A CRISIS OF FAITH

There was this kid. His name was James. I never met him, but he grew up in America in the 1970s and 80s, so there are a few things about him that I can be fairly certain about.  Pretty sure that somewhere in his mom’s house is a picture of him, sitting on the lap of a department store Santa or Easter Bunny, bearing what looks to all the world like a huge grin; although she knows that in reality he was screaming bloody blue murder about five seconds after the picture was taken. He probably went off to college, full of bravado and ready to take on the world, but at least once during those first few days, when no one was looking, he probably hugged himself in his bed and maybe even wept a little because he was realizing that the world is a lot scarier than he realized and he missed the solace of being home. He was from New England, so it’s fairly likely that he at least raised a glass to the Sox when they finally won the World Series.
Then, a couple of days ago, James was forced to kneel next to a thug in black pajamas and recite some vitriol against the United States. At which point, the terrorist, whose face was covered, slit his throat and cut off his head with a huge knife. 
All I can do is imagine this man’s fear and anguish and terror as the last few seconds of his life unfolded. It makes me sick and creates a knot in the pit of my stomach.
We’ve seen it before. Daniel Pearl. Others. We’ll see it again, perhaps over just the next few days.
What’s happened to me, though, is that this latest atrocity, this latest murder most foul, has triggered in me a kind of crisis of faith. But not a crisis in my own faith, but in this “faith” of others. How, I am beginning to wonder, can one of the world’s “great” religions, keep engendering this kind of barbarism? Today, I realized that I do not personally know a single Muslim. I wish I did, because I need someone to sit down and discuss it with. I want to know, how do these events make the ordinary, go-to-Mosque-on-Friday, everyday Muslim feel? Are they Sunni? Are they Shiite? Do they hate the other? Do they hate the infidel? 
It’s all just beyond my comprehension. I try to wrap my brain around it by translating it into terms that I can understand. Can any of us imagine blood running in the streets because the Methodists are at war with the Presbyterians? No. The concept is so absurd as to be laughable. Can we picture an army of Hindu Swamis, blowing up a Buddhist temple in Thailand as “an affront to Hinduism?” 
That’s not to say that other religions are blameless. Christians committed numerous heinous acts of genocide and terror in the name of God during the crusades and the colonization of the New World. They still perpetrate crimes in the name of religion as they murder doctors and women as they exercise their right to choose. But for the most part, we’ve evolved. We’ve grown to see the value in human life, even if it belongs to a human who looks different than us or who prays to a different god. 
So, lately I’ve been having these thoughts. They’re bad thoughts, unpopular thoughts, un-PC thoughts. I see images of men being herded into fields, forced into ditches and massacred; looks no different to me than what happened in the forests of Poland and the Balkans during the 1940s. I hear stories of innocent, ordinary people being given a choice to change their religion (thereby denouncing their own God), leave their homes, or die. Considering that these people have nowhere to go, it’s not much of a choice. And then I feel the pain of another American man, not all that different from me, murdered in the most grisly, horrifying, and public way imaginable. And I can’t help but wonder: is this “religion” really legitimate? I begin to think the words that nobody wants to say out loud. Is this religion really about God and Love at all? Or is it something else, something far worse, something that is, dare I say it, Evil? Where are the millions, billions, of, “righteous” Muslims, who must be appalled by all this hate and violence? Why do they not rise up? 
As I said, unpopular sentiments. Dangerous, even. But these are the things I wonder. Evil does exist in this world. Could it be that one of the greatest “religions” on Earth has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing all along? 
I wish someone could explain it to me.
I know that, in the end, Good will win, Love will prevail. It always does. It has to. I just don’t know how much more of this pain we can inflict on one another in the name of God.