The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

I literally cannot comprehend it. It has deeply upset and affected me.

As if it wasn’t bad enough, I now have to listen to extremist groups try and exploit the situation for their own self-serving purposes.

I don’t believe this has anything to do with religion or terrorism.

Those labels are convenient tags used by governments, media and racists.

As I wrote a while back, I am firmly of the opinion that people are inherently good.

That said, I do believe it would help if the millions of good, law-abiding Muslims stood up and said this is not what they – or their religion – condones. That they say they will always warn the authorities about anyone they believe could potentially use their precious faith to justify acts of unspeakable horror.

I know they shouldn’t have to, but if anything, it might help pour cold water on the attempts by the far right to cook up trouble and hatred.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe people are already doing this.

Maybe it would have no affect at all.

I am utterly confused and upset.

While I am not a religious man, I do believe that at it’s core, religion – all religion – is about doing good for humanity rather than harming it, which is why I get upset when people try and use these sorts of incidents to try and present ‘good religion and evil religion’.

The Christian faith in particular – or should I say, certain people within the Christian faith – have a very nasty habit of using these situations to try and make themselves look superior, which is utterly contemptible given they have a history littered with incidents that counter everything they supposedly stand for.

At the end of the day, I just do not believe these acts are done in the name of religion.

I firmly believe the people who undertake these sorts of terrible deeds would do them regardless – using whatever excuse they feel justifies their actions at that particular time.

That said, I do think it’s time we had a calm, honest, non-confrontational debate about why certain people use Islam as their ‘excuse’ for these acts of horror [if only to highlight how that has little to do with it] but then I also believe it’s time we stopped automatically going with the convenient ‘reason’ for these incidents – which admittedly is often provided by the perpetuator – and started looking at the other, potentially bigger, causes.

Social depravation.

Social segregation.

Social isolation.

Social inequality.

While there is nothing good that can come out of the incident of yesterday, there was one thing that gave me faith about humanity – and that was the women who shielded the body of the dead man and challenged the attackers about their actions.

Compassionate, dignified and courageous.

A lesson to us all – regardless of where we come from or what we believe.