Not in God's Name Read Online Free PDF Page B

turbulence and stress it matters very much indeed.
    There is, as I show in chapter 5 , a way of thinking that we can trace back to a set of narratives in the book of Genesis, shared at least loosely by all three faiths. Here is where the problem was born. To ignore these narratives is impossible. But to reinterpret them is very possible indeed. We can go further:
the very texts that lie at the root of the problem, if properly interpreted, can provide a solution
. This, though, will require a radical re-reading of those texts, through an act of deep listening to the pristine voice of monotheism itself.
    Part II is that re-reading. I argue that these narratives are more profound than they have been taken to be, and that much religiously motivated violence throughout the centuries has been the result of a failure to understand these texts in their full depth and challenging complexity. Part III then looks at the other key challenges to Abrahamic monotheism in the global age. What will it take for the children of Abraham – Jews, Christians and Muslims – to live together in peace, and what is at stake if we fail?
    —
    What made this book possible is knowledge of the transformation that has taken place when Jews, Christians and Muslims face one another in their full humanity.
    In the case of Judaism and Christianity it took the Holocaust for this to happen. The result has been dramatic. Today, after an estrangement that lasted almost two millennia, Jews and Christians meet much more often as friends – even (in the word selected by recent popes) ‘brothers’ – than as enemies.
    Likewise with Islam. As I was writing this book an event happened that moved me greatly. On Friday 9 January 2015, an Islamist terrorist entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and killed four Jews buying food for the Sabbath. A Muslim employee, Lassana Bathily, saw what was happening and, out of sight of the gunmen, hid twenty Jewish customers in a cold storage room, saving their lives. Commended for his courage, he replied, ‘We are all brothers. It’s not a question of Jews, Christians or Muslims. We were all in the same boat, we had to help each other to get out of the crisis.’
    Like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani-Muslim girl who fought for women’s rights against the Taliban, surviving an attempted assassination and becoming in 2014 the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize, Lassana is one of the heroes of our time. What they and millions like them represent is the ability to let faith strengthen, not damage, our shared humanity. It sounds simple, but history tells us that it is not. Religious people in the grip of strong emotions – fear, pain, anxiety, confusion, a sense of loss and humiliation – often dehumanise their opponents with devastating results. Faith is God’s call to see his trace in the face of the Other. But that needs a theology of the Other, which is what I offer in this book.
    There is nothing accidental about the spread of radical politicised religion in our time. It came about because of a series of decisions a half-century ago that led to the creation of an entire educational network of schools and seminaries dedicated to the proposition that loving God means hating the enemies of God. The end result has been a flood of chaos, violence and destruction that is drowning the innocent and guilty alike. We now have, with equal seriousness, to educate for peace, forgiveness and love.Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today. That is what this book is about.
    It begins with the simplest of questions: What makes people violent in the first place?

2
Violence and Identity
What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things,