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The God Who Kills Children

What kind of God kills children?

What kind of God asks followers to kill children?

What loving God requires blood?

What being worthy of worship and adoration and obedience, is okay with murdering babies and toddlers and middle schoolers and teenagers—let alone commands such things from the faithful?

As a person of faith for most of my life, I need to confess a worry; a nagging suspicion that grieves me to even consider, but one that is getting more and more difficult to avoid:

I’m terrified that we may be the problem.

I’m worried that the people of God are the evil we’ve been condemning all these years.

Is our religion (for as much we who practice it like to imagine it as the source of love and mercy and compassion) doing more harm here than good? The evidence is mounting.

On days like today, the question comes easily: How does anyone walk into a crowded arena filled with vibrant young people, carrying a bomb filled with nails and detonate it—in the name of God? How does anything beautiful and life-affirming, become this poisoned, this malevolent, this sadistic? How in the hell can this sickness be called religion?

But before you answer; before you rush to craft a response that is faith-specific or nation-specific, or provides you and your tradition exemption—check your history books, read your own holy text, and look at the diverse legacy of those killing in the name of a good and loving God. It is a vast and bloody resume, one that crosses all borders and color lines and religious traditions.

Certainly people kill and wars are waged for all sorts of reasons; control, power, land, wealth—but few things generate terror as consistently or savagely as those convinced they are righteous holy warriors, living with God on their side.

And whether this conviction drives them to wear vest bombs or burn crosses or initiate drone strikes; to bomb clinics or destroy villages or legislate bigotry; to commit genocide or preach hatred from the pulpit or cut budget funding, the brutality is the same. It all violates the world equally, it all draws blood with similar ferocity—and it all rationalizes that God desires and celebrates it. At times like these, I try to rest in the belief that these people have it wrong, and that religion is still at its core a life-giving, redemptive thing.

Yet this is the problem we who believe ourselves to be good, Godly people of all faiths are going to have to wrestle with: Every person who does terrible, vile, violent things in the name of religion—deems themselves good, Godly people as they do these things. They all claim righteousness, all declare themselves the enemy of evil, all feel justified by their texts, all speak of glorifying God—whether they’re walking into crowded arenas filled with children, or launching missiles from thousands of feet, or targeting Transgender teenagers through a partisan House bill. They’re all equally wrong.

And this is why we who believe that God really is love, and that faith truly is a balm for humanity, need to speak most loudly whenever religion of any tradition is wielded like a weapon, whenever God is ever spoken of while violence is committed. We need to be the ones who passionately voice our opposition when any theology is perverted into something that wounds and destroys; who declare this all as the antithesis of religion.

As a Christian, I cling to a Jesus who is mercy and forgiveness and healing and love, though I need to admit that many who follow this very same Jesus, have come to a very different conclusion about what looks like, what it allows them to do here in this world, and that they are capable of truly horrible things in his name.

I am still a person of faith, though it is a struggle in these days to know if that is helpful.

I am someone who holds a deep reverence for all religious traditions—but I will never believe in a God who kills children.

 

 

 

 

 

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