Last night I watched the Frontline program Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. It examined the impact 9/11 had on the faith in God of some people when the World Trade Center was destroyed. There are a lot of things I’d like to talk about in relation to that program (there was more doubt than faith even though their on line poll was exactly the opposite) there is one thing that is bothering me. One of the voiceovers said something like “religion drove those airplanes into those towers and for that reason religion should be abandoned.” The voice was angry and passionate.
This is a common cry from atheists. But what of the Holocaust? Millions of Jews and others were exterminated by Hitler in order to “improve” the race. Hitler had taken the theory of evolution to its grisly and horrific extreme end and decided that the right thing to do was to purify the gene pool. He strove for Nietzsche’s Superman ideal. So if the cry to ban religion should be applied fairly, evolution must likewise be banned. What options does that leave us with?
In the end, the Frontline program was all about religion and not about faith. It was about man’s attempt to grasp at God and not about God’s self-revelation. No one asked what God has said about humanity’s evil. No one asked if God is going to do something about the evil in the long run. No one asked if America had even been faithful to what God has said. Only that religion is a bad thing because it leads people to extremes such as flying commercial airliners full of people into buildings filled with people. No one asked what God said about that.
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