Thoughts on Osama bin Laden

Note: I wrote this a while ago and never published it…

 

I got into a discussion with someone who believes that the war in Afghanistan should go on indefinitely on my Facebook page. He unwittingly proved my point exactly by what he said, though he didn’t know it.

My point was that it is dangerous to go to war in a part of the world in which we do not culturally understand. That most Americans do not understand Islam because they do not have Muslim friends. That this war had created a lot of racial prejudice against Muslims. (You know how everyone was freaking out about whether Obama was a Muslim when it was election time? As if that mattered? So what if he were a Muslim?)

This guy responded that he had read the book: “Understanding Arabs” (a textbook written by an American woman) and therefore he was confident that he understood Muslims.

Of all people, I think Mormons should never say something like that. Because one of our biggest pet peeves is to be told what we believe by non-LDS people. There’s a lot of negative propaganda out about Mormons, and even stuff that is not negative is likely to be inaccurate if not actually written by an active member.

I commented on Youtube on Obama’s speech announcing the death of Osama bin Laden:

“I wish that he would go into more detail about why we are at war in Afghanistan, when Osama was actually in Pakistan, and if he really believes that al Queda can be completely destroyed by a land war there when it exists all over the world.”

Someone responded on Youtube: “You ***** idiot, we’re in Afghanistan to kill terrorists and Muslims in general, are you part of al Queda or something?” And that very response, I’m afraid, is not unusual.

Another Facebook conversation I saw completely justified this war because he believed that this was the war between Good and Evil before the Second Coming as prophesied in Revelations—and the Muslims, of course, were the Evil.

The guy who supports the war in Afghanistan kept referencing Captain Moroni from The Book of Mormon which, to be honest, sickened me.

It sickened me because he was using my religion to justify bloodshed of people he did not know.

That doesn’t seem all that different to me than the group of Muslims who use their religion and the Koran to justify war against the west.

I could have a religious reply, but I really don’t like quoting scriptures back and forth—it reminds me of the amusingly self righteous editorials in the Provo newspaper.

It’s one thing to suggest that maybe—maybe--religiously you are justified to go to war, but unfortunately it seems most religious people don’t suggest it. They are supremely confident that they are correct with the confidence which comes from having God support you—the scriptures say so, or so they believe. This is true of many different sects. Christianity is, it seems, no different.

That saddens me.

Maybe—I don’t know for sure, of course—maybe God doesn’t take sides of wars—maybe God would rather we found another way of working things out than killing each other.

In any event, I wish people would leave religion out of whether we should be at war. Otherwise I could become quite cynical on religion being a negative rather than a positive social force. Because when people are fighting because they believe God wants them to, that’s a very powerful motivation, whether you are Muslim or Christian or Jewish. And that seems to spur fighting on rather than realizing that maybe neither side is “right.”

Anyway, read this article for a Muslim perspective on the killing of Osama bin Laden:

The US Needs to Focus on Not Creating Any More bin Ladens

American Muslim Voice founder Samina Sundas on her reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden