RELIGION: A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT

On March 23, 2006 the Associated Press ran an article titled “Top Muslim clerics: Convert must die”. This article starts by saying “Religious leaders urge courts to ignore West, hang Christian”. They are demanding that Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man who converted from Islam to Christianity, be executed.

The United States, Australia, and Europe are putting a lot of pressure on President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to free Rahman, who is facing the death penalty for converting. It is wonderful that so many countries have united to press the Afghan government. I firmly believe that freedom of religion is a basic human right. The world has long talked about human rights, but freedom of religion has, to a large extent, been ignored. Is the killing of a person for converting to a different religion any different than ethnic cleansing? NO!!

When I was in school, and admittedly this has been forty or fifty years ago, I was taught that there were two kinds of religion: polytheistic and monotheistic. Polytheists believe in many gods; examples we were given of polytheism were Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, etc. Monotheists believe in only one God, and the only monotheistic religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our teacher said (and mind you, this was in a Maryland public school) that whether you called Him Yahweh, God or Allah, you were referring to the same Deity, and that members of these three great religions were basically all brothers because of their belief in the same One Supreme Being. Some creeds are stricter than others, just as some families are stricter than others, but I think of God as a Father Who, although He can be stern, is a just and loving God, and I find it difficult to believe that He would want one of His children killed because that individual changed from one religion to another.

The Islamic law that requires the death penalty for converting from Islam is as outdated as the reasons behind the Crusades. Are religious leaders and governments enforcing this kind of barbaric punishment, anything more than terrorists themselves? Should they be treated the same way as any other terrorists? We have not done this because of not wanting to offend Muslims, but some clerics have gone too far! No one wants to mark religious leaders as terrorists, but how can we avoid it? Civilized nations must stand together and not give ground on this issue. How can there ever be peace in the world if religions leaders are allowed to practice this kind of terrorism? Hard-line Muslim clerics need to understand that there is more than one key to the door of the Kingdom of Heaven.