God, Religion & War: Man’s Inhumanity to Man

Arriving home from my trip to Ireland, a journey of searching for man’s search for meaning, my search for being, I was totally unprepared for what my Spirit would show me, what would be revealed.

The land is beautiful:  rugged, harsh, gentle, soft, dark, bright, gloomy, and sparkling; a kaleidoscope of everything that the Creator could provide for any one piece of terrain.  What I found, however, was that there appears to be no land that is bereft of inhumanity towards his brothers and neighbours; that generation after generation greed and the lust for power has continued to destroy human dignity, that there is a price on the life of a human being, and that religion has played such a mighty role in the destruction of God’s greatest creation, human kind.

How could he, or whoever it was that chose the word to describe the human, label us “human kind,” when to say so would denote that kindness is the essence of the human – when everything around tells you quite clearly it is an utter lie; in fact it should have been human unkind(ness).

As I travelled through Ireland, a land filled with more churches than there are street corners; a land ravaged with external and internal wars and uprisings, which to this day continue, but not so obvious…yet subtly still there in between the written words of the press, the platforms of the politicians…I was astounded by the stark beauty of this land and more so by how uninhabited it appeared to be.  I was able to travel for miles and miles without seeing one vestige of human existence; mountains, valleys and seaside with no evidence that man had hitherto fore passed by, and yet, I know we have for someone had to carve these roads upon which I travelled.

Ireland has a population of about 6.5 million people.  The city I live in has a population almost the same as the whole of Ireland – Toronto boasts just over 5 million people.

Ireland has travelled the same journeys as so many other countries of this world, and yet until I arrived there and started seeking and reading about the history of Ireland, my knowledge was sorely lacking.  I only knew my grandmmother (on father’s side) was from Ireland and that my father, just before his passing, was glad to have made the trip home to his mother’s land.  I knew of the “Orangemen” – the rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism – that still to this day wages – north against south.  What I did not know, did not realize, was that my grandmother, barely a teen, was  forced to come to North America, not because there wasn’t any food to eat, but because the “non-Irish” who had inherited the land by Government escheat during the great famine of around 1841, well, they would not share with their tenants and the food and other goods that would have saved the Irish, well, they were shipped off to Mother England for the benefit of the English and Scottish peoples.  Meanwhile the Irish were dying in the streets and fields; suffering disease because their bodies were starved of all nutrition that would have enabled them to fight off the attacks of disease.

The churches and the undertakers…they owned the land.  As a child I often pondered the business of the RC church (born into an Irish catholic family as I was).  I use the term “business” purposely, for it did become just that; another money making corporation.  I questioned how a church my parents attended beside their winter residence in Florida could be collecting millions of dollars to build a larger church…just in case it might be needed twenty years from now…and when you drove out of the church parking lot, there were people living and begging on the streets.  I remembered reading about the churches involvement and ownership of land in Mexico and other places, and yet young children, boys and girls, were living on the streets, prostituting themselves to make enough money to live…or, God forbid at such a tender age, to feed a drug habit?

I used to think, “Why doesn’t the church sell all its fancy churches and build homes for the poor, the orphans and the widows?”  After all, is that not what Yahshua (Jesus) was all about and are we not told to feed the widows and take care of the orphans?  So, I thought, what’s wrong with this organization called the Catholic Church?  Why can’t they see and act upon what is needed?

At the airport as I was leaving Cork to return home to Toronto, I picked up a book (didn’t need yet another book on Ireland…my suitcase was already over weight with what I’d purchased) and began reading it; stunned into silence best describes the effect of the intro alone upon me!  It is the true story of a young school teacher and his new bride to be; the hardships of Ireland and how ultimately they were forced by the land barons, their non-Irish landlords, to choose between remaining in Ireland and with certainty dying of starvation or disease, or boarding the “coffin ships” to Canada.

Ultimately this man and his young bride, chose the coffin ships to Canada, mainly because they were strong and wanted to be there to help the others who were more feeble and sickly from the things already suffered in trying to just exist a day at a time.  What really got under my skin is the basis for this book; it not only speaks of the hardships suffered in Ireland, it speaks of the horrors committed on Canadian soil.  One passage brought back memories of what I’ve read and seen on the horrors of Nazi Germany – and it described people pushing wheel barrels of bodies and dumping them on top of others in man dug ditches & grave yards.  And I thought Nazism had the first call on this horrendous treatment of human life; not so.  Long before the war with Nazism, Canadians had carried out the same types of inhuman acts.

God, religion and war; man’s inhumanity to man.  I am forever changed by this one fact and that is that there isn’t a place on planet earth that can boast it has not treated the stranger indifferently or even viciously; has not disrespected and de-valued human life for it’s own selfish, greedy, political and power hungry desires.

In closing I suggest that if we remove religion and return to why we have been created, for “relationship”, first with our Creator and then with each other (ergo the vertical aspect of the cross and the horizontal – first the vertical (me & God), then the horizontal (me & you…human kind) – perhaps then, and only then, will we have some reprieve from the horrors that have preceded us, and sorry to say will likely succeed us.