Charlie Hebdo magazine cover — Jan. 15, 2015

[Written and published in 2015 in the weeks following the mass shooting in Paris by Islamic gunmen angry because a humor magazine had published the cartoon above. In 10 years my views have not changed.]

I’m sorry but I’ve finally had enough. I can’t do it anymore, can’t accept the idea that if you call yourself a Muslim you have no accountability for all the butchery and mayhem perpetrated in the name of your religion, no responsibility to condemn, speak out against, or make any effort to deal with the burgeoning population of maniacs operating under your logo.

I have come to believe, as my aged grandmother the daughter of a missionary came to believe, that religion is now the greatest divisive force in humankind, more than race even. Race is generally discernible at some distance, religion not so much, nonetheless I think religion has now become the undisputed #1 reason to hate, kill, torture, and mutilate one another. Go back far enough and it all came down to food and sex I suppose, but today, in 2015, it’s religion. No it’s not the only reason, the only modern excuse to unleash our bloodlust, just the most popular, and becoming more popular by leaps and bounds. And Islam leads the parade by a mile.

I grant you there are mass murderers of other faiths. Take the guy in Norway for example, the right-wing Christian gentleman who slaughtered nearly 80 youngsters in a finely-crafted massacre he planned for months. Hindus do it in India, Jews in Palestine, Buddhists in Myanmar, atheists and agnostics are fully capable of turning ugly, but above all Muslims in ever-increasing numbers are killing other people (and themselves) in an ecstasy of religious fervor.

Today the news reports that a 10-year-old girl in Nigeria blew herself up taking 16 market shoppers with her and wounding dozens more. In Syria fighters are joyously beheading each other, murdering captives, and dropping poison gas on civilians. In Paris cartoonists are gunned down for drawing a picture of the Prophet. In New York knife-wielding worshippers steer an airliner full of innocents into a skyscraper killing thousands. In beautiful Bali the faithful blow up a hotel killing over 200. In Palestine parents willingly send their own children off to die strapped into a suicide vest. Devout Muslims are flocking by the thousands to fight in Syria with a group [ISIS] so insane that even Al-Qaeda can’t stomach them. And everywhere their purpose is the same: to take over a piece of territory, turn it into an “Islamic State”, and impose what they see as the laws of their religion on every last one of the inhabitants. Because? Wait for it…

Because theirs is the One True Faith, the One True God, and the rest of us are going to Hell and they would like to speed that up for us. All we have to do is call God by some other name than Allah, bad-mouth him/her/it, or take 10 seconds to scrawl a likeness, and that’s enough for these folks to pass a death sentence on our infidel heads. This week our friends and allies the Saudis sentenced a blogger to 1000 lashes in public and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam” because he criticized some conservative clerics online. The first 50 lashes were administered today in public before a large audience of worshippers who had just emerged from the mosque after Friday prayers. If I lived in Saudi, this post would earn me the same fate.

I do not believe in God, and until recently I believed it was not my job to speak out against the absurdities of religion, but with religious fundamentalism on the increase everywhere  — including Christian fundamentalism in my own country — my position has shifted. It is time to call bullshit on beliefs that cause harm. I don’t care if your people have been slicing off the clitoris of adolescent girls for centuries, you need to stop it now. I don’t care if you think your God tells you it’s OK to rape underage children, if you do it you should go to jail. I don’t care if your clerics tell you to kill anyone who draws a picture of Mohammed — that’s not even in the Koran, nor does the Bible forbid abortion. The point is we should not craft our civilization according to the interpreted dictates of old books written by folks who were largely ignorant, often the self-serving prescriptions of men asserting dominion over women. It is time to get over all that.

And now to the final outrage, my original point. If, let’s say, half a dozen members of your large and immediate family had lapsed into psychosis and began arming themselves and planning to blow up City Hall during business hours, should you or should you not contact the authorities and try to abort the carnage? Even if City Hall doubled your garbage and sewer rates in the past 5 years, I would say yes. Yes, the right thing to do would be to intervene even at the risk of looking like a tattletale. At the very least you might try to reason with them, turn their destructive impulses in a less murderous direction, or perhaps pay for a few visits with a counsellor. Yes, I absolutely think you bear some responsibility in a situation like that.

To speak clearly and realistically, I think the community of Muslims — and they are certainly a community these days for many reasons good and bad ranging from racism to distinctive clothing and grooming choices — the Muslim community needs to stand up, speak out, and move aggressively to combat this cancer gnawing at their core. Killing these out of control fundamentalists (the solution most frequently recommended on American television) only creates more of them. What is needed is an all-out effort to make outcasts of these murderers, these butchers, these lunatics who believe that God wants them to burn down buildings full of school children as they are doing today in Nigeria. And this needs to start at home, in the family, in the neighborhood, in the mosque. People need to speak out, clerics need to speak out, political leaders need to speak out, idolized athletes need to speak out — all Muslims need to speak out and stop saying “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me…nothing to do with me. Why do you expect me to denounce somebody I don’t even know?”

Why? Well, because he or she is a member of your family. You swear by the same book, repeat the same prayers, bow in the same direction five times a day. Because he or she says he’s doing it for you! And because maybe if your son or daughter, your father, uncle or neighbor hears your words — whatever you find it in your heart to say — just maybe they won’t travel down that path tomorrow or the next day.

Yes you need more acceptance, you need to be free of the discrimination of racism and xenophobia, and yes you deserve the freedom to follow whatever damn fool religion you like as long as you don’t hurt yourself or others. Yes we need to put an end to the counter-productive and highly illegal drone strikes we use to execute people without a shred of due process. Yes my country needs to loosen its stranglehold on the Middle Eastern oil fields to feed our fossil fuel habit and let those folks have full ownership of the natural resources they have under the sand. Let’s take the hit, pursue the future and lead the way to a less-polluting energy future.

It’s not all up to the Muslim moms and dads, imams and clerics to reverse this tide of catastrophe, but after this week’s events in France, in my view peace-loving Muslims are no longer off the hook. There are billions of you out there. If you put your minds and hearts to the task you can help to turn the tide, and I am no longer satisfied to accept excuses why you have no responsibility to try. The new President of Iran has finally stood up and spoken out against these latest killings in the name of Islam. More Islamic leaders need to do the same, and you can do it too.

Many things need to change if we hope to get a handle on this epidemic of extreme brutality sweeping across the globe. The human race has sometimes done worse in the past — remember burning at the stake? or “drawn and quartered”? Christian customs if I’m not mistaken. Whatever the religion or none at all, let’s not go any further down that road. No religion has clean hands. If you consider yourself religious I believe you have a special responsibility to take a stand against prejudice and violence in your own sect, but for Muslims in 2015 the situation is now clearly out of hand and the need for effective and immediate action to change direction is clear and urgent. For God’s sake do something!