The Truth on Religion and Violence

The following is a reply to a young man on social media who was commenting on a post having to do with faith in God.  In the comments, there were a number of posts written by the new atheist type criticizing religion for the violence throughout the world.  Some went so far as to say that religion is the cause of most wars and most of the violence around the world.  Before beginning let me share with the reader that I don’t make any apologies for religion.  When religion does something wrong, it deserves the same criticism as the non-religious.

Let me begin by throwing some mud of my own; have not the ideologies of atheistic communism and liberalism been responsible for killing over two hundred million people since the French revolution?  That is more than all the other wars recorded in history.  If you take out the wars caused by economics and power-hungry kings, how much is left to blame on religion?  The belief that religion is the biggest source of war and violence is an atheist myth and propaganda disseminated by them to prejudice people against religion.

The idea of killing people for abstract ideas and ideology are a modern phenomenon with Muslims being the first to practice it on a large-scale in a religious sense.  Even here there are many scholars who point out that the Muslim faith more like resembles a fascist political system rather than a religion.  However, even if you count it as a religion it is the only major religion which has violence as a part of its core beliefs.  By this, I mean it is the only one whose Scriptures (Koran) preach violence.  The Jewish faith and its scripture in the Old Testament have stories of violence in them, but the violence was directed toward a certain ancient nation that no longer exists.  There is nothing in the Old Testament scripture that would justify Israel today committing violence against another nation or religion  except in self-defense.  The other major religions teach love and peace.

You asked me why God has made it so hard to find him.  I personally don’t think God has made it hard to find him.  I think it is Western culture that has made it tough for people to find him.  For example, a materialistic mindset has hardened the hearts of people in the west making it hard for them to see God.  To experience God it takes time and effort which men in Western culture are no longer willing to do.  They expect to find God the way a person would add up two plus two and get four.  Unfortunately, experiencing God is more different than that.  Finding God comes by way of subtraction, and not addition.

Our spiritual neglect has reached the point that our so-called Christian civilization is no longer Christian.  This hasn’t happened through progress in our education or by growth in our spirituality; it’s happened as a result of total neglect of the spiritual.  We have simply ignored God.  It was not long ago that anyone who was considered an informed person would have a working knowledge about their religion.  Today in general, the educated class is totally ignorant of their culture’s religions.  Two years ago, I was sitting at a table with four or five people with PhD’s.  To my amazement, I found that I could not carry on an intelligent conversation with any of them about religion, philosophy or science.  They were specialists who were only well-versed in their particular field.  When it came to religion, they were as ignorant as children.  Over the years they’re getting to be quite many; I have given numerous books to intellectuals to read on Christianity and to my best recollection not one of them has read the books.  It is people like this that criticize religion on Facebook and other social media.  They are as ignorant as rocks when it comes to religion and yet they parade themselves as knowledgeable.

You see, the rejection of religion is not a problem of the intellect.  It is a problem of the will or appetite.  All this intellectual crap that they parade before the world is just a smokescreen to cover up their indifference and bias towards religion.  It is all done to save the appearance that they are honest and sincere.  They fail to accept that the basic condition of mankind is one of ignorance, sinfulness and hypocrisy.  Their arrogance blinds them to God and it justifies God for turning them over to themselves.  They have forgotten God and God has turned them over to be the play thing of their own disgusting selves.

Secular people have even rewritten history exaggerating the depravity of the Greeks and Romans only to justify themselves.  We are in many ways the most depraved generation of humanity that has ever lived.  As the Scriptures say, “there is no one righteous, no not one; there is no one who seeks God.”  As a result the end of western civilization is near. Metaphorically, we are living out the story of Lot in Sodom.

Let me recommend a couple of authors; Joseph Peterson is excellent and can be watched on YouTube.  C.S. Lewis is still relative and is a good place to start for someone who is seeking God.  Start with his book ‘Mere Christianity’.  He is English and I find it easier to listen to him on tape or an audio book, than by reading him.  You can get his book and more on YouTube.