In the Name of the Infinite

There is something about human religion that I have never been able to fully reconcile.

Consider the Abrahamic traditions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Three enormously different faiths, three distinct theological lineages, three separate understandings of revelation, scripture, prophecy, and humanity's relationship with the divine. And yet all three trace their spiritual lineage back to Abraham. All three worship the God of Abraham.

And throughout history, human beings have repeatedly found reasons to kill one another over which of them understands Him correctly.

The Inward Edge of Tribalism

Perhaps even stranger is that the violence has never stopped at the borders between religions. Christians have killed Christians. Muslims have killed Muslims. Jews have fought Jews — Catholic against Protestant, Sunni against Shia, sect against sect, denomination against denomination, interpretation against interpretation. Sometimes the theological differences between opposing factions are monumental. Other times they would seem almost incomprehensibly small to anyone standing outside the tradition. Yet time and again, people have decided those differences were important enough to bleed for, or worse, important enough to make someone else bleed for.

At what point does killing in God's name stop being about God and start being entirely about us?

The descent is a recognizable one. Belonging becomes more important than believing. Faith becomes identity. Identity becomes tribe. Tribe requires an enemy. And eventually, someone decides God must hate the same people they do. The theological content hasn't changed — only the direction the faith is pointing.

Religion is hardly unique in its capacity to divide. Humanity has waged war over land, race, ethnicity, political dogma, scarce resources, kings, borders, flags, and economic models. We possess a remarkable and tragic talent for sorting ourselves into simple binaries. Religion simply provides one of the most powerful identity frameworks around which that division can crystallize — because once a person convinces themselves that the Creator of the Universe is unquestionably on their side, a dangerous psychological shift occurs. Disagreement stops being a difference of opinion and becomes heresy. The opponent stops being merely mistaken and becomes inherently evil. Compromise stops being a pragmatic virtue and becomes a betrayal of the divine. That is an extraordinary amount of certainty for a finite human being to carry.

The Traditions' Own Reckoning

The profound irony is that these exact same religious traditions contain extraordinary teachings about mercy, charity, justice, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, restraint, and peace — and more than that, they contain centuries of internal argument against the very abuses done in their name.

Aquinas spent considerable effort in the thirteenth century developing just war theory precisely to constrain the violence being committed under Christian authority, establishing conditions under which force could be considered morally justified and, implicitly, cataloguing all the ways it was being unjustly applied. Islamic jurisprudence developed extensive rules of combat — prohibitions on killing civilians, destroying crops, harming prisoners — because Muslim scholars recognized early that faith was being used to license conduct the faith itself condemned. The Jewish concept of pikuach nefesh, the principle that preserving human life overrides nearly every other religious obligation, is a theological argument built to resist exactly the kind of fanaticism that treats human bodies as acceptable casualties for doctrinal purity. These traditions have not simply produced violence in the name of the divine. They have also produced some of the most rigorous internal arguments against it.

Millions of people draw daily inspiration from those virtues. Religious organizations feed the hungry, build hospitals, operate shelters, care for refugees, respond to disasters, and comfort the dying. Some of humanity's most selfless acts of love have been motivated by faith. That is not a footnote to the history of religion — it is the majority of its daily practice, running alongside the violence that makes the headlines and largely invisible because ordinary compassion rarely generates a historical record.

How can the exact same impulse inspire both supreme selflessness and brutal destruction? Because religion does not erase human nature. We bring ourselves with us into the pews — our compassion, our fear, our generosity, our prejudice, our humility, and our hunger for power. Faith can challenge those base instincts. But humans can just as easily bend faith around them, and the traditions themselves have known this from early on, which is why the internal arguments against abuse are as old as the abuses themselves.

This is why I find myself increasingly suspicious whenever someone claims absolute certainty about what God supposedly demands they do to someone else. Not what God asks of them internally — their own discipline, their own humility, their own moral walk — but what God demands they enforce upon you. There is a significant structural difference between those two postures. One is authentic faith. The other is human power wearing the clothing of faith.

If God is truly infinite, then no finite human mind can completely comprehend Him. Yet history is crowded with people so absolute in their certainty that they were willing to torture, exile, imprison, and execute anyone whose understanding differed from their own. The traditions they claimed to represent had, in most cases, already generated internal arguments against exactly that behavior — arguments those same people chose to ignore.

I cannot pretend to know the mind of the Creator. That seems like an extraordinarily arrogant claim for any human being to make. But I find it difficult to imagine an infinite Creator looking upon billions of human beings slaughtering one another over who understands Him best and concluding: yes, this is exactly what I intended.

Maybe faith was never meant to give us permission to hate our neighbors. Maybe its original purpose was to challenge our innate capacity to hate in the first place — which is, not coincidentally, what the most serious thinkers within every one of these traditions have argued for centuries, in documents that are still sitting there, largely unread by the people doing the most damage in the tradition's name.

Before anyone raises a weapon, condemns a neighbor, or declares another human being an enemy in the name of the divine, there is one question worth asking honestly:

Am I doing this because God demands it — or because I desperately want God to agree with me?