Once my dear friend Judy, a nurse, told me a wild story
about a patient suffering from mental illness. After the story I asked her to
explain the behavior. She told me, ‘you can’t make sense of crazy.’
This comes to mind in the aftermath of the barbaric attacks
carried out in France by the Islamic State. There has been much talk about the
role of religion in these attacks and in modern public life, given the caustic
behavior of a few, regarding how religion should be evaluated.
It is important to remember some of these basics that
Episcopalians, and many others adhere to:
1)
We must affirm that religious people obviously
do evil things. There are few motivators that can be as dangerous and deadly as
religious ones. However, it’s all the more important to remember that religion
inspires far more good than evil.
2)
We should never judge a religion by its
extremists. These will always be a minority who will take their religion
superficially and literally, bringing their own motives to the table. Instead
we should judge a religion by its moderates who compose a significant majority.
3)
We must remember that followers of every
religion believe their tradition provides them with a genuine path for truth.
We need to not only respect this, but value every religion that is not our own.
4)
The vast majority of people who hold to
religious beliefs and practices do so to improve themselves and the world
around them. In most cases, religion provides a channel of positive energy and
action in the world.
As long as there is humanity, there will be brokenness. A
small number of us will do despicable things to one another in the name of most
anything. Sometimes the motives will be understandable, many times they will
not. But in these times of pain and chaos, let’s avoid the temptation to
distance ourselves from the very thing God gave us to better cope with them and
to assist the victims: our faith.
