Even when religion is clearly not the issue, modern atheist writers insist on twisting evidence to make it the culprit. Consider Sam Harris’s analysis of the conflict in Sri Lanka. Harris is trying to blame suicide bombing on religious people. Yet he has a problem. The inventors of the modern form of suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers. So Harris gets to work. “While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr worship that they have nurtured for decades has many of the fea- tures of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as combatants in a secular political struggle over land and self-determination, Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious crazinessthat explains their fanaticism.

I do not for a moment deny that religion can be a source of self- righteousness, and that this tendency can lead to persecution and violence. In the past, it has indeed been so. In the Muslim world, violence in the name of religion is still a serious problem. But for Christians the tragedy of violence in the name of religion is thankfully in the ancient past.

I’ll conclude this chapter by suggesting why this is so. In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers tells the story of the grand inquisitor, in which Christ himself appears before the tribunal. He is immediately recognized and thrown into prison. That night, the inquisitor comes to visit him. He asks him to “go and never return again.” The reason is clear. Christ’s teachings are those of a peacemaker. They are the very opposite of the persecutions and violence that have sometimes been perpetrated in the name of Christianity. Jesus says in Matthew 7:1-5, “Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again…. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam from your eye, and then you shall see clearly how to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.” This may not always have been the spirit of Christians, and it is not always the spirit of every Christian today. But it is the spirit of the founder and guiding light of Christianity, and it continues to supply a noble standard for a war-weary and violent world.