Persecuted Christians

I recently heard a respected priest speak from the pulpit about persecuted Christians being slaughtered in the Middle East, particularly in northern Iraq right now. He prayed that the people would “hold onto their Christian teachings.”

The word slaughter, in this case, means the killing of great numbers of human beings, and from what I hear on the news, it is being done in the most awful ways. People have been killing one another for their religious beliefs for a very long time. The end result of this senselessness is, quite obviously, that there are a lot of dead people. Lives are ruined, families are destroyed, society is harmed, the human race is diminished.

Our response? “Hold onto your Christian teachings?!” Can we do better than that?

It is time for some better advice: STOP KILLING FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS–PERIOD!

Here is some more good advice: DON’T DIE FOR YOUR RELIGION!

THINK!  Religion, in its many different forms, is false. There is no God. There is no evidence of God. When you pray, nothing happens. There are no virgins waiting to have sex with you in heaven. There is no evidence of heaven–or hell for that matter. Your religion isn’t superior to anyone else’s–they all have a false basis.

Here is an excerpt from the Boston Globe (Aug. 16, 2014):

 In a blog post this week, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley asked Catholics around the world to pray for the people of Iraq.

“It is important that we pray for them during this time when so much of the Christian population has been completely displaced and so many people have lost their homes, their families, and even their lives,” he wrote Friday, the same day he celebrated a Mass focused on the Iraqi situation at St. Leonard’s Church in the North End.

Last week, Pope Francis condemned the militants’ campaign against religious minorities, which he said left him “in dismay and disbelief.” In his Sunday blessing, he cited “thousands of people, including many Christians, driven from their homes in a brutal manner; children dying of thirst and hunger in their flight; women kidnapped; people massacred; [and] violence of every kind.

“All this gravely offends God and humanity. Hatred is not to be carried in the name of God,” he added. “War is not to be waged in the name of God.”

Saturday’s Mass in Newton was “a time to give them our support and pray for them and tell them they’re not alone in this country,” said Father Charles J. Higgins of Mary Immaculate of Lourdes, where the Iraqi community often celebrates Mass.

Seriously?! We’re going to pray for them and tell them they’re not alone? Wow, that should help. Prayer makes us feel better about doing nothing.  It doesn’t do a thing for the people being slaughtered. It would be far better to tell them to abandon their false beliefs and seriously deal with the people trying to kill them. Wasting time praying while someone is breaking through your door is just not a good idea.

The real problem is that young people are being taught to intensely believe something that is false. Young people are taking these false beliefs to the extreme and are enforcing what is actually written in their holy book–to kill people who don’t believe as they do.

We try to be so sensitive about people’s religious beliefs so as not to offend them. The price for not offending people is the slaughter of innocent people.

My religion, your religion, their religion–it’s all a load of rubbish. It looks sweet and warm and comfortable, but it’s not. It is ugly–and deadly. The root cause of the slaughter is the rubbish we call religion.

We should be INTOLERANT of religious beliefs that espouse killing. We MUST teach children things that are true. We MUST NOT teach children things that are false. We must become critical thinkers and teach critical thinking so that young people can avoid being brainwashed into doing terrible things.