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Date Posted: 03:39:19 11/06/02 Wed
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 209.252.119.14
Subject: Why are religions a part of so much murder and hate?

The terrible riddle goes unanswered
Why are religions a part of so much murder and hate?

JAMES A. HAUGHT
Knight Ridder/Tribune

Last month, the Bill Moyers public television agency flew me to New York to join a circle of theologians and scholars discussing a baffling question: Why is religion -- which universally teaches love, forgiveness and brotherhood -- entwined in so much murder and hate around the world?

As cameras rolled, our eight-member group debated for two hours, but found few answers. At the end, we had no solutions. The contradiction can't even be explained, let alone corrected.

My role, as a news editor, was to outline the enormity of the problem, which unfolds day after day in international news reports. My outline went like this:

Since the Cold War ended, most of the horrors around the planet have involved religion, in one way or another. America's Sept. 11 tragedy was a grotesque and spectacular example, but there are many others:

• Muslims and Christians kill each other daily in Sudan.

• Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese kill each other in Sri Lanka.

• Catholics and Protestants still kill each other occasionally in Ulster.

• The tragic civil war that shattered Yugoslavia in the 1990s was between Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars.

• Previously, the main players in the tragic civil war that shattered Lebanon in the 1980s were militias of Maronite Christians, Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Alawite Muslims, Druses, etc.

• India is cursed by recurring bloodshed between Hindus, Muslims and occasionally Sikhs. Three of India's Gandhis -- Mohandas, Indira and Rajiv -- were killed by zealots.

• Muslim fanatics have killed about 100,000 people in Algeria since the early 1990s. True believers shot high school girls in the face for not wearing veils.

• Muslim fanatics killed defenseless tourists in Egypt, plus Coptic Christians. They assassinated President Anwar Sadat.

• Muslims and Christians kill each other sporadically in Nigeria -- and Indonesia -- and Azerbaijan -- and the Philippines, etc.

• On Cyprus, U.N. peacekeeping troops have been holding Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks apart for three decades, lest they slaughter each other.

• The Ayatollah Khomeini created the world's cruelest dictatorship in Iran -- then the Taliban created an even-crueler one in Afghanistan. The theocracies were stunningly evil.

• Fundamentalist extremists occasionally kill doctors and nurses at American abortion clinics.

Cults add to the horror. The Waco cult massacre was somewhat a replay of the Jonestown cult massacre. Supreme Truth cultists planted nerve gas in Tokyo's subway to kill commuters. Baghwan Rajneesh cultists planted salmonella germs in salad bars at Oregon restaurants.

In all these nightmares, it's extremely difficult to determine whether religion is a major cause, or merely a fringe factor. Most religio-ethnic conflicts also involve politics, language, economics, power-grabbing, demagoguery and other elements.

"Religious tribalism" is a phrase sometimes applied to the Catholic-Protestant strife in Ulster. Many of the hate-filled adversaries never attend church -- yet their religious labels pit them against each other. From childhood, each Ulsterite knows who's "the enemy" -- it's the people in the opposing religious neighborhoods. Religion separates them into hostile "tribes."

Actually, religious killing and persecution are as old as history. A pattern can be traced through the era of human sacrifice, the Crusades, the Inquisition, jihads, Reformation wars, pogroms, etc.

Did you know that Catholic-Protestant strife caused a deadly cannon battle in Philadelphia in 1844? Or that Shiite Muslims have massacred thousands of Bahais in Iran since the offshoot religion began? Or that the world's worst religious war, the Taiping Rebellion, killed an estimated 20 million Chinese in the 1850s?

The Bill Moyers discussion is expected to air later this year. But it won't settle anything. All the participants -- Moyers, a Muslim scholar, a Princeton philosopher, three Christian theologians, an international writer and I -- were at a loss to decipher the riddle.

If anyone knows why religion, which espouses kindness, is stained with so much gore, I wish you'd explain it to me.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James A. Haught is editor of The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette and author of "Holy Horrors" and "Holy Hatred," books on religious atrocities and persecution. Write to him at The Charleston Gazette, 1001 Virginia St. E., Charleston, WV 25301. E-mail: haught@wvgazette.com.

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