It is a sad day when writers or artists are killed over beliefs. They are men and women who’s purpose in life is to create. They seek to invoke emotion, to make others laugh, cry and to think. They are farmers of the mindscape, cultivating thoughts and feeling. Their ideas may never die but ignorance and hate have succeeded in clawing out another breath of creativity that the world sorely needs.
Do you know why we see these creative people targeted again and again? The ignorant fear them because they spread thought and thought can single-handedly destroy everything that these extremists believe in. This isn’t just a threat from Muslims, anyone with free thought knows this. Christianity has always persecuted writers and artists who speak out against the church too. While cold-blooded murder may not occur any more, censorship and ignorance are certainly still prevalent. One simply has to look to the reactions to Philip Pullman’s work or any article on school censorship boards. Religious persecution of creativity is still a very real issue and can be seen in all walks of life.
What we need is to stand together as a united humanity. Men, women and transgender, old and young, black, white, brown, Asian, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, Sikh, Pastaferian, straight and gay and everything in between as the grand collective known as Homo sapiens. We HAVE to come together and agree that killing is wrong. That isn’t a strange, alien idea is it? Our compassion as humans who understand that killing achieves nothing but pain has to win out over belief in some psychotic god.
Any god who condones such things is a god unworthy of worship. If I died and discovered that there really was an afterlife and that despite living a good life as a kind and caring individual, not because of a perceived reward upon death or to please a greater being but because I like to help my fellow man, I was to be damned to Hell for eternal torture because I didn’t believe in an unbelievable story, that is not a God that I would ever give praise to.
Look at it this way. We are all Creators. We hold the ability to create objects, art and music. We also create new life with every baby. Would you teach your sons and daughters to kill anyone who disagreed with you?
Use your heads and your hearts. Be kind. Love the world and try to build a paradise here on Earth rather than a war-zone. We are one people and the quicker everyone accepts this, the quicker we can finally have the peace that exists only in stories and art as of yet.
Matthew Roys 