The editors of the New York Daily News have reported on “The
boy who believed in a cruel Islam,” which is the title of the piece they wrote
and published on January 25, 2016. The views they express in that editorial
triggered a few thoughts in my head, some of which I discuss below.
As a toddler steeped in Catholic teachings, I learned that
Jesus died on the cross to redeem (racheter in French) me and all human beings
because we collectively committed the original sin of disobeying God even
though we were not with Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit.
As I grew older, it began to dawn on me that Jesus did not
die unexpectedly or by accident. He knew that what he was doing will lead him
to the Calvary . He even dared the Romans to
destroy this temple (his body) because he could rebuild it in three days (his
resurrection). And on the eve of his arrest and crucifixion, he told a disciple
he'll betray him before dawn. So the question that began to haunt me was this:
Did Jesus plan his own death because he had a fanatic love for the human race?
And then, I started to become aware of what was happening in the world; and I
gradually ceased to be surprised.
In the time between my toddler years and the start of the
Korean War, I heard a great deal about the Catholics who were martyred – many
of them willingly – during the hundred-year religious war that raged in Europe between the Catholics and the Protestants. I
wondered if I would have died for the cause had I lived in that era.
Still, I was not surprised to hear that during the Japanese
occupation of China ,
hundreds of unarmed or lightly armed Chinese peasants would storm a Japanese
war vehicle knowing they will be cut by cannon fire and by machine gun bullets before
they could overwhelm the vehicle. The result was that dozens died so that one
or two may reach the Japanese, throw a hand grenade in the vehicle and kill its
occupants. Those were the same Chinese combatants who were now fighting the
Americans and their allies in Korea .
Which cause were these people dying for?
I was not surprised to hear that during World War II,
Japanese pilots, sailors and foot soldiers would go on suicide missions for
what they thought was the debt they owed to their emperor. And I was not
surprised to learn that many people – some of them under-aged – from North
America volunteered to go fight in both World Wars knowing that the odds they
will survive the adventure were near zero. What stories did they hear that lit
up the desire to do what they did?
Beyond that, the more I studied the human condition – be
that in peace time or in wars – the more I became convinced that dying
willingly for a cause is a human trait that's shared by all sorts of religions
and all sorts of persuasions. I concluded that an individual who is motivated
enough to believe in a religious cause or a secular one, is capable of
committing an act of martyrdom. Was this the case of the Masada Jews who
committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans? History is not clear
about this one.
After that, a new phenomenon began to hit the news. Devout
Christians in the Americas
and the Philippines
asked to be crucified at Easter for the love of Jesus. Did these people feel
the pain, or were they sucked so deeply into a religious trance, they became
numb to pain as if they were anesthetized. Would they die for the faith if
asked? And then, the phenomenon of the suicide bomber appeared for the first
time in Sri Lanka , and made
its way to Western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa .
This is why I am not surprised to learn that a teenager who
believed he sinned against God when he raised a hand by mistake, decided to cut
off the hand thus prove he is still devoted to God. He turned out to be a
Pakistani Muslim who says he did not feel the pain, but he could have been a
Christian from the Philippine or the Americas or anywhere else.