The story of the 27-year-old Afghan woman, Farkhunda, has evoked righteous indignation, though there’s more than a touch of pot-calling-the-kettle-black to this story. The woman objected to a mullah selling talismans and amulets to superstitious Afghans, presumably feeling that profiting from the gullible was questionable behavior for a religious leader.
She had a degree in religious studies, interestingly, so may not been any less knowledgeable about Islam than some charlatan mullah. But she was accused of burning the Koran and of a history of mental illness, possibly by the offended mullah or his stooges. A crowd filled with fury decided she was out of line. Did they call her names, suggest she apologize, take her to court?
No. The mob kicked her, stoned her, beat her with wooden planks, threw her off a roof, ran over her with a car, lit her on fire and threw the burning remains into the Kabul River. That ought to teach her to know her place and please God. Westerners have been filled with holier-than-thou scorn and horror at this medieval barbarism. Even in Afghanistan women have protested the atrocity, and the fact that police stood by and allowed it to happen. In doing so, they argued that Farkhunda was a good Muslim woman so didn’t deserve such treatment.
That seems to suggest that if she hadn’t been a “good” Muslim woman, beating torturing and killing her would have been fine. Again, Westerners are inclined to shake their head at such primitive attitudes. But they might pause a moment to consider the mote in their own eye.
Alas, all religions are primitive and filled with superstition in place of reason. And even lofty and admirable faiths are regularly perverted by their adherents. If there is a God, it is impossible to believe he would approve of the practices his worshipers get up to nor the preaching most of his self-appointed prophets offer up in his name.
You don’t have to go back too many generations to find ancestors behaving pretty much like a Kabul mob. Those New England worthies we celebrate every Thanksgiving soon set up an intolerant theocracy. Native Americans were presumed to be in league with the devil. Puritans killed witches in their midst and hung several Quakers for having the temerity to question their theology.
For hundreds of years Jews have been made to suffer for the alleged crime of killing Jesus and for practicing imaginary blood rites at the expense of Christian children. In fact, they were demonized for having a different belief system. Hindus kill their Muslim neighbors and vice versa. Protestants and Catholics turned the 17th century in Europe onto a vast bloodbath over doctrinal disputes. Farkhunda died not because he wasn’t a believer but because she disagreed with a mullah (and was a woman doing so) on a detail of Islamic practice. It happens every day.
The history of almost every religion is a history of intolerance of any other religion. Popes, the representatives of the Prince of Peace, blithely preached Crusades and sanctioned slaughter on an industrial scale against the heathen. It was God’s will. Jihad is tit-for tat, holy war against the infidel who has attacked Islam. And it, too, is God’s will.
Until quite recently Catholics and Protestants were exterminating each other in Northern Ireland. Evangelicals believe we must support Israel because “the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return” and Armageddon can commence. Devout Christians kill abortion doctors and disrupt the funerals of soldiers to protest gays in the military. God hates them.
Slavery and the Civil War were justified by resort to the Bible, just as 9/11 was justified as righteous destruction of nonbelievers. In Congress, Sen. James Inhofe, tool of big oil, chairman of the Environment Committee and climate change denier, says global warming can’t happen because Genesis 8:22 assures us God has got our back. The earth will be fine no matter what we do to it. The Bible tells him so.
There is nothing that can’t be excused or justified by the religious, by people who believe first and think later. Any atrocity is acceptable when committed against the worshiper of a competing faith or an apostate from one’s own. And when it comes to enforcing orthodoxy, religions are no less zealous or ruthless than totalitarian regimes with their reeducation camps.
Man is fallible and subject to wishful thinking and self-delusion. Reason is not our natural habitat. We are possessed all too easily by monsters from the id, by our dark desires and impulses. The aim of many religions is to tamp them down, to encourage the better angels of our nature. But in practice, many believers and too many preachers use their faith to justify acts antithetical to it – war, cruelty, torture, scapegoating. And it is always God’s will, the infallible, moral get-out-of-jail-free card for the wicked.