Murder in the name of God

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
THE Europeans of several nations who splashed ashore in Africa, the Americas, and the islands of the South Seas which included PNG, did so in the age of conquest.
Their thirst for territory and wealth was matched only by their missionary zeal and they wielded both the Bible and the gun interchangeably to turn to God heathen souls and to King and country everything physical. Never mind that there might have been any cultures in place including any forms of worship in these locations prior to their arrival.
This very issue formed a part of the Pan-Amazon synod organised (by Pope Francis) in October 2019.
How will Christianity and in particular the Roman Catholic Church account for the near extirpation of Amazonian or Melanesian cultures including their forms of worship at the hands of European powers? For that matter the cultures and believe systems of all conquered nations of the world?
Pope Benedict was quite clear when the matter was raised in his time in relation to Liberation Theology, which has its origins in the Amazon region and which was conceived there in part because of this issue. Benedict decided that what occurred was a necessary cause of action, although the accompanying violence might be regretted, to introduce God and salvation through Jesus Christ to the region and presumably by extension, all other pagan regions. Pope Francis, who is a citizen of the Amazon, is silent but his opinions might be different. However, we are here concerned with a certain persistent strain associated with the spread of the Christian faith around the world: violence in the name of God.

The hands that are today raised to God in praise and worship are crimsoned, steeped in blood.
From the personal, tribal God of Israel of the Old Testament to the birth and death of Christ and the books concerned with his words and works that comprise the New Testament and the introduction of the Judah Yahweh as the one true God to all nations through the spread of Christianity, killing and murder have never been far from matters of faith.
The very first children of the parents of humanity chose as their first recorded sin, the capital crime of murder in the celebrated case of Cain versus Abel. With that humanity seemed cursed with insane acts of wanton killing in the name of God wherever His name was invoked.
God sent his angels to kill the first born of every Egyptian household in order to release Israel from slavery. Israeli King Herod repeated the same act many years later against Israel itself in order to kill the baby Jesus but he escaped with his parents, seeking safety, ironically, back in Egypt.
Yaweh’s hands razed down the walls of Jericho and His people rushed in and slew every man, woman and child. The sin of the people of this city was occupation of a place promised to another lot. Whether or not the poor residents of Jericho knew they were squatting on somebody else’s land is a question unanswered in the good book.
To bear death meekly, obediently in the name of God has been elevated to sainthood status. Hardly a word has been whispered across the years as to the immense unfairness of all this where the mightiest hand known to man remains disinterested whilst millions who honour It are killed in the most painful and brutal manner imaginable in Its Name.
The Jews, God’s very own chosen people, have suffered some of the worst cruelties imaginable for their belief across the years and it is not yet over. They are persecuted by the very fact of their Judaism.
Christian churches have presided over or allowed barbaric killings and acts in the name of God. Those dishonoured, tortured, or killed on accusation of heresy during the Inquisition which ran across 400 years in Europe has no equal.
The Crusades, run out of Europe ostensibly to liberate the Holy Land, ended up as pillaging, murdering, and plundering expeditions which earned nothing but a bloody reputation added to the name of Christ. No true soldier of Christ would do what these people did.
Slave traders, slave runners and slave owners went to church and prayed to God and his angels who they fiercely believed heard them, they in their white-and-male-only Heaven, and then went home to line up errant slaves and give them the whip to an inch of their lives and if they actually died, they did not warrant a mention.

They saw no evil there.
Often the worst in us hides right behind the best in us. Our tendencies to love can very quickly and at a moment’s notice burst forth in murderous hate. Our hopes for peace is sitting on the same pew as our desire for war.
God cannot exist on Its own if Satan were absent, in matters of our faith that is.
Faith is an emotion. Emotion, by its very nature, is very involving and all encompassing. It tends to run and can burst all strictures, physical or moral, if pushed to the extreme.
I can hear the private cry of real Christians of all colours, races, creed and sexes across the years: “My God, why do you not avenge me? Why do you allow evil to rule untrammelled?”
That too is my cry. And it remains unanswered for me as for everybody else, now as ever.
Evil, including murder, is perpetrated in the name of God and yet It remains, now as ever, aloof to this outrage. Ought it not tell us that perhaps we have got the whole God thing twisted?
It might not be as we believe It to be.