By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN
Ideas matter; thoughts have force. This is an obvious truth. It is why pastors preach, why professors profess, and why pundits do whatever they do.
Yet whenever ideas do things we do not want them to do, as they did in Oslo , Norway on Friday, we try to pretend that ideas are powerless.
For the last two decades, Christian students have told me that Christianity had nothing to do with the Holocaust. After 9/11, many Muslims said that the men who flew those planes into those buildings had nothing to do with Islam. When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot, we were told that the crime had nothing to do with our current climate of political hatred.
Unpacking the ‘Christian fundamentalist’ label for Norway terror suspect?
Now in the wake of the Oslo massacre bloggers and pundits are reassuring us that the crimes of the alleged perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik can be understood simply as the product of a deranged mind. They had nothing to do with his Christian faith or his anti-Islamic ideology. This is wishful thinking of the most dangerous sort.
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The manifesto refers repeatedly to martyrdom, calls Breivik the “savior . . . of European Christendom,” discusses Quranic views of Jesus and quotes extensively from the Bible.
About the author:
Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of “God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World,” is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.
Categories: Islamophobia, Norway
Excellent article, very nicely exposing the Christian apologists, who deny any association of terrorism with Christianity and the Islamophobes, who want to link the extremist Muslims to terrrorism, to the exclusion of every one else.