To the Editor:
I must express disagreement with Mr. Benner’s recent letter. I think he takes religious discourse into very dangerous territory and must be opposed.
Mr. Benner writes, concerning the Boston bombing, “They were Muslims. It shows once again…that we are at war with Islam.” Then he notes that he has no problem with drones killing, “our Muslim foes . . . I feel that the more and quickly that we kill them, the safer we will be.”
Mr. Benner seems to be waving the flag for another crusade here. For religious extremists, the answer has always been to kill those of the other religion; often with little distinction between extremists and moderates. This has never worked, of course, and it won’t work now.
I suggest, rather, a call to reason and education. If religion is a problem, then why try to cure it with more religion?
It has been estimated that there are about 21 “major” religions in the world today, and hundreds of minor ones. Additionally, many of these are subdivided into sects, like Christianity, which has thousands of different sects.
How can so many different religions and sects coexist, all with faithful adherents thinking they have the answers? Only one way; none of them can prove convincingly anything of significance concerning their foundational beliefs. All of their fundamental claims must be taken on faith, or rejected. If they could be proven with testable, convincing facts, then there obviously would be far, far fewer religions.
We don’t have thousands of theories of gravity, or relativity, or quantum mechanics, but we do have thousands of songs and ice cream flavors, but we also understand they’re just matters of taste.
As this data clearly shows, if anyone really has the answers, he can’t prove it. So, should we continue to kill one another over our various interpretations of alleged revelations, knowing that one man’s revelation is the next man’s hearsay and heresy? This is madness.
The ultimate weakness of religion is that it has no reality test. As Greta Christina expressed so brilliantly on her blog, “Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.”
I offer the humble suggestion that we stop killing each other over stuff no one can prove. We can research, write, educate, debate, and scream our heads off, but killing cannot be the answer; and killing in the name of religion is perhaps the ultimate moral perversion.
