Front Page
Commentary
Letters
Editorial
Feature
Health
Profile
Perspective
Legal
Real Estate
Finance
Africa News
Community
Arts & Entertainment

About Us
Advertising Info
Subscribe
Survey
Chat Room
Bulletin Board
Guest Book


Search

Past Issues

Current Weather
7-day Forecast
Traffic Map

PERVERTING THE SACRED NAME OF GOD

KWADWO KYEI

One of the things that most people seem to have a hard time accepting when it comes to spiritual matters is the religious belief that blood can be spilled in the name of God. It is a very strange belief that runs counter to the very concept of God as an entity of infinite goodness, a Deity who abhors all manner of evil. Unless I am missing something in the Scriptures - and I may very well be - I believe that taking innocent human life is the ultimate evil, and that killing in the name of God is the ultimate contradiction in terms.

Like most people, it is very difficult for me to suscribe to the notion, held by Muslim fanatics who call for Jihad, that the likes of Mohamed Atta, who seize airplanes full of passengers and willfully crash them into public buildings causing thousands of deaths and injuries, are doing God’s work and will be rewarded by Him with a cozy place in Heaven along with an entourage of beautiful virgins. This, in my opinion, is a monstrous perversion of the sacred name of God and a preposterous misrepresentation of what the after-life is all about.

Unfortunately, as incredible as it may sound, the notion of killing in the name of God appears to be shared by certain elements - the lunatic fringe, of course - in nearly every other major organized religion in the world. The sad events of September 11, in which suicidal members of the Islamic faith committed perhaps the most horrific acts of violence ever seen in this nation, were unique in their sheer enormity and calculated brutality, but the mayhem unleashed that day on America by Osama bin Laden’s terrorists was by no means the first of its kind with a religious texture.

From the pro-life Christian vigilantes in the U.S. who kill abortion clinic doctors to the Catholic and Protestant armed sectarian zealots in Northern Ireland who regularly murder each other and innocent citizens as well, from the Serb Eastern Orthodox cutthroats in Bosnia to the Islamic fundamentalist mass murderers in Algeria, one can easily discern a gruesome picture of bloodletting under the banner of religion in various parts of the world encompassing different faiths.

It would be bad enough even if the killings were actually done in the service of God, which the perpetrators claim their violent activities are all about anyway. But there is no evidence that this is even the case. Most of the time the religious extremists kill either to make a political statement or to advance political causes, with precious little thought about God. In Northern Ireland, for instance, Catholics and Protestants die at each other’s hands not because they want to convert each other, but because each side wants to achieve political supremacy over the other.

The same is true of the Christian Serbs in their genocidal warfare against Muslims in the Balkans. And the same, again, is true of the Muslim extremists in Algeria, notorious for their grisly massacres of entire villages in their campaign to create an Islamic theocracy in the North African country - a bloody campaign which may be more of a bid for good old-fashioned political power than an effort to bring about a genuine Islamic super-state based on Sharia Law. Iran, probably the first major modern Muslim nation to embark on such a route, has backtracked significantly over the years, looking more and more secular and increasingly giving the impression that the only thing that changed in that country in 1979 was political power passing from the hands of an absolute monarch into the collective hands of a bunch of authoritarian clerics, who have since altered their austere visions of what an Islamic society should look like.

While the various instances I have alluded to happen to be mostly contemporary cases, the subject under discussion is an ancient one with echoes from the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice of injecting the

sacred name of God into activities that lead to bloodshed and great human suffering goes all the way back to the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago, when the warrrior Roman Popes led legions of Christian soldiers into battle against the Muslims in the Holy Land. The Popes even led military forces against their sectarian rivals in Christendom. Then as now, God’s name was fraudulently invoked in enterprises that entailed the shedding of human blood, which is a spectacle God must certainly frown on.

The not-so-holy tradition continued throughout the ages as European colonizers went into Africa and Asia on their so-called civilizing missions clutching the Holy Bible in one hand, and the gun in the other. To their credit, however, the colonizers accomplished many good things, but they also did a lot of bad things such as waging wars and killing large numbers of the indigenous populations and mistreating them. In South Africa, they created a monument to their religious hypocrisy in the form of the Apartheid system, which literally nullified the status of Africans as human beings. And the Dutch Reformed Church was on hand to dutifully offer the evil racist regime all the moral, spiritual, and even material support it needed!

The social and political history of the U.S. also offers powerful testimony to the misuse of God’s name. What in essence began as a high-minded social experiment based on their Puritan principles with the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 eventually turned into a colossal exercise in hypocrisy. Native Americans wound up losing their lands, their heritage, and came close to extinction, thanks to relentless and ruthless military campaigns carried out against them by the white Christian settlers, suffering almost the same fate as another hapless indigenous people, the aborigines of Australia. Africans were brought over in chains as slaves to be abused and dehumanized by white Christians who failed to recognize the immorality of the institution of slavery as well as its incompatibility with the doctrines espoused by Christ.

Even though a lot has changed in this country for the better with regard to the fortunes of both Native Americans and the descendants of African slaves since the first Pilgrims set foot in New England,

there are still pockets of hate groups in America who proudly march under the banner of Christianity proclaiming the superiority of the white race and vowing to get rid of blacks, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans and, indeed, anyone who differs from them in any way. These groups go by such names as Aryan Nation, National Socialist Workers Party, Ku Klux Klan, as well as a host of other non-pacifist designations; and they all revere the memory of Adolf Hitler, the greatest mass murderer of all time, singing his praises even as they kiss the crucifix.

The perversion of God’s name, whether it is done by Muslim extremist maniacs or Christian fundamentalist screwballs or drug-crazed Neo-Nazi and K.K.K societal misfits who call themselves Christians, or even by ancient papal warlords, needless to say, discredits any religion and tarnishes the image of God. God, as every believer knows, is all goodness and is not in the business of hurting people, which exposes all those who invoke his name to kill or indulge in other violent activities as no more than religious frauds - indeed as no better than your garden-variety criminals who do not stand even a snowball’s chance to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

E-mail: africanspectrum@aol.com

Listen to The Journalist's Soldiers of Fortune CD