Religions don't Commit Crimes

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Jersey City slaying of Hossam Armanious, the 47-year-old Coptic Christian, his 37-year-old wife, Amal Garas, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8. See, for example, the article from
New York Newsday.

The headline to that Newsday article is: "Jersey City slaying spurs new wave of anti-Islam bias" - which strikes me as curious for the apparent slant - which slant was almost the subject of this post. However, something even more interesting caught my eye farther down in that article:

Suzanne Loutfy, a Muslim leader of the Egyptian-American Group, asked people not to blame Islam if the killers are found to be Muslim.

"People are so willing to condemn an entire religion," she said. "That's what the big problem is. People commit crimes; religions don't. I hope we can be intelligent enough to separate those two."

(The emphasis in this quote is mine.) I read this final quote and wonder at the hope expressed in the final sentence. It is a very interesting test of intelligence, separating "people" that act from "religion" that encourages people to act in particular ways.

I see the meaning of this as being better examined if we play with the structure of Suzanne Loutfy's key phrase, the one I emphasized. In this particular case it means:

People commit murder, religions don't.

While this statement may be true in a superficial sense (in that religions are a set of intangible ideas that lack the capability of accomplishing anything without the assistance of a human actor), it is at its root false. Many intangible ideas (like hatred, like racial bigotry, like the Nazi political philosophy) impel an actor to do deeds. If those deeds are crimes like murder, then it is pretty clear that we, in fact, do not hold the philosophy blameless. History says that we allocate the blame to both the doer and the impelling philosophy.

So to me, Suzanne Loutfy's hope expressed above, that we can be intelligent enough to separate the people from the philosophy, appears to be in vain. We cannot nor should we totally separate the two.

I hope instead that we can be intelligent enough to examine the motivating philosophy carefully and determine if, in fact, it does share the blame. For centuries certain types of muslims were able to live peaceably with their non-muslim neighbors. But certain versions of this religion, like various sects within the historical Christian community, may have become corrupted.

If the philosophy is not blameless, let us be intelligent enough to recognize so. Let us also be intelligent enough to discern between the poisonous viper and the harmless.