Confronted with a huge wave of political refugees from countries shattered with war and terror in the Middle East, many here in the West express their unease with immigration of people who have a different ethnic, cultural and especially religious background. It is in 90% of the European population a fixed idea, that terror by the so-called “Islamic State” or “Al-Kaida” or “Al-Shabab” is a direct result of islamic faith. Being a strict atheist person, I have to reject such ideas. It is a complete ahistoric view to associate islamic faith with a more inhuman attitude than any other religion. If you just go in the history text books back 400 years, you will find that witch-hunting guided by christian priests lead to > 20 000 innocent people burned to death in (the beautiful state of) Bavaria. Simply the longer historical distance should not blur our view, that burning innocent people (blamed as being witches or heretics) to death is not less disgusting and inhuman than decapturing opponents of the IS in Syria or Iraq.
The worst and most influential crime organization, Mafia/Cosa Nostra/NDrageta etc. are devote catholic believers. It might not have reached your attention, that last month the death of one of the Mafias godfathers received a glamorous funeral with catholic priests. Which conclusion you would draw from this ? That by abandoning catholizism you can minimize organized crime ?
Have you ever heard about the support of the Vatican to hide Nazi criminals after WW2, and helping them to escape to South America (so-called “rat path”), where they provided their expertise in torture and killing the opposition to the military dictators ? Does it mean that fighting catholizism is a useful way to prevent political dictatorships ?
Vatican (and its Banco Ambrosiano) was crucial in financing the Italian terror organisation P2, responsible for killing Aldo Moro and placing a bomb that killed >100 people in the Bologna train station. Would you go as far to propose abandoning catholizism in order to fight political terror ?
Religion has to faces: for poor people it is like a drug, like a pain-killer. It might ease their life and prevents them from fighting against the injustice they live in. But at the same time, all religions are prone to got misused by political leaders, criminals, wannabe dictators. Promising them a little share of the power or a little share of the financial gain, it is easy to be granted religious absolution not simply from sins, but from mayor crimes against humanity.
In physics and signaling theory there is a useful method to identify regular pattern in apparently chaotic measurements over time. It is called serial-correlation (or auto-correlation analysis) and it works by overlaying (or logically comparing) a time series of measurements with itself, after applying a continous time shift. If this is done for the last 2000 years of mankinds history, we find that always after +/- thousand years of the formation of a new faith, its representants start to develop a sort of paranoia and want to fight enemies. The christians did this first by starting crusades against muslims and jews in the holy land, and later by punishing and killing thousands of “heretics and witches” in Europe. The Islamic leaders developed the same time of paranoia 700 years later, and now don’t seem to be able to stop the misuse of their faith for extremist violence and religious war.
