God Don’t Like Ugly, But I’m Supposed to Believe He Condones Violence in His Name

As a child, I went to church, not frequently, but enough to have an understanding of its importance, at least in the cultural sense. My mother is agnostic/atheist and my father, who grew up Southern Baptist (the Black kind), devoted himself to God in theory, not in action.

One of her sisters and one of his sisters did their best to make sure I wouldn’t grow up to be a heathen; it didn’t work, well, in the long run. When I was in sixth grade, I decided that humans, in all of their fallibility, couldn’t be the best thing the universe had to offer. There had to be more, something righteous and just all the time. This notion sparked my ten-year search for him. I went from being a run-of-the-mill protestant who went to church with friends to a devoted (yet unbaptized) Jehovah’s Witness until, well, I started having sex (later than most) and as much as I tried, I could not feel guilty about sharing myself with someone I cared about. I could not feel guilty about feeling love. My views on religion started to become drastically undone. So many of the questions that I dared to ask — even if just myself — were never answered and the more I went without an answer, the louder the questions became.

One of those questions was, why does a loving and just God condone war?

If you are not aware that there is conflict between Palestine and Israel, then you are surely living under a rock. Since Israel became a nation post World War II, the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, who were living there before the Israelis, has yet to cease, and as of late has only gotten worse. The capital of Israel is Jerusalem, and the area is holy land for Jews, Christians and Muslims, making the real estate that much more in demand. To say that religion is not important in the conflict would be intellectually disingenuous, and somehow, people can look at the bloodshed of others and feel that their god Is justifying it.

One of the questions I had growing up under Christianity was, what was God’s mood? The question was not exactly in those terms but I couldn’t understand when it was appropriate to lead with peace and when was it a ‘time to kill?’ Who gave the orders to shed blood in God’s honor, a just and loving God, I might add. Last week, a 6-year-old Muslim boy living outside of Chicago was stabbed 26 times by his landlord, who also attacked his mother. During the attack, the man screamed, “Muslims must die.” I imagine not only does this man think he is going to heaven but also that God will reward him for his sacrifice. There have been one too many because one is too many images of children’s bodies being used as sacrifices for religious real estate. Many people did not care until reports of those children being Israeli had emerged.

It seems that blood turns redder the whiter the skin from which it emerges.

While my support is with the Palestinian people, it is difficult for me to reconcile that a God who watches this is somehow pleased in any religious context. Many Israelis are clamoring about the injustices done to their people but have had no problem with the unhousing and un-aliving of Palestinians for decades, just for them to have a piece of holy land.

To pray for peace after initiating a war in God’s honor is beyond belief or anything I would want to believe in. It is hard to believe that God condones the murder of children, or anyone for that matter, for a small sliver of land while having given us an entire planet, and if that is the God people choose to believe in, I will happily not worship.

What is this God that they believe in, who don’t like ugly but condones ugliness in his name?