By now, the horrific details of the attack on Paris are all over the news, even in self-absorbed United States. I was working yesterday afternoon when the first reports started coming through and throughout the evening, the news grew worse and worse.
This isn’t a post on skin cancer. This is a post on the cancer that seems to ravage the human species. A cancer born of hate, and fanaticism, and power, and a skewed version of a God that is not the benevolent thing in the sky, but an old god that demands blood and sorrow and pain. Before you think this is an attack on Islam, it’s not. Horrific things have been perpetrated on humanity, often the most defenseless, in the name of religion throughout the ages. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism, or pagan beliefs. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the genocides that happen regularly in modern times in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, even the settlement of North and South America by the European nations – all of them have suffering, murder, and pain inflicted on one people over another in the name of a god.
Religion has its place in the world, when it provides comfort and strength in the midst of adversity. Belief in something greater than your own self can allow you to rise above whatever challenges you face and triumph over darkness. The rituals of a weekly service can remind you that need to always strive to become a better person.
But religion can also twist the mind, harden it, become so rigid that it cannot allow you to consider that anyone that does not share your beliefs is a good person. Fundamentalism is a cancer that spreads throughout the human species. It is not just the Muslims who kill in the name of their religion, although the headlines may have you believe otherwise. Religious fanatics all over the world, angered that other people think, believe, behave differently, will kill to sate their righteous anger.
As I woke this morning to the awful, gut wrenching headlines, I couldn’t help but to weep for those people who suffered agony, pain, death because of the inability of the human species to coexist. I wept for the families and friends who spent a harrowing night waiting for news of their loved ones. I wept for the children of this world who yet again learned that the world is a brutal place, and to fear people who don’t look like you, who don’t think like you, who don’t believe the same as you. I wept for this world knowing that until we can learn to celebrate, or at least tolerate, the differences that make each one of a unique and important part of this human species, we will all suffer.