[symple_box color=”blue” text_align=”left” width=”100%” float=”none”]
Franck Bertrand Ayinda is an African academic and a world peace activist who relentlessly works to empower people to express their full potential and pursue their dreams, regardless of their background. Franck is an Editor at The Moroccan Times, a world traveler and an avid reader of books. Franck’s ultimate dream is to open a world-class human potential development school across Africa. His interest are politics, economics, and social justice.[/symple_box]
The most distorted word and its understanding in most languages (the English language in this case) may be the one spelled G-O-D. It is a word used freely and frequently by hundreds of millions of people who belong to different religious denominations, and even as a curse word by many people.
But how many really understand the meaning behind that word? How many have truly attained the state of consciousness known as God-realization? How many instead use the word to justify various forms of bigotry against those they perceive as non-believers?
As a Catholic devotee (and Islamic pupil and admirer) I have always learned from these tenets the love for God with all your heart, mind, and soul. But also I have learned the love for your neighbor as much as yourself which according to most religious beliefs is the true essence of God. Unfortunately today, I am afraid religion is no longer used to build closeness and spirituality with God. Some “religious people” have used and abused the tenets of their own religious beliefs or its ideological derivatives in the quest for political power to justify dishonest and immoral deeds which contradicts the main principles of what their religion represents.
Certainly throughout history more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion or its ideological derivatives than for any other cause. In this way, organized religion has often made itself repulsive to sensitive souls.
Hector Avalos, in his book “Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence,” published in 2005 argued that because religions claim divine favor for themselves, over and against other groups, this sense of righteousness leads to violence because conflicting claims to superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be adjudicated objectively. His analysis is exactly what explains the current and preceding events of assaults, massacres, or bigotry in the name of religion or God.
The anti-Muslim militias in the Central African Republic, Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army, Boko Haram extremists, Buddhist monks in Burma, Ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, American Evangelical Christian movements in Africa, do not get the same consideration as ISIS, but let’s not fail to recall that these people (and other people) are still doing appalling acts in the name of God.
A recent United Nations report stated that the Christian anti-balaka rebels in Central African Republic had carried out the ethnic purging of republic’s Muslim minority. As countless as 6,000 people had perished in the battle so far, nonetheless such evaluations fail to seize the full scale of the killings that befell. The commission couldn’t determine that there was ethnic cleansing but made it clear that both Séléka (Muslim group) and anti-balaka were liable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Other sources report occurrences of Muslims being cannibalized. The Anti Balaka group had declared this to French media “There are still nine Muslims here. We will capture them. We will kill them. When we finish here, we will go to the next village and kill the Muslims there, too.”
Moreover, The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, a Christian cult that originated in the early 1980’s as the Holy Spirit Movement, commanded by a woman named Alice Lakwena who claimed the Holy Spirit had ordered her to launch a coup d’état against the Ugandan government, which was blamed of treating the Acholi people of the North Uganda dishonorably. As bitterness towards the Ugandan government heaped on, followers flocked to Lakwena and the Holy Spirit movement collected momentum, up until a clash won by the government led to Lakwena’s banishment.
Joseph Kony, took over as leader and renamed the movement in 1986 as the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose declared goal is to apply the Ten Commandants as the law of the republic of Uganda. To that end, the LRA crushed thousands of men, women and children, raped women, and required people into being sex slaves (just like the Islamic State does today in Syria and Iraq) The rebels often covered-up as military soldiers, or took on as villagers assembled together for events such as church services. They propelled brutal attacks, killing the weak and the old with blades, swords or stones, and cutting off people’s ears, lips and noses to serve as a notice to others. These atrocities were perpetuated done over several years since the origin of the LRA.
Furthermore, the hate preached by the American Evangelical Mission in Africa has contributed to the oppression of gay people on the African continent. In Uganda where American evangelical Christian groups are increasingly propagating bigotry, their parliament had just passed a law making homosexuality illegal by death penalty. The Ugandan bill prolonged current laws prohibiting endorsement of homosexuality by talking or writing about it, and compelling people to denounce anyone they know who is gay. But indeed it was foreigners who enthused this bill in the first place. US Christian activists met earlier at a conference in Uganda in 2009 with David Bahati initiator of the anti-gay bill and reverend pastor Martin Sempa, a homophobic, Muslim loathing pastor, where they vowed to “wipe out” homosexuality. The symposium included Scott Lively, president of California’s anti-gay Abiding Truth Ministries and co-author of The Pink Swastika, a book stating that prominent Nazis were gay. Similarly there was Don Schmierer, on the board of Exodus International, which helps the “ex-gay” program, believing people can adjust their sexuality and be saved. The third radical evangelical to be present was Caleb Lee Brundidge, who is connected to Richard Cohen, a man trusting that psychotherapy can “remedy” homosexuality.
But there are exceptions to religious men who support bigotry. Rick Warren, America’s most powerful and influential evangelical preacher released a video statement. He said that “As an American pastor, it is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations, but it is my role to speak out on moral issues,” adding that the bill was “unjust, extreme and un-Christian toward homosexuals.”
Similarly, Jewish antipathy towards Christians is the bigotry no one ever pens about. In December. 29, 1977, Christians in Israel and the occupied areas complained against a new law approved by the Israeli parliament making it prohibited for missionaries to convert Jews. Protestant churches indicted that the law had been “hastily pushed through parliament during the Christmas period when Christians were busily engaged in preparing for and celebrating their major festival.” The law made missionaries liable to five years of incarceration for trying to sway people to change their religion, and three years of detention for any Jew who changed his faith. The United Christian Council protested that the law could be “misused in restricting religious freedom in Israel.” Even so, it came into force on April 1, 1978, barring the gift of “material inducement” for a person to change his religion. A material enticement could be something as negligible as the giving of a Bible. Parliament member Binyamin Halevy had even called Christian evangelists “a cancer in the body of the nation.”
Once more, Boko Haram’s members are known to reference the Islamic verse that states, “Anyone who is not governed by what Allah has revealed is among the transgressors.” This fundamental Jihadi movement has been known for kidnapping the “Chibok girls” in 2014 and the January 7th 2015 Baga massacre. Claiming responsibility for January 7th massacre, Shekau said in a video released on YouTube that “we are the ones who fought the people of Baga, and we have killed them with such a killing as he [God] commanded us in his book.” The consequences of these bigots’ actions? Burning of churches, schools, and mosques. The immediate objective of Boko Haram is to establish strict sharia law in northern Nigeria, where the majority of the population is Muslim.
As a final point, Buddhism has largely absconded trial. This is simply because to much of the world, Buddhism is tantamount with nonviolence and loving kindness, concepts propagated by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, and scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and psychology. But like members of any religion, Buddhists and their holy men are not insusceptible to politics and, on occurrence, the appeal of sectarian chauvinism. The Rohingya people of Myanmar have a very dissimilar judgment of Buddhism. The Rohingya are Muslims who inhabit mostly in Rakhine, in western Myanmar, neighboring Bangladesh. Today, in a nation that is 90 percent Buddhist, there are some eight million Muslims, of whom about one in six is Rohingya. Since 2012, there has been a malicious series of persecutions against the Rohingya. Villages, schools and mosques have been taken on and burned by Buddhist gangs, often assisted by security forces. The anti-Muslim crusade has been led by Buddhist monks, who say their activities are in observance with the demands of their faith.
The 969 movement (an anti-Rohingya organization) leader, a monk named Wirathu, has supposedly called himself the “Burmese Bin Laden.” Muslims, he told an interviewer, “breed quickly and they are very violent.” Because “the Burmese people and the Buddhists are devoured every day,” he argued, “the national religion needs to be protected.” The extremist monk has recommended a “national race protection law” under which a non-Buddhist man desiring to marry a Buddhist woman would have to convert to Buddhism and secure authorization from the state. The proposal has won backing from Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, and can become law by the end of June. Hardly anyone would recommend that there is anything inherent in Buddhism that has led to the maltreatment of Muslims.
The leader of the democracy movement, the Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been disgracefully silent, eager only to denounce violence in general. Members of her National League for Democracy are agreeably involved in extremist anti-Rohingya organizations. It is not that tenets of the Buddhist faith are liable for the persecutions, but that those bent on hostility have put on the garb of religion as a way of acquiring a constituency and vindicating their actions. What is true of Myanmar spreads on to many other wars involving religious groups from Iraq, Israel, Uganda, and Nigeria through the Central African Republic to Burma. The breeding of such viciousness has led many to see religion itself, as the root of war.
Religion does, of course, play a part in these battles, but it would be erroneous to see them as only religious. When groups contending for political power abuse religion, its role is often to create the chauvinist distinctiveness by which other groups are demonized and the acts of one’s own are vindicated.
The anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar may make us doubt our presumptions about Buddhism. It should surely make us question the posture of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, commonly seen in the West as an intrepid warrior for liberty.
While many Western onlookers admit the political roots of Myanmar’s religious violence, it is noteworthy that few are eager to be as nuanced about other clashes involving Islam. Maybe the troubles of the Rohingya will prompt us also to contemplate again about global hostilities where religion plays a part, and will push us to espouse a less black-and-white outlook.
[symple_box color=”blue” text_align=”left” width=”100%” float=”none”]
Franck Bertrand Ayinda is an African academic and a world peace activist who relentlessly works to empower people to express their full potential and pursue their dreams, regardless of their background. Franck is an Editor at The Moroccan Times, a world traveler and an avid reader of books. Franck’s ultimate dream is to open a world-class human potential development school across Africa. His interest are politics, economics, and social justice.[/symple_box]
