I’ve been wondering lately what to do about something that is bugging the hell out of me.  That religion is the cause of much of the suffering in the world is an unavoidable fact, not just an opinion. Since 1969 when my family and I lived in Southeast Asia for four years, I’ve been a regular traveler to places all around the world.  Margaret and I are home again in safe, comfortable San Diego after a short trip to Eastern Europe.  One day on that journey, I sat at lunch with a family in their home in a small Croatian village that was bombed and shelled and burned almost out of existence eighteen years ago.  These friends have rebuilt and started over again after their home and many others were destroyed by repeated bombings and a marauding army.  They are hopeful that they won’t go through another period of loss, but their homeland has seen war after war after war.  The majority (88 percent) of Croatians belong to the Roman Catholic Church.  Their most recent war was with Serbia where the dominant religion is the Serbian Orthodox Church, another Christian religious group, not the Christian against Jew conflict of an earlier time.  In 1941 the Jewish population in Serbia was around 12,000; today only 1,200 Serbs describe themselves as ethnically Jewish.  The Jewish population of Croatia before World War II was 25,000.  Now there are around 3,000 Jews in the country, and most of them live in Zagreb.  Of the 82,500 Jews of Yugoslavia alive in 19041, only 14,000 survived the Holocaust.  More than 68,000 Jews were murdered.  Next door in Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims make up 45 percent of the population; Serbian Orthodox 36 percent; Roman Catholic 15 percent; and other groups 4 percent.  During the Communist period from World War II until 1992, the government disapproved of religion altogether, but religious practice was not strictly forbidden. Even then the various religious groups found reasons to dislike and distrust each other.

In case you are wondering, Hungarians are predominantly Roman Catholic; Romanians and Bulgarians are predominantly Eastern Orthodox.  Fourteen percent of Bulgarians are Muslim.  Three religions - Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism - have coexisted in Kosovo. The large majority of Kosovo Albanians consider themselves to be Muslim.  Of Kosovo Christians, ethnic Serbs consider themselves Orthodox at least nominally, and 60,00 Kosovo citizens are Roman Catholic.

For the purposes of this writing, specific details about religious demography in other countries aren’t necessary to make the point that religion is a problem all over the world.  The shooting in Pakistan of fourteen-year-old Malala Yousufzai by the Taliban got our attention this week. The Taliban is an extremely conservative Muslim minority, and Malala is a devout Muslim who simply wants education to be available for females as well as for males in the beautiful Swat Valley, Pakistan, where she lives.  Next week an equally horrific atrocity may happen in some other part of the world.  The perpetrators may not be Muslim extremists; but they almost certainly will be extremists claiming to represent the true expression of a religion group. 

At what point in my life is it appropriate, or perhaps a moral imperative, to say “enough already... enough with religion...”?  Is it time to try for responsible morality without religion?