Unidentified Man #1: I think that anybody that would want to harm another person based upon their belief in God and based upon somebody else's nonbelief in their God, they really have to look at themselves.
Unidentified Woman #1: Religion divides more people than it unites. How can you wipe out a whole race if it be in Ireland, or Bosnia, or the former Soviet Union, simply based on religion?
Unidentified Man #2: If you take something on faith, that means you don't have to think about it. You can believe it without thinking, and if you believe without thinking, then you may do what you're told to do, which may be morally wrong. If your religious leaders tell you that you should kill because that's what our religion tells you, you may do so without thinking.Unidentified Man #3: In the Bible it says, "An eye for an eye," so if someone attacks me, I'm going to respond accordingly.
Unidentified Woman #2: I think if someone dies for God and that's what they truly believe, I think that they would definitely be forgiven.
Unidentified Man #4: Being a Catholic, it's a point of hypocrisy in the Church -- men that are killing other men in the name of God.
ABERNETHY: We want to raise those questions now with Jerry Powers of the U.S. Catholic Conference, Fahhim Abdulhadi of the American Muslim Council, and Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee.
Mr. Powers, how do you answer the charge that religion causes violence?
JERRY POWERS (U.S. Catholic Conference): There's no doubt that religion is a factor in these conflicts. It takes 13 walls to divide Protestants from Catholics in Belfast, but I don't think you can really understand the conflicts if you focus principally on religion, because I think political and economic factors are much more central to these conflicts.ABERNETHY: Mr. Abdulhadi, many of us in the West are confused or perhaps just don't know enough about the Islamic concept of jihad. Does the Qur'an teach -- does Islam teach -- that it should be such a thing as a holy war against non-Islam -- non-Muslims?
FAHHIM ABDULHADI (American Muslim Council): The word "jihad" translates to mean "struggling to one's utmost." When it's applied to warfare, yes, fighting is allowed in self-defense and also against oppressors; however, there are restraints put on that, and that being that you can only aggress against combatants and those who contribute to the struggle, as opposed to women and children.
ABERNETHY: So when a young Muslim turns himself into a bomb and goes into a crowded part of Israel, that person is doing something that is not condoned by Islam?
Mr. ABDULHADI: This person has attacked noncombatants -- who are people, for instance, in the Ben Yehuda Street mall who were there to shop -- and therefore, what he has done is outside my understanding of the boundaries of Islam.ABERNETHY: Rabbi Rudin, the Torah, the Old Testament for Christians, presents a God who is himself violent, destructive, wrathful. Does that establish a kind of a tradition in Judaism -- perhaps Christianity, too -- of violence?
Rabbi JAMES RUDIN (American Jewish Committee): Bob, the Jewish religion is not just the Hebrew Bible. There's 2,000 years of rabbinic tradition filled with mitigating laws, compassion, justice, changing situations, so that it's a mistake, a great mistake to read the Hebrew Bible as if that's all there is to the Jewish religion. It's a religion that does hold its religious leaders accountable, and the job of religious leaders, all of them -- that's why I'm very pleased to hear Fahhim condemning the attacks on noncombatants and innocent civilians. The job is to root out the absolutists who seem to know all the truth. What counts is authenticity, accountability, and, unless a religious leader is prepared to do that, then they're not being really a leader. They're being just a follower.
Rabbi RUDIN: There's also one other point. I think it's a great mistake to relativize all religions. As you have to be very, very accurate, each religion has its own traditions, its own history. As a Jew who -- speaking as a person in a faith that's been persecuted by both Muslims and Christians -- the word "violence" means not just physical violence but abusive religion, verbal violence, and so we have to sort out every religious tradition and talk about it in accurate terms and not relativize it.
Rabbi RUDIN: Hold -- have to -- you know, religious leaders.
