Quizzical graffiti: Fencing with the feebleminded

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Note: This is a rather locally flavored column and not a favorite of mine. But I should own up to it, if I wish at all to supply an example.

It is difficult sometimes not to react to the work of another writer. We usually don't, but, in this case, we'll make an exception.

Whoever it was who scribbled rather messily on the doors of Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, First United Methodist Church and First Baptist Church in downtown Pueblo, Colo., (late May 2004) raised some points that are interesting only because of their familiarity and the lack of deep thinking involved.

Of course, the medium of expression served only a limited goal: Make someone else clean it up. That in itself communicates rather clearly the writer's unwillingness to take responsibility for his or her opinions.

Enough about character. Let's move on to a few of the ideas that were inscribed on Sacred Heart's doors. Item 1: "If it was not for God, we would have nothing to war over" and its companion slogan, "Religion is Genocide."

Let's see if we have this straight. All wars have been fought and genocide has been committed for religious reasons, specifically with God in mind - right?

So we have 6 million Jews falling victim to a program of systematic extermination engineered by a religiously ambiguous Nazi Germany, for their faith as much as for their heritage.

We have atheist Russian Premier Josef Stalin's politically engineered famine that, by some estimates, starved to death 10 million men, women and children in the Ukraine - that being only one example of Stalin's willingness to kill on a large scale for reasons that pointedly excluded God.

And no one knows how many people were represented in the bone piles of atheist Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's "killing fields" in Cambodia. The estimate is only given as more than 1 million.

These are only three examples of mass murder in which the perpetrators either used the name of God only as a handy, little-used excuse rather than a theological basis, in the Nazis' case, or had no use for it at all, as in Stalin's and Pol Pot's pogroms. In fact, with as much bloodshed as can be blamed on religion, killing by the non- and anti-religious historically has more than kept pace.

So it looks like someone's a bit rusty on history, at least, and a far piece off kilter as to cause and effect.

Item 2: "This is not an attack on Catholics - this is an attack on all feable-minded (sic) people who believe without questioning."

How many do you suppose do that? And if you could prove that someone never questioned his or her beliefs, however they were arrived at, why would you attack that person? (By the way, brush up on that spelling. The word is "feebleminded." If you can't spell, you make it hard for people to take you seriously.)

If this is the work of a superior intellect who questions everything religious, he or she is making it too easy. Sure, pick on the feebleminded; they can't fight back.

It is interesting, this persistent notion that if someone believes in God in what we call a fundamental manner, and goes to church and follows the rules (OK, maybe not all of them), then that person must suffer from some mental deficiency or moral cowardice.

Having lived less than half my life as a believer who has spent much time rigorously examining what I believe and why I believe it - and I hate to be too rough, but at least I'm not scribbling it on somebody's door - it is to laugh.

Perhaps the scribbler did not have people like that in mind, but that just brings us back to the question: Why pick on the feebleminded "who believe without questioning" - if there are any? Don't have any arguments fit to present to someone who has run the theological gantlet and come out believing? None that are better than:

Item 3: "Islam = Catholicism = Christianity = nothing"?

Well, evidently, that is not true. Were it so, the Marker Master would have had nothing to scribble about.

And were they all equal, obviously, we would have no basis for difference. Only questionable scholarship by some who study or instruct in comparative religion produces the imagination that all faiths, on basis, are the same.

That, in turn, draws from their ideas about what people want out of faith, rather than examining what the God or gods of their faiths seek to instill in them. The Bible, for its part, has insisted on pointing out such differences, especially in the Old Testament.

And since when has the point had to be made that "Catholicism = Christianity"? That is a head-scratcher.

And we probably should stop there. We would not want to be accused of picking on the feebleminded who believe what they believe without asking the hard questions - and having what it takes to find and accept the answers.
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