...grieving over the loss of our humanity.

I’m sure I’m experiencing what billions of others have experienced. Grief. Sadness. I pick up my NY Times and on the front I see a photo of Iraqis mourning over the corpses of their loved ones. Senseless deaths, which makes death even worse. Grieving even harder. So many deaths in the name of religion. Religious strife. People that can’t get along with each other. Yes, because of religious differences. Not only political and economic and social differences – but because their god tells them they’re supposed to go on killing crusades. Hateful crusades. I just don’t get it. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty, religion is at the core of man’s inhumanity to mankind. We want everybody to be a Christian. Or everybody to be a Muslim. Of one faith. Only one faith. On and on it goes. No tolerance. No love for anyone other than those who are carbon copies of us. Only those who think exactly like us. Really, we want to turn the world into a mass of spiritual robots. People who worship one god, one way. By a hard set of rules. We don’t want multiple approaches. We don’t want acceptance of dissenters. There are so many ways to live and let live and to be kind and accepting of others. But that’s not good enough, is it? We want one way. Our way. The orthodox, organized way. The Christian way. The Muslim way. One or the other. But not both ways. We have masses and masses and hordes and hordes of people telling us their way is the only way to salvation, to peace, and to harmony. And that means we all have to march in lock-step and become robots. Christian robots. Muslim robots. We’re locked in a pitched battle. And we delight in killing each other. In the name of our god. Even within the same religion. Shiite against Sunni. Catholic against Protestant. And to think, I grieve over the loss of Jeanne. When I should be grieving over the loss of our humanity. --Jim Broede