them and rallied a mob to set the two of them ablaze. In flames, the girl and her brother scaled a wall to escape the mob, but her brother slipped from her grasp, and she watched from the rooftop as the cheering crowd beat him to death and reignited his corpse; again, all in the name of God.

This scene has played itself out time and again over the centuries. And still, people presume to know what God wants. Could it be possible that all He/She/It asks for is peace? Perhaps, but no major religion would say that. There are always stipulations and conditions on that peace, probably because no self-respecting Cardinal Richelieu-style demagogue could get millions of worshippers to follow him if all he offered was peace. If history has taught us anything, it's that any organization needs two things: a goal and an adversary. And that's the great thing about religion-you don't need to prove it's correct! In fact, if you could prove it, it wouldn't be religion-it would be science. Hence, it pits one irrational belief against another, with no hope (prayer?) for resolution.

Now, before an angry mob starts chasing me around campus, let me state that I'm not against religion. However, I would prefer that each of us be allowed, the world over, to seek God in our own way, and form our own personal relationship with whatever we perceive Him/Her/It to be. The essence of this belief should be respect for another's interpretation of that higher power.

I leave you with this thought: what if one day, completely out of the blue, God appears to the world and says: "you know what? You're all morons. All I ask-all I've ever asked-is that you treat each other with decency and respect. But you never quite got it. Each of you was vain enough to presume to know My will. You even started killing each other over it! I never wanted any of this! So I'm packing up my stuff, and I'm leaving to start another universe somewhere else. Goodbye!" And with that, God vanishes, never to return. What would we do then? Would we reevaluate our beliefs? Would we make amends with our fellow man? Would we start senselessly slaughtering any living thing that comes our way? What if we started acting for the good of the world, instead of for the presumed dictates of a presupposed God?... God only knows.