Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true! This has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God’s name.
We see countless examples of this in history. From the time that we first gained self-consciousness, we’ve done violence in God’s name. It began by sacrificing human beings to try to attain God’s favour, and it led to everything from actively persecuting others for religious reasons, to waging war in God’s name, to burning people for heresy at the Inquisition, to practising capital punishment for religious reasons, and, not least, at one point in history, to handing Jesus over to be crucified out of a misguided religious fervour.
