Category Archives: Religion

Christians have never seemed stronger in the United States than they appear today, with fundamentalism entrenched in the marketplace, education, entertainment, and government. But faith appears increasingly fragile.

Many families home-school children using curriculum materials that support biblical truth as opposed to social, historical, or scientific truth. Churches have their own rock music so they can rave without hearing contrary words, and there are Christian romance novels and Christian post-apocalyptic fiction for the young folks so they will not be led astray. Many Christians feel attacked by the mention of evolution, and their faith cannot comfortably coexist with science, other religions, or alternate lifestyles. To preserve their fragile faith, they silence or marginalize — perhaps demonize — people who do not fit their mold.

Human understanding of the universe and of people grows and expands, through human experience, reflection, discovery, and discussion. Such learning threatens the God of fundamentalism, who is changeless and text-bound, too small to contain the whole unfolding universe. So they protest too much and believe too little, and they are stressed-out and fearful, defending their downsized God instead of living in faith and moving forward.

Conflicts today often devolve to a conflict over religion, or at least between two groups committed to different interpretations of God. Both Islam and Christianity claim to be religions of peace, but history does not reveal them to be so. Judaism does not have an imperialist commission to convert people of other faiths and expand their territory, but it too bears historical scars of both oppressed and oppressor.

Yesterday in Egypt, a bomb exploded outside a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, killing several people:

After the explosion, some Christians from the church clashed with police in anger over the blast. The Christians hurled stones at police and a nearby mosque, chanting, “With our blood and soul, we redeem the cross,” the witnesses said. An AP photographer at the scene said the protesters stormed into the mosque, throwing books inside out onto the street. The protest sparked clashes with Muslims, as both sides began throwing stones and bottles at each other in the streets. (The Huffington Post, Maggie Michaell, “Egypt Church Explosion,” 12/31/10)

It is convenient in any conflict to be able to identify the “other person” who is the “enemy” as someone who does not worship the true God, meaning of course the one you worship. It doesn’t even have to be a different God. Arguably the reference “God” in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all refer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The whole problem is that Muslim fundamentalists understand this God one way, Christian fundamentalists understand him another way, and Jewish fundamentalists yet another way. The difference becomes a reason for any group to kill members of the other group, wreck or ban their houses of worship, destroy their books and artifacts, call them infidels, and otherwise treat them in unfriendly and injurious ways.

Through history, most of the world’s large killing sprees have involved Christians, frequently on both sides of the conflict. Muslim fundamentalists have warred against each other and against Christians, earning their reputation as terrorists by striking at civilian targets without warning. It is not as if they were powerless to do better, because they have the same platforms available to other groups from which to negotiate or otherwise present their grievances. Their method is of their own choosing, and they expect that their God will reward them with paradise. Somehow it is not incongruous to think of a Viking soldier believing that his spirit will be borne into Valhalla if he dies in battle, just as it is not incongruous to think that some shepherd on the hills of ancient Rome believed that the sun was Apollo’s chariot racing across the dome of the sky. But in a scientific age it is difficult to think of a modern human with a suicide bomb believing that killing a group of random strangers is his ticket to paradise.

Perhaps it is that religion, which probably should be about how we live, has come to be about how we ought to die for our faith. A martyr earns God’s special favor in paradise and headlines that go around the world to tell people he is a soldier of God, while a person who dies in his bed after a long life of service to fellow human beings gets only his obituary in the local paper for a couple of days and a few family to welcome him on the other side. Or perhaps it is even more simple, and since nobody is actually certain of their own God’s favor, they have to prove themselves right and righteous by proving the other person wrong. If the other person is trampled upon or dead, if the other person’s books and holy artifacts are trashed and his temple destroyed, obviously his God wasn’t as good as the God whose soldier is still standing.

With the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution in our history, it seems likely to me that people could learn to live in peace if we could all manage to quit defending our all-powerful and eternal Gods against attacks by every piddly little infidel that strikes a pose.

The newspaper reported that a third to half of parents at one middle school kept children home on Friday because they were afraid the children would be ritualistically sacrificed by other children who had joined a vampire cult and had to kill to gain immortality. I’m not making that up.

It appears that a girl was suspended recently for stating that she had to kill someone to gain immortality, a startling aspect of a religion that she got from a comic book. The aunt of another student heard about this cult (?), composed the details into a message titled ““Something to PRAY ABOUT!,” and sent it to ten or fifteen of her close friends on Facebook.

Well, the friends passed it on to their friends. They kept their kids home the next morning. Parents who got the message after their children had already gone to school started picking up their kids. The newspaper is unclear about how the school superintendent found out about the panic, but he went to the school personally and sent out a calming e-mail.

You can chuckle over this, but there is a serious issue embedded in this story. It says to me that religion has gotten out of hand. A school is disrupted by rumors of a vampire religion because a child reads a comic book. A relative hears about the cult and leaps to the rescue by requesting prayer on Facebook. What world do these folks live in? They are able to believe that middle school children are joining a vampire cult and planning to kill each other, and they pass around a prayer request on Facebook? In my world, if you think there is a vampire cult that is going to kill your children at school, you really should call the school principal.