I just saw another thread about rabid atheists removing roadside crosses. This is insane! How can something you don't believe exists offend you? But is this not the theme learned from the Old Testament, where a "jealous" God orders desecration of anything devoted to an "idol," including the graves of idolatrous people, dashing their infants to pieces, and raping idolatrous women?
Religious intolerance is not only present among atheist crusaders. The same mentality exists among the "people of faith" who like to refer to themselves as "servants of God." Rabid intolerance by such people of other faiths—simply because they are not cast in their image—is a constant theme of the last 2,000 years until the end of the 20th century.
Even people of the supposedly same faith exhibit the same rabid intolerance for heterodoxy. All in the name of the love of Christ, western Europe engaged in a 100-year war following Reformation, and then—while they were still burning each other at stakes—they ganged up on a third party of Anabaptists and proceeded to exterminate them in the biblical fashion with impunity simply because Anabaptists believed in the "sin" of re-baptizing their baptized infants when they reached adulthood!
The Northern Ireland conflict that lasted from 1969 until 1997, and cost 3,526 lives, was the last vestige of the Catholic-Protestant bloodletting in Europe since the Reformation.
Although it was officially a political and ethnic conflict, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1995) that took some 150,000 lives on all sides, was basically a religious war among people who share the same language but are divided along confessional identities. The war was fought between two Christian groups (Serbs and Croats) and between Christians and Muslilsm.
The last religious conflict in Europe ended in 1999 with the NATO occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo between Christian Serbs and predominantly Muslim Albanians. The war in the Middle East and Afghanistan is essentially a religious war. The manufacturer of US military rifles used in these conflicts recently admitted to inscribing biblical verses on gunsights!
People either use hatred or love of God to promote their own extreme agenda which is basically to exterminate those who do not share their beliefs. At least the atheists are just being plain inhuman, which seems to be our nature, but the "servants of God" often rely on the extermination commandments of their God as written in their scriptures, seeing their efforts as a morally just removal of "idolatrous" scum.
At least Christianity has a modifying, attenuating element in its sciprutre, the New Testament, but the Muslims and the Jews don't. Their scriptures do not even pretend that our ultimate goal is to (try to) love our enemies (as human beings) even if we have to defeat them (although the Old Testament quoted in Mat 5:43 does not exist)
should read "although the Old Testament verse quoted in Mat 5:43 does not exist."
It’s difficult to imagine a way to foster an increased understanding of God’s perspective on all that.
I do know that His grief over suffering is greater than ours.
I do know that you haven’t and can’t construct the least elevation of a pedestal from which to judge God in any remotely kosher, safe or accurate way or degree.
I do know that children who die before accountability enjoy God’s presence—and that on balance they suffer far less than most of us left to live out our lives.
I do know that choices have consequences for the chooser and for others around them and for their descendants and for the world at large.