“Religion Causes War and Atrocities”: Response to ‘Religulous,” Part 3
Author: Andy Robbins
Bill Maher of the new movie, Religulous, has pointed to religion as a source of wars and atrocities. I believe he is partially correct. Certain religions have been a source of wars and atrocities. The Jihad (holy war) carried out by Muslims is a great example. The Qur’an (Koran) encourages the slaying of one’s enemies — anyone who does not follow Islam.
Jesus Christ, however, taught to love one’s enemies, to do good to even those who mistreat you, to offer the other cheek to someone who slaps you, and to bless those who curse you. And Jesus commanded that we should treat others the way we ourselves would want to be treated.
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No one, therefore, who has read the Bible or observed the humanitarian efforts carried out by Christians could ever say of Christianity that it has done more harm than good. When you look at the deeds of Christians like Mother Teresa and organizations like Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, and Feed the Children, to name just a few, you begin to get an idea of the compassion for mankind that faith in Jesus has inspired. It would be difficult to count the number of hospitals, orphanages, and schools that have been built with funding by Christian individuals and organizations, not to mention the impoverished that have been fed and clothed, the diseased who have been cared for, addicts who have been ministered to, and the lonely and hurting who have been taken in and nurtured. Society would be much different in a way that you and I would not like if it were not for the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ.
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Yet many atrocities have been committed by those who have abandoned true Biblical Christianity and practiced a perverted form of it by those still claiming to be acting for God. The Bible says of such people that they will get their just rewards in eternity. The early Roman Catholic Church, for example, morphed into an unbiblical monstrosity of historic proportions, which sparked the first Christian Reformation led by Martin Luther and others.
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In more recent times, people like the infamous Jim Jones, and later David Koresh, who claimed to be Jesus Christ Himself, did much damage with their insanities and perversions of Biblical teaching. However, what these people and organizations practiced was not something you will ever find encouraged in the Bible, but were heresies inspired only by their own lust for power and control over people and societies.
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Similarly, people practicing true Biblical Christianity are grieved by the conflicts in Ireland between the people calling themselves Catholics and Protestants. Christianity is not militant. It is peace-loving.
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The Bible says that the fruits of a life truly devoted to Christ will result in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (see Galatians 5:22-23). True Biblical Christianity is a faith that inspires compassion, morality, peace-loving, equality, and justice for all. In fact, it was a black Christian man, a preacher no less, who led perhaps the most historic movement of equality the modern world has ever seen. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by his faith, quoted from the Bible often in his memorable speeches, and ultimately paid the ultimate price for pioneering the kind of equality He saw demonstrated in the pages of his own Bible.
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More than a hundred years before Dr. King was Abraham Lincoln, who was also an outspoken and devoted Christian. It was Lincoln’s own hatred for slavery that led to emancipation for the oppressed negroes of his time, and it was his Biblical convictions that inspired his policies. If you doubt Lincoln’s commitment to Biblical principles influencing his policies, you may be suprised to learn that Lincoln once wrote, “It is the duty of nations as well as men to own their dependence on the overriding power of God… and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proved by all history, that those nations only are blest whose God is the Lord.”
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Shortly before Lincoln was William Wilberforce, a Christian member of British Parliament whose tireless efforts have been credited in almost single-handedly bringing about a ban of slave trading throughout the British Empire.
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The argument by Maher that religion is a source of wars and atrocities also seems to assume that no wars have been fought and no atrocities have ever been committed by those who don’t claim any Christian convictions, which of course is the farthest thing from the truth. All I need to do to prove that is mention the names of a few folks whose stories you might be familiar with: Charles Manson, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, etc. These are people whose hatred for certain groups of humanity led them to commit the most egregious acts in human history. In fact, two of these notorious and sinister figures in particular, Hitler and Stalin, were humanists and whose racism was fueled by their devotion to evolutionary ideas. Hitler’s dream of a perfect race was based in part on his understanding of evolutionary thought, and he reasoned that the German race would have the unhindered opportunity to evolve to a higher state than was ever possible before given the right circumstances where races and people groups that he considered lower forms of humanity (Jews, in particular) were exterminated from the human gene pool. Hitler thought he was doing mankind a favor, and his madness was fueled by ideals that differ starkly from what the Bible teaches.
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To say that religion is the source of wars and atrocities is a sweeping generalization that cannot be fairly applied to Biblical Christianity.
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What about the Crusades then? Okay, let’s talk about the Crusades.
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Pop culture has led us to believe that the Crusades were carried out by ruthless Christians who were carrying out an expansion conquest of Europe. But history tells a very different story. The Christian Crusaders were actually being terrorized in many cases by Muslims who had been persecuting them for years. Under the duress of persecution, the Christians were themselves victims of the expansion conquest being carried out by Muslims through Jihad, or so-called holy war. Thus, the Christians decided to fight back or face possible extermination. The Crusades were actually the only way the early European Christians could save their own lives, but that version of history has been conveniently re-shaped to suite the modern humanist worldview, just as the founding of our country by Christian men and women whose intent was that America be solely a Christian nation has been revised as well.
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If somehow it could someday be proven beyond any doubt that there is no God and that the Bible is a book of myths and fairytales, I don’t think it would be a good idea to let the Christians know that, because so much good for humanity is being carried out by Christians who believe that when they do good to their fellow man, they are following the example of Jesus.
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From time to time I watch Extreme Home Makeover, and one year they went to all 50 states to find selfless families who had let their homes and finances be decimated as they helped others before themselves. It was astonishing to find that almost all of them were Christians.
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So my advice to Maher and to all who share his sentiments is to leave the supposedly delusional Christians alone. It would be a disservice to humanity to discourage us. Since there aren’t any atheist hospitals, orphanages, or humanitarian groups, leave the Christians and Jews alone and let them take care of the world. We are better off for it.