There is no excuse in my mind for terror attacks and religious fanaticism that leads to murdering other people. What these guys did was completely wrong. Violence done in the name of religion is perhaps the worst kind of violence there is. Unfortunately, there is too much of it in the world today.
But not just today. The Canadian event occupying my mind is the miniseries on CBC called “Book of Negroes”. My oldest son and I were background extras when it was filmed in Shelburne last May. I am really looking forward to the brief glimpse of me walking behind Lou Gossett Jr. when he is sitting on a wagon.
“Book of Negroes” is a fictional account of the real-life slave trade in the 1700’s. An organized kidnapping of people in Africa, ripping them from their homeland, bringing them to the New World, where they were bought and sold like property.
For hundreds of years, the slave trade was organized and maintained mainly by white, English-speaking Protestants. Just like me. People who used the Bible to justify stealing people and then thinking they owned them. Saving them, supposedly, from their pagan ways and introducing them to Jesus, at least, some pro-white, racist caricature of Jesus.
People love to point out the violence of the followers of Islam today, but it was not too long ago, in this very part of the world, that white people systematically destroyed people’s entire way of life, and in the name of God. A person can still today see race very much as a dividing issue.
If you read the Word of God without the Spirit of God, you will get humanity at its worst. Slavery, persecution, genocide, First Nation schools, terrorism, segregation, discrimination, and hatred flow from people who believe in a violent God (or no god at all), and will use violence to get their own way too. The Bible just becomes a justification for what they really want to do anyway.
1 John 4:8 says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” If you really believe this, you will reflect it in your relationships with others, who are made in God’s image just as much as you are.