Heaven and Earth

    I was surprised at the reaction to the President’s Prayer Meeting comments this past week in which he related some of Christianity’s historic violence to contextualize what is likely an ephemeral eruption of Islamic extremism practiced by a much smaller percentage of that religion’s adherents than once found myriad and diverse cause to purvey violence under the umbrella of the Christian crusades. I thought his contention that bad people often use religion to do bad things, was at worst by turns both apt and innocuous rhetoric.

    The overwhelming masses of self-identifying religious people have always gravitated to the doctrines of peace found in their respective manuscripts, rather than the few spastic calls to violence by God in (his?) fits of pique. It’s just in this age of technology and potent weapons, together with the force magnifier of instant universal media, a few fanatics or frauds, on either side, can parlay acts of barbarism inflicted on a few, or one, into a Potemkin Village of world-wide terror threat in order to serve or advance their respective objectives. If anything, the President may have been attempting to suggest that since the transition from the dark to the enlightened age, rational man’s penchant for religious conversion or acting as realtors for God by way of military conquest, may have assumed  it’s more correct and appropriate aspect as secular ambition which simply employs religion to convince unthinking recruits they are cannon fodder for a “higher purpose”. The peaceful majority of rational humanity has come to understand from reason, and even scripture, that God’s mythical omnipotent lethal capability requires no human agency for His will to be done on earth. If he wants people killed, he is perfectly capable of doing it himself. Thus, by force of historic evidence it appears, as with politics, that all warfare is local, and is empirically entirely terrestrial. So, let’s put this “religious war” stuff to rest.