After the atheist President Macron of France with his usual tact insulted Muslims, several outrageous terrorist attacks have occurred, especially in France and Austria. As a result we hear all the usual: ‘Well, what do you expect from religion, they’re all fanatics. If there was no religion, there wouldn’t be any terrorism. Religion just encourages them’. What do we answer such nonsense?
First of all, religious faith is not responsible for terrorism or any other sort of violence. To this we will hear, ‘What about Charlemagne and the Saxons, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Protestants and the Catholics, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jews and the Catholics? Always at each others’ throats’.
However, in reality, the simple fact is that scoundrels always use the name of God for self-justification. (As, similarly, the writer Samuel Johnson long ago also remarked, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’, not in any way meaning that patriotism is bad, but quite the opposite, that scoundrels use noble patriotism to justify their base actions).
After all, if I want to steal money, conquer territory or plunder oil reserves, murdering millions in the process, I am not going to say that openly, rather I am going to say, like George Bush’, ‘God told me to do it’, or else ‘I am bringing them ‘freedom and democracy’, or else as the Western European imperialists used to say, ‘I am bringing them civilisation’.
In other words, as religious faith is the highest and noblest instinct of mankind, it is always used as a pretext for the lowest and ignoblest actions.
The repulsive Islamist terrorists who murder the innocent do not believe in God. They are atheists, filled with hatred, anger, vengefulness, greed, jealousy and frustration. The same was true of ‘Catholic’ crusaders, inquisitors, Protestant cowboys, Hindu terrorists who murder Christians, Thai Buddhists who murder Muslims etc etc. None of them has any religious faith, just a flag or label, behind which they hide their base motives for organised violence.
Does anyone believe that Napoleon and Hitler were Catholics or that Stalin was Georgian Orthodox? Of course not, they were all persecutors of God and of God’s Creation, ruthless mass murderers, who not only did not believe in God, but espoused atheist ideologies which gave them the logical right or self-justification to murder God and anyone who believed in God.
Today they are no more, but instead we are governed by people who, under-reported, worldwide murder over a million babies a week (1) (about fifty times more than the over-reported death toll of covid-19, which, incidentally, leaves babies and children alive) because these unborn babies are inconvenient. Terrorists and murderers may claim to be Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, but they are not. ‘By their fruits you shall know them’.
Atheism breeds violence.
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