Reflections on Religion and 9/11

Mervyn Claxton

It is not for me to say whether religion (that is to say, the acts committed in the name of religion, since an abstract ideology or belief system cannot in itself produce any concrete effects) has caused more harm than good. I leave such judgements to others who are better informed, or wiser, than I am. It does appears to me, however, that the harm done in the name of religion over the past two centuries has greatly obscured the good done in its name. I am open to correction if my impression is wrong in that respect.  It is true, human nature being what it is, that the good that is done in the world often goes unsung - forgotten, minimized or dismissed as uninteresting - while the bad that is done keeps our attention riveted.

I consider myself a fairly well-informed person but I cannot think of acts committed in the name of religion that outweigh the enormous harm (3000 deaths caused by the events 9/11, or of the 700, 000 deaths caused directly or indirectly in Iraq, as estimated in an article in the Lancet, following an illegal and unjustified invasion ordered by a Born-again Christian president who claimed that he had consulted God on the matter. When asked subsequently if he had consulted his father before ordering the invasion, Bush replied that he had consulted a Higher Father. Similar harm has been done in all continents and in the name of all religions, throughout the ages. But let's take a look at some of the more heinous acts committed in the name of religion in the past two generations. An estimated million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were killed in racial-religious clashes when India was partioned in 1947. A further twelve million people were transformed into refugees forced to flee their homes - Hindus fleeing to India, and Muslims to Pakistan. Both groups fled because they feared being ruled by leaders of the other faith.

The heinous acts committed by extreme Islamists in recent years have been widely reported in the Western press and, thus, they need not detain us here. Rioting Hindus massacred thousands of peaceful Muslims in Gujerat (1992) and Mumbai (2002). An independent group of Indian observers, headed by the former Indian naval chief L Ramdas, reported to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that "genocide" of Muslims took place in Gujarat in 1992 when anti-Muslim Hindus went on a murderous rampage. Their report pithly summed up the harm done in the name of the Hindu religion: "5,000 Muslims killed, 50,000 made homeless, hundreds of mosques, and dozens of hotels, shops, and villages destroyed during riots in the Indian province of Gujarat."

Militant, right wing Israeli Rabbis, who urge the recovery of the West Bank at all costs, were recently revealed to exercise an inordinate influence on the Israeli army through the large number of army recurits who have been indoctrinated by their extremist views. No doubt those soldiers believed that they were doing God's work by acting as they did during the Gaza war, launching phosphorous bombs on civilians, using them as human shields when they entered towns, and killing them indiscriminately, as reported by Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross, and UN personnel present in Gaza.

In Uganda over the past few years, the religiously-motivated rebel group, The Lord's Resistance Army, has killed thousands of people and raped hundreds of women and girls before killing them by crushing their skulls with wooden bats and axes. Every year they abduct or enslave an estimated two thousand children for their army, The group's stated goal is a Christian theocracy whose laws would be based on the Ten Commandments, apparently forgetting that one of those commandments is: "Thou shall not kill." But such hypocrisy and utter disregard for their own avowed religous principles is quite typical of many of those who do harm in the name of religion.

I cite, as another example, the following two paragraphs taken from an article the columnist,  Colbert I. King, which appeared in Washington Post of 12 september. He was  commenting on an incident that was widely reported by the American media:

"On Aug. 16, pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., told his congregation that he prays for the death of President Obama. In a sermon titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama," Anderson preached "I'm not going to pray for his good, I'm going to pray he dies and goes to hell." Anderson is not the only man of the cloth to wish widowhood upon Michelle Obama. In June, the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., said he was praying for the president's death.

Anderson, however, was explicit in his wish "I'd like him to die of natural causes. I don't want him to be a martyr; we don't need another holiday. I'd like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer." The day after Anderson's "I Hate Barack Obama" sermon, Chris Broughton, a member of Anderson's congregation, at Obama's speech in Arizona with an AR-15 and a pistol -- not to harm the president, Broughton said, but to exercise his constitutional right to have weapons."

According to another press report, Pastor Anderson also declared in his sermon (some sermon!): “God Hates Barack Obama, I hate Barack Obama. I hate Him. God wants me to Hate Barack Obama.” Unfortunately, many among the good pastor's flock would probably have believed his statement that God hates Obama, and one or more of them might even take it upon himself (it is always a man, never a woman) to carry out God's wish by attempting to assassinate the President. Imagine the racial riots that such an act would spark, especially if it were successful. The harm caused would be unimaginable and the effects would endure for generations.

But that is not the first or the last time that an American Christian pastor has implicitly called for the murder of another human being, in the name of God. During his daily radio talk show on June 2 last, Pastor Wiley Drake of the First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calififornia called the murder of Dr. George Tiller an answer to his prayer. Tiller was killed while he was serving as an usher in his Church, the previous Sunday. His wife was singing in the choir. Despite many threats, Tiller had remained one of the few doctors in the country who were prepared to conduct legally-permissible late-term abortions). Later that same day, Drake declared that he is also praying "imprecatory prayer" against President Obama. Questioned on Fox Radio about that latter statement, Drake said that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments: "Imprecatory prayer is agreeing with God, and if people don't like that, they need to talk to God. God said it, I didn't. I was just agreeing with God."

I wonder to which God, the two pastors prayed? Was he the "Father" of Jesus Christ who preached "love thy enemy as thyself". Gandhi, a saint in every sense of the word, once said: "There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for." Would that all who claim to act in the name of God adopt that noble sentiment.

There are many unsung priests, pastors, rabbis, imams etc who live their lives acording to "the essential  moral tenets  of Brahman, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad - as distinct from enforced institutionalized forms constructed around their teachings". People like Ghandi, who was a Hindu, do good in the name of religion. So did Mother Theresa, so did Martin Luther King, and so did Dom Helder Camara, Archibishop of Recife. Do their good actions outweigh the harm that has been done, and is still being done, daily, in the name of their God or the spiritaul founder of their faith? Archbishop Camara fell foul of the Vatican because he was putting into practice Christ's teachings about showing compassion towards the poor, the weak, the underprivileged, and the stranger. How does St Theresa's laudable work to ameliorate the existence of the poor in India weigh in the balance against the tens of thousands of lives of Catholic Africans lost through AIDS because of the Vatican's militant campaign against the use of condoms? How does her work and that of other unsung  priests and nuns weigh in the balance against the Vatican's excommunication of a Brazilian woman who had arranged an abortion for her nine-year-old pregnant daughter, after she had been raped by her own step father, the woman's husband, whom the Vatican neither condemned or excommunicated? How does the unreported, unsung good work of priests and nuns weigh in the balance against the refusal of the Pope to condemn the actions of priests in America and elsewhere in the world who have sexually abused large numbers of children over the years, until he was literally forced to do so?

Jesus sought to protect children ("suffer little children to come unto me"). That precept did not seem to be taken to heart either by the Vatican or by America's Religious Right and Christian Republican Congressmen who saw nothing wrong in opposing and vetoing a bill last year to protect underprivileged children by ensuring that they receive the necessary health care. The violence with which both groups, who loudly proclaim their Christian principles to all and sundry, oppose the provision of health care to more than 40  million Americans without medical coverage is most eloquent. It is the more secular Democrats who are, and always have been, supportive of such a measure. Where are the noble principles that Christ espoused?

I end this rather long e-mail with a few verbatim quotations taken from statements made by Mahatma Ganhdi. They are most illuminating:

"I did once seriously think of embracing the Christian faith," Gandhi told Millie Polak, the wife of one of his earliest disciples. "The gentle figure of Christ, so patient, so kind, so loving, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retailate when abused or struck, but to turn the other cheek, I thought it was a beautiful example of the perfect man..."

"The message of Jesus as I understand it, is contained in the Sermon on the Mount unadulterated and taken as a whole....If then I had to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not hesitate to say, 'Oh, yes, I am a Christian.' But negatively I can tell you that in my humble opinion, what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount... I am speaking of the Christian belief, of Christianity as it is understood in the west."

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. If all Christians acted like Christ, the whole world would be Christian."

"If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today."

"I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christs Christianity."

September 13, 2009