Be Hippocratical

Ahh Saint Patrick's Day, a shining example of how people can utterly and shamefully misapprehend the events of history.  It's not quite as bad as Columbus Day mind you, but nonetheless it is essentially a celebration of the unholy union between Christian faith and Imperialism.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Pat was a good fellow, I'm quite sure that bringing Jesus to an entire island of benighted heathen would really earn him an extra crown in heaven, if I believed heaven worked at all like that.  In fact, I suspect that the actual impact of importing Roman Catholicism into Ireland is rather a wash on an objective level, and so there was the invention of a myth about Pat driving out the snakes.  Thing is though, cold, places like Ireland don't tend to be the favorite hangouts for cold-blooded creatures like snakes, and what snakes there were probably did mostly useful things like, I don't know, control the rodent population.  You know the funny thing about Boubonic Plague, I mean if there is anything funny about the Black Death?  It's spread by rats and the fleas that love them.  You know what eats rats?  Snakes.
Anyhoo, there's always the eternal souls of those poor pagans that Pat brought to Jesus, surely if you're going to die young from the Plague, at least you can get to go hang with JC?  Right?
Okay, I'm going to take the cynical stick out of my craw right about now, and I want to talk seriously to religious people, and believe me, I'm talking to myself as much as anyone else, but I want those of us who talk about a savior and/or about a gracious and loving God, or even some sort of elevated awareness called enlightenment, I want you to consider something: are you actually making the world a better place?
Don't immediately hide behind your justifications of sin or run and get your gnostic excuses that this world is just a shadow and a passing affliction that people of faith must somehow just live through, actually examine for a moment, is God's creation, in any way improved by what you believe?
I'll even let you balance things out; I'll accept that gift to charity, or that mission trip you went on where you built a house for a poor person, that's cool, good work.
But I want you to analyze the big picture of your life, do you work for justice as often as you should?  Do you show mercy to people who are broken?  Are you humble enough to admit that maybe you don't have all the answers?
If you observe the world carefully, and at least attempt to be the tiniest bit objective, you will quickly find that religious people are often at the heart of some of the absolute worst messes the human race has ever cooked up.  In fact, at the moment, the fundamentalist wingnuts in the three monotheistic religions are doing just about everything they can do to bring about Armageddon, and some of them are actually aware that that's what they're doing, seriously, it's their end game, let's start a huge conflagration so that God/Allah has no choice but to intervene and prove us right.  It goes like this: the sons of Jacob (Religious Zionism) think the State of Israel ought to be like the Kingdom of Israel, the divinely sanctioned, home of he LORD and his chosen people.  The radical fundamentalist sons of Ishmael (Arab Muslims) are cheesed off that Israel exists in any form and that, even worse, a group of Arab Muslims (and Christians I should probably add) were kicked out of their homes to make it so.  Back in the US of A, a whole raft of fundamentalist Christian types think that Israel is just super peachy, and feel super guilty that our Christian world has sort of treated the Jews rather badly over the years, so let's make ammends, right?  After all, the A-Rabs are going to hate us no matter what we do, so let's just keep dropping bombs on those haters.  I mean, from the perspective of some, why not just start a big old apocalypse, because that's when Jesus is going to come back.
I feel Christopher Hitchens smirking from the void, or wherever he wanted to be.
I have to admit, that most of the really intractable conflicts of humanity would be less intractable if people didn't believe so absolutely that God was on their side.
Would subtracting religion solve the Arab-Israeli conflict?  No.
Would subtracting religion make Western Imperialism go away?  No.
Would subtracting religion put an end to ISIS and Boko Haram?  I don't actually know, but I suspect those folks would just find another reason to hate.
The fact of the matter is that none of these things is all the fault of religious fervor, but it is also pretty clear that religious fervor fuels them, and does nothing to slow them down, and that, friends and neighbors, is the problem.  It is also a challenge, because it means that if religion is part of the problem, then it is incumbent upon religious people to help fix it.  People who "get it" from all quarters need to stand up to those who are using the name of their God in vain.  Yes, Muslims need to condemn ISIS, but I also need to condemn John Hagee and Pat Robertson and anyone else who believes that there should be a Christian Empire, I need to stop using the excuse that, well they're my brothers in Christ and I shouldn't really talk badly about them.  I must love the church and my America enough to critique them when they are making the world a more violent place and when they are contributing to the suffering of God's Creation.
I need to remember that Jesus was not all about the next world, he cared rather passionately about what happens in this one, and if I'm going to follow him, I should as well.
I think maybe what needs to happen is for Christians (and other religious types) to stop being hypocritical and consider the Hippocratic oath (see how those two words are similar, but mean different things, dang I'm clever) which says: "first do no harm."  Jesus said this thing one time about taking the log out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from another.  That's pretty good advice, as usual.