The 9/11 Trilogy - Religion

You know I had to be going here eventually.

The 9/11 attackers were religious zealots of the worst possible kind.  Completely and totally brainwashed into the belief that there will be a fantastic afterlife in the Kingdom of God with 72 virgins.  Or something like that.

Every religion has a spectrum of followers.  I would venture to say that the spectrum even has multiple axes.  You have your devout cotton candy believers who only look at the good and peaceful things in their holy books and conveniently ignore the rest.  You have those that show up once or twice a week (if that) to their designated place of worship, go through the motions, and go home.  Then you have literalistic believers who live their life on every word (usually the violent ones) and want to spread that belief to everyone and everything.  There are other axes as well.  Your holy book of choice has the scriptures in it to defend just about any position you wish to take a stand for.  It is sort of like a 2000 year old horoscope.  You can make just about anything fit if you try.

Islam is very much to blame for the events of 9/11.  Not every Muslim, but their religion, because it has within its belief system the structure that the likes of Osama bin Laden can preach to the cruelty and hatred.

What about the role of religion in recovery process of our nation?  Have Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders done enough to help heal or have they flamed the fires?

I can't help but recall the lyrics to Imagine by John Lennon.  It is amazing to me how many people of faith love this song, because if you really read the lyrics, the message is very anti-religious and unifying.  Below are the first two verses and chorus.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

I, for one, can easily imagine no heaven or hell.  I truly do believe that religion, more than anything our society has ever invented, is responsible for more misery and death.  Defenders of religion say that it is a necessary foundation for moral values, for being good to others.  I don't think so.  If you go and look at many of the isolated tribes of Africa or the Amazon, they live in peace with each other, not because they have some moral framework passed on to them from an imaginary deity, but because it is in their best interest as a tribe, to be kind, loving, and caring to each other.

The Islamic recruiters will zealously use anything that we do as a country to recruit more and more young, gullible minds to their tragic way of thinking.  The irony is that we call upon our Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders here in the United States to stand up for tolerance.  They don't, or very few of them do, and not with a whole lot of voracity in their arguments.  Why is that?  Simple.  Because the fact that all three exists means that someone is wrong.  Maybe even all of them are wrong.  There needs to be a winner.  Islam uses Judaism to incite hatred among their faithful in the Middle East.  The United States supports, without fail, the rights of Israel, therefore, the United States is an enemy.  The Christians are using the acts of Islamic terrorists to show how wonderful and good Christianity is by comparison.  And on and on and on.  It is a vicious circle, with all three Abrahamic religions watching the other, talking tolerance out one side of their mouth while pointing out the evil ways from the other side to show that their way is the right one.  There are no winners.