This week has seen the BBC reporting on an incredibly brave Pakistani schoolgirl, 14year-old Malala Yousafzai, who is being treated in a British Hospital following an attempt by a Taliban gunman to assassinate the Muslim child, who has been campaigning for women’s education in Pakistan. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-19966357
According to the BBC report, the Taliban said that they had attacked her for “promoting secularism”…
It makes me so angry, that an individual with a gun, who has forgotten God’s own creative power, and their own status as child of God, can attempt to murder another child of God, and thenhave the audacity to claim that they are doing so to somehow protect God…!
…it also makes me ashamed, on so many levels.
Ashamed that anyone, including this taliban bloke, has such little reverence and fear for God (or ‘Allah’, or Dieu, or Theos -or however one is used to referring to The Almighty), that they would dare claim to assert the authority to annihilate any part of God’s own creation in God’s own name… it makes me tremble for them when I think of God’s justice.
…it makes me ashamed because at the human end of the equation, no religion has managed to entirely avoid such violence -It is part of humanity’s selfish departure from God’s loving creation that even when trying particularly to be ‘good’ we more often than not end up simply attempting to shore-up our own identities as ‘right’. Cue all the skewed historical citations of Dawkins and Hitchens and other children of God who prefer to shore up their own identities with a more post-Enlightenment notion of ‘righteousness’ than the old school religious extremists -but with just as much irrationality and vitriol, and just as little genuine recourse to our Creator.
…and this leads onto my third sense of shame… I am no better when I angrily assert my own ‘rightness’ at the cost of love, than a gunman; I am only less heavily armed…
And so in order to side with the Angels, I must not only pray, God bless and protect you Malala Yousafzai, God inspire you by His mighty love in all good works and keep you good and peaceful. But I must also pray, albeit with fear: If it be His will, God bless you with all the awesome, terrifying, heartbreaking fullness of His love -Mister Taliban gunman.
A Pilgrim's Progress 