Israel is at war again as another tragic escalation of violence erupts in the Middle East. The terrorist organization Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel targeting civilians and committing horrific atrocities in the process. Israel has responded by essentially saying “the gloves are off” and is now bombing the Gaza Strip – the world’s largest open air prison – including the bombing civilians. As has been reported elsewhere, 50 percent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 18 which means Israeli bombs are going to kill a lot of kids. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a haven of disinformation, bigotry, and hatred as MAGA extremists, including GOP politicians, spread lies about who is to blame. The rapist, serial criminal, and former president Donald Trump continues to stoke the flames with his incendiary rhetoric claiming that he alone can fix this. Bad faith actors are the ones largely to blame for this tragedy and they are dominating this situation, often for religious reasons and it is having terrible consequences.

In 2002, I moved with my family back to the island of Oahu where I had been stationed in the Marines from 1991-1994. My then wife had joined the Army and was commissioned as a chaplain in 2000, and we ended up back in Hawai’i. After our arrival, we met with our former pastor Rick Lazer, who was a Southern Baptist. That day he told us that he had just returned from Israel where he and a delegation of military and political leaders had gone with a particular purpose. “I can’t tell you much about it due to secrecy, but we went to facilitate the rapture.” I was stunned and scared witless because the incredibly spurious theological views of the rapture enthusiasts are utterly bonkers and dangerous. He and his delegation cohorts were literally trying to bring about Armageddon in the mistaken notion that it will make Jesus come back in the so-called Second Coming. Rick and those of his ilk were ill informed bad faith actors then, not caring about anything or anyone except their desired outcome – the rapture – regardless of who would be impacted by it. Over twenty years later there are far too many people like him in positions of power in the U.S. government, be they military personnel like the Flynn brothers, diplomats, members of Congress, or former president Trump. The latter both uses and is used by right wing fundamentalist Christians who believe that by starting World War III in Israel will suddenly make the heavenly trumpets sound signaling the miraculous return of Jesus. It will not.

These fundamentalists do not truly care about Jews or Israel. In fact, they generally think that all Jews will burn in hell for eternity for rejecting Jesus. Their support for Israel is completely about making the rapture happen. Here’s the problem with that line of thought, it’s absolute nonsense driven by terrible, jejune interpretations of the Bible, in particular the Book of Daniel (which has nothing to do with Jesus at all) and the book of Revelation. The latter is quite literally a piece of anti-empire apocalyptic literature that the writer wrote as a response to the abuses of the Roman Empire and how Christians should reject Rome along with its oppressive empire. It has nothing whatsoever to do with predicting events more than two thousand years later and certainly is not to be read as a literal blueprint of “the End Times.” Theologically it does speak to future generations, but only as an instruction against serving a violent empire. Unfortunately, because of fundamentalist Christianity’s misinformed views on the subject, government policies are being made by bad faith actors whose concern is not for the plight of human beings here and now, but with a myth that has zero basis in fact.

That kind of thinking definitely contributed to the formation of the modern state of Israel after World War II. Since that time, hard line Jewish politicians and religious leaders have stoked violence and created conditions of oppression for non-Jews such as Palestinians. Meanwhile, terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, have responded in like manner and predictably enmity, violence, and atrocities have taken place for decades since the formation of Israel. Adding to the complexity has been the governments of so-called Western democracies, in particular the U.S. and U.K., who have at various times played the various sides against one another in order to maintain a position of political power or geopolitical control in a tempestuous region. Now, Russia has entered the picture, as reported by multiple media outlets and journalist Seth Abramson,(1) as it tries to further destabilize the U.S. by any means it can, including supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations. In an ironic twist with terrible implications, the GOP, who often is most loud about its support for Israel, has actively been supporting Russia, and therefore tacitly supporting Russian allies like Hamas. Bad faith actors abound on all sides of this precarious, complex, and catastrophic situation.

All of this highlights the problem with extremism in religion -be it Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. It all highlights the asinine nature of total warfare and using violence as a means to an end. The Hebrew Bible speaks about how violence had become so pervasive that God had to essentially attempt to reset humanity with a flood. The Gospels reveal Jesus as a teacher of peace who refused to retaliate even in the face of Roman brutality and treachery from the elites who benefited from the Roman occupation, and the Qur’an also teaches that its revelation to the Prophet Muhammad was peace, that God is peace, paradise is peace, and peace is how Muslims are to live in this lifetime where in an “ideal community, both non-Muslims and Muslims greet each other with prayers for their peace and well-being.” (2) Thus, it is not religion as such that is the problem, rather it is the misuse of religion by those who choose to be bad faith actors out of a desire to control others, often with violence, in order to bring about a desired end that is often contrary to the core teachings of the faith that fundamentalists of any stripe claim to follow.

The antidote to hatred is love. The antidote to violence is peace. The antidote to religious extremism is the golden rule which is foundational to all major faiths. My prayer is for peace and for all bad faith actors to be exposed and have power peacefully wrested from them in hopes of allowing all people to live in peace. May it be so.

(1) https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/ten-stunning-major-media-revelations

(2) https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2016/08/the-idea-of-peace-in-the-quran/

My latest book: Theological Musings Volume 1