Holy Wars

Holy Wars

How can anyone keep a straight face and

tell me without batting an eye,

how much they love God and how much God loves them

and then describe religious riots or factional wars, death and wounded counts

in terms that sound more like baseball scores on ESPN, or

that hearken to the Crusades or to Manifest Destiny,

the Cold War or the fervor of evangelism run amok?

How can someone be so fired up about their religion that they’d do anything from

diabolical torture of an individual to burning alive hundreds of people in locked

churches and mosques then employ expiative self-flagellation, self mortification and

even self-immolation in case anyone wasn’t paying attention to their piety?

It’s all so eschatological;

apocalyptic underscores to 3D movies where we load our guns and shoot them

to news clips of an 18 year old soldier fastidiously activating a drone

equipped with racial profiling software all designed to travel quietly and without

human input, kill anyone who matches, even a child,

to a pin up caliber photograph of a beautiful woman- a soldier and a sniper-

who has a documented kill from over a mile away all the more

more impressive since it says her lipstick remained unsmudged and her mascara intact.

We abhor the garrote and machete yet employ

rocket, bomb, fire, bacterium, invoke God…

all in the name of the uniformly same righteousness that

we’ve had coded into our DNA by our grandfathers and our politics –

the same DNA that from the same sources and the same reasons once launched

a thousand ships, that saved the Union, that charged into the valley of death and that

was invoked even as a jet plane was flown into a tower

and a zealot pulled the charger in a crowded marketplace.

In the end there are many holes, none of them holy.