advertisement

Don't surrender reason to religious extremists

I would like to respond to Robert Clark's Nov. 30 letter titled "Message of religion went off track."

Looking at the history of most religions, one finds an unfortunate record of atrocities. Consider the horrors of the Inquisition in medieval Europe; there was a time when merely questioning the church was to risk being burned at the stake. During World War II, European Christianity had the capacity to stop Nazism before it came to power, and to fight against its genocide, but repeatedly failed to do so because many of the principal churches were complicit with the Nazis in their barbarity. In fact, the Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers bore icons on their uniforms declaring "God is with us."

Jewish and Muslim extremists in Israel claim that certain parcels of land belong to them "because God has decreed so," and the intractability of these positions has continued a downward spiral of violence which has existed for decades.

In our country's history, the Ku Klux Klan used the Bible to justify their hatred against African-Americans. Slavery and generations of abuse were visited upon a large segment of our society simply because of the color of their skin and a twisted reading of scripture.

Terrorists - with God's name upon their lips - flew planes into buildings on 9/11, murdering thousands. And some, like Christian televangelist Pat Robertson, declared that our nation deserved God's punishment for recognizing the rights of homosexuals and atheists under the U.S. Constitution.

Personally, I see no difference between Robertson's words and those of a radical Muslim cleric. When we surrender our capacity for reason to those who claim to speak for an ultimate authority, such as a god, how can we be surprised when the inevitable atrocities occur? History is filled with the results of such irrationality.

Matthew Lowry

Mundelein