A shopkeeper in Tehran told a reporter she wasn’t a religious person and hadn’t voted in the recent presidential elections, but after watching the beatings in the street first-hand, she was disgusted. They were “beyond belief,” she said (ironic, the words she chose). “They do this under the name of religion," she said. "Which religion allows this?”
When my wife sees something like this she sighs and says, “Poor God. It must make him sad.” And putting aside all the cultural and theological arm wrestling about how you describe your ultimate reality, she’s right.
It’s incredible how subtly I find myself moving people I don’t understand or who make me uncomfortable into a “there’s something wrong with them” category. How uncritically behavior that creeps me out begins to look to me like behavior that “isn’t right,” perhaps even that “should be stopped.”
The Monty Python guys always said, “No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.” But in big and small ways, it keeps happening anyway and, most maddeningly, way too often in some god’s name.
Poor God.
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