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A guest commentary

Here's hoping that God read The Star

Sunday, September 14, 2003

This is important, and I'm going to assume that it's so, since people believe God knows all things, including the news, before it even hits the streets.

I ask because we have a problem for which there seems to be no earthly solution, as Muslim martyrs have been killing hundreds of innocents at a daily clip in God's name. From New York to Baghdad to Jerusalem, violence, bloodletting, suffering, terrorism and war are being perpetrated out of firmly held religious beliefs.

This is not an entirely novel development, of course. From the early Crusades to the recent Afghan war, religion has been a contributing factor and religious conflict a primary cause. But at least those wars had endings. The one burning now in the Middle East seems to flare from a bottomless volcano, with lava and endless ashen fallout overspreading the entire planet.

But is it possible to stop zealots wearing bomb belts who hope to die and ascend to paradise?

We did just that in World War II when kamikaze pilots were disintegrating themselves and their small warplanes to destroy American ships filled with soldiers and other war planes. We stopped them, all right, but only by dropping two atom bombs on Japan. And it's likely that certain military types are thinking of that very option today: nuke the cradle of Islam.

Yet today's suicidal fanatics are not confined to one island country as they were in 1944. We can hardly incinerate dozens of countries and millions of innocent people, in trying to eradicate the guilty ones.

So what about rejecting war and stopping the violence at the negotiating table? Can't someone (Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger) or anyone (Bill Clinton, Rev. Jesse Jackson) talk them down? Show them the illogic? Hammer out a no-suicide pact? Unfortunately, if you've seen and listened to the martyrs in their videos and in prison interviews on "60 Minutes" you know these are not people who can be persuaded. You cannot debate a man's religious faith away.

All that's left, it seems, is to hunker down and keep things secure. Screen and check and imprison and intercept and border patrol and search and customs inspect and x-ray and spy and wiretap. But these are all the measures we're implementing already, and the atrocities in this week's paper show they fall way short.

So that's why I hope God reads The Star. We need God to come out now.

We think we understand the reasons for God's invisibility up to this point — testing our faith and that sort of thing. But this time we are all jammed up. This could very well be the eve of World War III, a conflagration between East and West that threatens to destroy this world as we know it.

Could God make just one brief appearance? I don't mean tears coming from a statue or a new miracle at Lourdes. I'm talking about a prime time live international telecast. Break into network programming and tell Muslims and Christians that nobody gets into paradise with traces of plastique or gunpowder under their nails. Proclaim that there'll be no salvation for anyone who hates, who wages war against, or who detonates explosives in the midst of a crowd whose skin is a different color, or whose prayers are said facing a different direction. Five minutes is all I ask.

A live appearance would not be cheating or stacking the deck. Rest assured, immediately after God's off the air, someone will get carjacked and someone else's pocket picked. But everyone will know, once and for all, that you can't get to heaven by killing unsuspecting innocents.

David McGrath is a novelist and teacher living in Oak Forest.