As tired as many may be, as ready as many may be, it is difficult to shake the feeling that a misguided, perpetually angry remnant of religious zealots will always exist, eventually rise, and do their best to sabotage what many would consider progress, a path toward peace.
The animosity between Israel and Hamas, between Israel and Hezbollah, between Israel and Iran, for so long seeming intractable and irreconcilable, can only turn a corner if, somehow, religious belief takes a back seat, or if people can be guided by canons within canons of their holy books that speak to peace and love—not hatred and mistrust and retribution and revenge and violence and infidels and unresolved history and endless savagery and all the other unhelpful imagery and messages.
It seems there are enough people who prefer peace to perpetual war, but what keeps them from moving forward is the authority they lend their holy books. It may seem impossibly hard to separate oneself from the holy writ, whether it’s Torah or the Koran, but it’s adherence to and interpretation of these very things that have perpetuated the misery all along the way.
What is so hard about living and letting live? Where people have a homeland in which to live peacefully, practice their religion peacefully, make a life peacefully—with the understanding (and maybe this is the hard part) that the gift is having room to coexist, since God has apparently chosen to speak in different ways to the citizens of Earth.
There is no winning, no best or only religion. People have to come to terms with this, and with the limits of evangelizing and proselytizing. Invitation works better than command. There is something to be said for learning to shake the dust off one’s feet and being able to move on.
There is no significant unity among religions. And if there is something that unites us all, many seem unwilling to invest the time and energy to look for it. It’s easier, or somehow feels more natural, to have a bone to pick.
One might rightfully wonder why a Loving, All-knowing Creator of the Universe would choose to operate this way– where some, many, across faith systems, behave as if they have a corner on perfect knowledge and understanding of what God is trying to tell us.
Frankly, it’s equally easy to get the impression that God doesn’t have it all together yet, and we’ve been suffering because of it. For a very long time.
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