Everybody knows about the troubles in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Somalia... and other member states of the Arab League... and Iran, which is not part of the League... All together, there is a world of hurt for people in those nations; and horrible suffering in other African nations where famine hangs like a plague over whole regions... and now today comes news that a young fellow who graduated from high school just a few years ago just up the road from where I live is the mass murderer in a Colorado theater massacre. The suffering seems unending. The violence is inextricable. Solutions are elusive.  We are left to wonder what is the common thread running through conflicts in all of the world’s troubled places.

I’ve tried to talk myself out of a conclusion that I really would like to avoid... one that  I don’t like; but it’s unavoidable that among all the causes of conflict in communities, from the smallest local cultural group all the way out to the whole world community including all of the almost seven billion of us, religion tops the list of reasons people don’t get along.  It’s difficult to avoid seeing that religion is the obvious common aggravation, the most common cause of dissent, the most common fulcrum on which community loathing and anger become unbalanced and erupt in violence.  How can I forget hearing one of my uncles, now long dead, say that “Niggers are just like mules... They don’t have souls.”  He was someone whose memory I am supposed to honor.   More recently a member of my extended family when asked whether she would rather have a child of hers be gay or dead answered quickly and firmly, “dead.”  My uncle was a deacon in his church.  My relative who would rather see her child dead than gay is active in her church.  I could go on with examples, but that’s not the point of this writing. 

I’ve been wondering, as have most other people of good faith (no reference this time to any organized religion), what might be a logical first step toward a saner, safer world... for everybody.  Outlawing religion was tried by Marxists, and clearly the ideology formed around an idea that “religion is the opiate of the people” was not the answer.  We all know the decades-long soviet disaster that resulted from that idea.  Anti-religion became a religion just as the new atheism for some people has become a religion to be defended. The atheist, like the Hardshell Baptist or fundamentalist Muslim, becomes entrenched in arguments and in defense of an idea to the extent that the denial of ideology becomes ideology.  My blog writing today isn’t a plea for somebody to “gimme that ole-time religion.”  It’s definitely not good enough for me. It is a plea for people who identify themselves as people of faith who are members of an identifiable religious group to ask some serious questions why they cannot get along with other people of faith.