Your demons will eventually come back to haunt you.
132 children have been killed in Peshawar. Not in a natural calamity, not of hunger or famine, they died because they were in school and some people decided they deserved to die.
Religion is a very sensitive issue in the world. Today we have more deaths in the name of religious fanaticism, outrages, people willing to take up arms than ever before. Westboro Baptist church took placards saying that American children deserved to die. In our own country, an astounding 561 incidents of communal violence have been reported in which 90 persons have lost their lives. ISIS is terrorising the world, abducting women, beheading journalists, soldiers and selling young girls as sex slaves.
There was a time when people took up arms to defend their country. The world was divided in semantics. People were not only afraid of another community, there was a genuine fear of being completely wiped out, if you did not fight. The war had less to do with religion, more to do with expanding your kingdom. People did not understand the other community, they were much more superstitious. They thought that a shadow of a non-believer will afflict you with small pox.
Today with the advent of internet, we don't have that excuse any more. In the 1940s, when a mad man decided that he was superior and he needed to rule the world, 60 million people were killed, officially. Millions were displaced, more than 250 thousand were wiped out in the deadly atomic bomb strikes in Japan in a counter strike. Today the fear is much more. We know what the enemy thinks, but we don't know what they look like. We don't know who will turn to support them. It may be an IT engineer from Bengaluru, or two students from a small town in US. They all use modern technology and tools to regress the world back to middle ages.
All this because people have started to believe that innocents must be punished in the name of the God? I fail to believe that. These men and women who are waging war are selfish in nature. They don't have a religion, because no religion aids the slaughter of children. They want power. They wield guns and hold it over the heads of defenceless babies because they are megalomaniacs. They use religion as an excuse. This has probably been said too many times on this forum, but maybe it needs to be said one more time—with power.
But the saddest bit is – these people with demonic power are brainwashing others, who are looking to find meaning to their own lacking. The people joining these organisations are either lost in understanding theology, or are suffering from poverty or other problems – hence more vulnerable to feel that someone has to be held responsible, take revenge and pour out their angst in the form of violence. I am not defending these acts of savagery, I am merely trying to speculate what makes these men and women lose their souls.
Revenge begets revenge, it cannot be mistaken for justice. It might well begin with you but it most likely will not end with you. This anger over things we don't understand is a cycle we can't escape from. But if it takes over our humaneness, then civilisation has no meaning.
After destroying an entire country, making their women slaves, burning down villages and towns, attacking other countries, they have now started to destroy another. I want to ask these men, which God, if he exists, will have them in heaven?
As Indians we normally see Pakistan as an adversary, and yet when I heard this news, I couldn't help but ask myself why people put up messages like “it got what it deserved”. I somehow felt that the mad men who destroyed all those families were blind haters with guns. People who make their hatred bigger than the death of these children. When the tragedy of death is not enough to make you question your existence, and it simply makes you laugh at the loss, you have lost what little soul you had in you.
Why are we so full of hatred for other human beings? Why is their religion more important than them being alive? Why is it that we have this superiority complex even though we are still seeking the Gods we are supposed to follow?
And if the Gods these fanatics from all the religions follow make them attack innocent children, I am glad I don't have such cruel Gods. For once I am thankful that I don't have faith in higher powers that allow such savagery.
This article was first published on Zeenews.com
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