An inset photo of Sayfullah Saipov on the scene of multiple bikes
crushed along a bike path in lower Manhattan in New York City on Oct.
31, 2017. (Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters/ABC).
If there was any comfort to be
had in the wake of the shooting at a Texas church Nov. 5 that killed 26
worshippers, it was that this latest atrocity, coming just a week after
an immigrant from Uzbekistan was charged with running over 20 people on a
crowded Manhattan bicycle path, had nothing to do with ISIS. Recent
history has given us all too many illustrations of the aphorism coined
by
the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and outspoken atheist Steven Weinberg:
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people
can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”
Weinberg, writing two years before the 9/11 attacks,
based his conclusion on evidence that had been accumulating more or less
since the dawn of history, mentioning in particular Frederick
Douglass’s observation that his own situation as a slave “
became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion
that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children
of Ham.” It’s unlikely that anything going on in the world now would
give him reason to change his mind, in a year when terrorists have
struck New York, London and Paris in the name of Islam, while more than a
half-million Muslims have been driven from their homes in Myanmar by
Buddhists.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment