From the Genocide Blog: Contemplating Peace on Earth

My friend Michelle, author of the Stop Genocide blog, penned a beautiful post tonight titled "Contemplating Peace on Earth." Please read it.

Following is a section of it (as you might imagine, I believe these thoughts apply as much to our violence against nonhumans as they do to our violence against fellow humans):

And yet religion is used everywhere to condone violence and mass atrocity. People-and in my field, violent dictators in particular-wrap themselves in the protective cloak of religion, invoking God's name to justify their actions-as a shield, or a mask, that creates a buffer between them and their destructive agendas, removing, in their minds, individual accountability by transposing it on to the shoulders of the divine.

But the mask is a transparent one. Violence is purely man's work.

I don't claim to know where God is, and I (unlike others) certainly am not arrogant enough to claim to speak on his/her/its behalf, but I cannot believe that the act of senseless slaughter does anything but subvert the principles of any religion on this planet. If there is the hand of a higher power in creation, I cannot believe that creation was divinely destined for self-destruction.

Violence is purely man's work.

Chief among the fallacies implicit in religiously-justified violence is that nothing can be done about it. If this is God's will, well then good luck trying to do anything about it. But while humans have the ability to wreck absolute havoc, to push the extremes of cruelty, we also have the ability to stop it. And yet more often than not, we don't. We find our own reasons-masks, cloaks, degrees of separation between us and those left utterly unprotected against the hand of violence, creating a divide with reasons which, when considering the stakes, ultimately seem meaningless. Yet with this divide, we justify our inaction, we go about our lives, perhaps with an occasional cheer for human rights, perhaps a prayer, and a donation to <insert charity here>.

Now please read the rest of the post.