What Can We Learn from Terrorists?

I remember seeing an article that I thought sounded ridiculous until I read it The headline was something like "What We Can Learn from People Who Live in a Dump." It turned out these people found in the dump what they needed for shelter and cooking and the scrap they sold to earn an income. Their livelihood was recycling writ large. It was just like the train loads of scrap iron that become new steel or the discarded rock piles reprocessed to ferret out every bit of copper. In the same way countries with no lithium mines will have to learn to make new batteries out of lithium extracted from used items.

     So, what wisdom can we extract from terrorists? They think about God far more than those who say, "I don't believe in God," and those who blithely assume God created each and every full blown plant, animal, and human.

     In his book, The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe recounts an exchange between Charles Darwin and a group of naive students who wanted to know how evolution "got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up -- from what?" One student was not satisfied with Darwin's answer that evolution probably started with "four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere." He asked where the cells came from and who put the cells in the pool. In 1871, Darwin said he didn't know and in 2017, since no one has created even one cell out of nothing and the greatest scientist has discovered what exists rather than created anything, the obvious answer is God.

     In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson expressed the self-evident truth that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The First Amendment of the Constitution went on to guarantee certain rights, including that Congress could not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Through texts, traditions, the words of learned scholars, and the well-formed consciences of individuals, many religious beliefs related to the existence of God have developed. Is He or She? Is God one person, three, or hundreds? Was Jesus God? Did he rise from the dead or was he a hologram, spirit, or frog-like being stimulated by electricity? Are we here to accumulate wealth or to serve the poor, pray, and adore God? Is God vengeful or merciful? Is there life of the body or soul or both after death?

     Where Muslim extremists go off the rails is when they use Allah to justify killing infidels who  hold different religious beliefs. Similarly, pro-life zealots who use their religion to justify killing doctors who perform abortions are also misguided.

      In summary, we can learn two main ideas from terrorists: 1) God is too big a subject to dismiss without study, and 2) religious beliefs do not justify killing those with different religious beliefs.

(See the earlier post, "This We Believe," to learn some of the beliefs of the world's major religions.)