I am sick and tired of people the world over using their religion as an excuse for their actions. It just means that their unshaken belief in a supreme being or authority who governs all our lives in some way is used to justify acts which fly in the face of common sense. Please allow me to give you some examples.
George W Bush and the USA
Private Eye has picked up on the tendency of the current President of the United States’s use of God as his justification for his actions, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Take this picture as an example (albeit satirical). Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), a documentary on the 2003 Israeli-Palestinian summit, contains footage of Nabil Shaath, Palestinian foreign minister to Yasser Arafat, who claims that Bush told delegates:
“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”
I agree with Zoe Williams from The Guardian, who suggests that while it doesn’t make sense for God to actually tell Bush to go invade Afghanistan, we cannot dismiss the claims entirely. While I’m not necessarily a Christian, I do feel that – on the basis that our lives would be worth nothing if we just died and faded away to dust, without an after-life to commend what we achieved during our lives – there must be some sort of overseer out there. Anyway, the point is that: we just don’t know.
Nonetheless, why would God rely on Bush to do something like this? Why would Bush say something so profound in its implications, so far-fetched, that doesn’t make sense? Perhaps he is trying to justify his actions, and because there is no justification for the losses of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the military, he is blaming God for it.
Martin Kettle summed up the situation in the USA with regard to their divinity and attitude towards foreign policy in an article published in The Guardian back in November 2004 related to the US presidential elections:
Bush’s apparent acceptance of the view that he may be doing God’s work in the White House … is shared by millions of American conservative evangelical protestants, many of whom believe … that the very existence of the United States is proof of a divine purpose. In that context, the idea that America should reject ties with necessarily less blessed nations becomes existential, an exceptionalism of another order altogether.
Most Americans don’t think in these terms, of course. Yet sufficiently large numbers of them do for their conviction to be massively important, especially when they are so determined and have such powerful armed forces. If you believe that God has a higher purpose for your work, then you bring a special fervour to everything that you do, whether it is re-electing the president, challenging his opponent’s credentials, stopping his voters from voting, challenging their votes or – if by some cruel fate the opponent wins the election – preventing him from governing.
I do have respect for people’s own beliefs, but come on … !
Terrorists
From one extreme to another, terrorists are another example of people using religion as an excuse. A recent example would be that of Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the 7 July bombers, who said in a video released on 2 September 2005, in which he justified his actions as being a protest against the American-Anglo aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine:
I ask you to make du’a [a supplication] to Allah Almighty to accept the work from me and my brothers and enter us into gardens of paradise.
That reference to his religious beliefs is yet another example of how people are justifying unjustifiable acts by referring to an entity that is difficult to identify either physically or mentally. I’m sure that’s not what God intended when he (according to the Bible) created Earth in 7 days and created Adam and Eve.