Imagine

Imagine devoting your life to killing other human beings. Imagine this being your great achievement as you exit this world. Murder. Well, that was apparently the idea rattling around in the heads of the family members responsible for the Surabaya church bombings. Imagine being so confused, so disturbed, that you believe that God wants you to murder people, and will celebrate you for doing so. Imagine not understanding that every life is precious to God. Imagine strapping bombs to your own young daughters and sending them to their death. Nine and 12 years old. Imagine sending your sons as well. Imagine these things if you can. I for one cannot. Here is where imagination fails me. Here is the juncture whereupon a person has failed to be a common human being and has entered a realm that can only be described as dark and evil. Imagine imagining that some magical good will come of randomly killing other men and women and children. I say it again: imagination fails me. I can imagine no world, no circumstance in which this would be anything other than insanity. I read a comment recently in a Facebook thread wherein the writer lavished praise upon the Surabaya bombers. So strong had been their faith, he said, that they were able to take this step, to sacrifice their own lives in obedience. My thought is that they are perfectly welcome to sacrifice their lives if they think it will please God--but just keep it to yourself, you know? Make your sacrifice, die in a blast of glory, but don't take others with you. Here would be the true sacrifice: to realize, in a flash of true intuition, that you have drifted hopelessly apart from humanity, from reason, from life itself, and that you are about to commit an act of blind, unforgiveable, inhuman violence, and so to end yourself, and only yourself, and thus save the innocent from your sickness.