The Value of Religion

Woke up the other day to another shocking news of terrorist acts stemming from religious differences. An innocent British soldier was hacked to death in broad day light by two extremist Muslims who then ranted about their actions and justifying them through their own faith. My heart sank when I read the news and I felt very disturbed by this whole incident for several days.

When I was a kid, I attended an Anglican school and that is where I had my first contact with religion. Religion since then become a blow fly kind of thing that no matter how much you want to avoid it, it just keeps coming back to you. I am not saying that religions and faiths are bad, but I continued to be haunted by what evils this good could bring and had brought to mankind.

As a person belonging to the Christian faith, I still tried to keep an open mind about other faiths and beliefs. My teaching in the faith was about doing good to others and to care for others. At least this is how I understood when I was little. However as I grew up and started to contract the necessary virus called world news, I slowly found out that religion is no longer what I understood. I became less and less constitutional with my faith but focused more on my personal relationship with it. Nonetheless this does not mean that the world had become better. The recent event in London proved that again.

Religion as a uniting force is ironically strongly dividing too. This power, when applied maliciously could do unpredictable damages to others. Further, this power is more destructive then anything racial or geographical because they dealt with the human mind, and the human mind has no limits, no matter what your racial identity is or where you were located geographically. For instance in this cold blooded London attack, one of the attackers was from a devoted Christian family who eventually turned into an extreme Muslim. The whole mind controlling aspect of religion is something that made it so destructive itself. This was well understood by the Chinese government when they cracked down Falun Gong followers years ago.

While people can apply ration and science to disprove the value of religion in mankind, we could not deny that religions and faiths sometimes are beneficial on an individual level. This stands as long as they were not use by people for their personal agendas to achieve other things. It would be unfair for me to point finger at any faith or at any practitioner of any faith, as I do not have sufficient knowledge to make value judgements on them. I personally know a number of Muslim friends who by no means act like what the extremists do. However, when a branch of a faith became extreme, they are usually the loudest and got into the media. This slowly changes other people’s perceptions and eventually these extremists’ versions of the faith become the “faith” itself.

In David Cameron’s speech in response to the attack, I really appreciate that he clearly delineated the attackers’ extremist belief from the general Muslim community. This for me is a sign of clear head leadership for a country. However, sadly this does not help to avoid irrational local attacks on Muslims. Whether these local attacks are genuinely religiously based or just people taking the opportunity to express their other agendas I don’t know, but for sure they are not contributing anything good to the society.

So the question falls back on what good is religion to mankind? If we believe in god, heaven and hell, has actually religion brought hell to earth before we even enter our eternity? For me, the major problem is religion is a lot of time based on written materials that are opened to interpretations. While we have what we called canon interpretations to keep them on the right track, there is no way to stop certain sectors to manipulate these materials to their own accord. As long as this happens there is no way to stop this craziness to continue on earth. Education and understanding is the best way to deal with this mess, but then how could we educate people on this when what religion deals with is something extremely personal? If God is overseeing this world, what kind of price does He wants humanity to pay for this establishment we called religion? I wonder whether I would ever get an answer out of this.