Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Calls for a new holy war are growing louder

Ready for a new Crusade?

There is a rising chorus of voices among evangelical Christians calling for a war against Islam. Not a war against Islamic terrorists or even radical Muslims, but a holy crusade against the second largest religion on the planet.

A few days ago it was Michele Bachmann cheering for a holy war and now an article published in Charisma, a leading evangelical magazine, advocates the violent obliteration of Islam (It has since been taken down by the magazine).

These calls for genocide are appalling to most of us, but when you are convinced God is on your side, anything is possible. Just watch a beheading video, if you can.

It’s the twenty-first century, but we are still victims of our primitive urges, superstition and intense tribalism. My feeling is that as religion becomes less and less relevant in peoples’ lives, as is the current trajectory, those holding the most dogmatic religious views will become more unhinged and dangerous as they strive for relevancy. It’s happening in the Middle East (with America’s help, of course) and it’s happening among conservative Christian enclaves in the West.

The sad reality is that religious extremists, whether Christian or Muslim or Jewish, never see the extremist in the mirror.

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