Bin Laden Is Dead

May 3, 2011

To all those who love human dignity,

In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, United States Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden, the serial murderer who killed three-thousand people on September 11, 2001.

My cousin Angie was among the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers. She was a young professional, full of happiness, dreams and hope. She was to be married shortly, but her wedding day never came. One of the hijacked airplanes slammed against the tower in which she worked. Her fiance also lost his life that calamitous morning.

For weeks, New Yorkers searched anxiously for their loved ones; they hoped to find them alive. My family also searched for Angie. They had the illusion that a miracle could happen, that she might be alive in some hospital, that—like in a soap opera—she had lost her memory, and that's the reason she had not contacted them. They pasted her picture next to photographs of victims of the evil one. Her mom hoped she would see her likeness and recover her memory. But Angie never returned.

In a single day, Osama Bin Laden ended the lives of thousands of Americans and broke the hearts of tens of thousands of family members. He stunned us. He showed us how dark hate can be. But his evil also awoke us. And by opening our eyes, we must recognize the responsibility we have to protect life and human dignity. We must repudiate the act of the murderer. That is easy to do. What seems a bit more difficult for some is to point at the source of his evil, not because they don't know what it is, but because they haven't the courage. You see, it's a mirror.

Bin Laden was radically Koranic, meaning that he had a firm belief in the “holy” book of the Muslim religion. For him, that book is the word of God. According to his fundamentalist faith, the book is inerrant and must be interpreted literally. That's why when the Koran order to kill the infidels—believers of other religions or those who profess no religion—Bin Laden was willing to obey. The “holy” book doesn't only order the killing of infidels, it also gives instructions to stone to death those “guilty” of certain “sins,” even if they belong to their religion. It also approves and regulates the denigrating institution of slavery. So, Bin Laden's evil comes from the instructions given in a book.

I call on sanity and reason. Let's ask ourselves, can a book that orders such acts be inspired by God? To say that God commanded such acts is an insult to his morality and it's slander. The Creator of the universe is not ignorant, evil and cruel. Those violent instructions—kill, stone, enslave—do not come from God; they come from wicked minds which attribute their thoughts to God in an attempt to justify themselves and to attract followers who will implement their wicked ideas.

God has given us legs to walk and hands to work, but the greatest gift he has given us is the capacity to reason. We should, then, listen to the voice of reason, the voice that shouts, “Those ideas are evil.” This is important because the “holy” book used in the West includes some of the same instructions the Koran has about killing infidels, stoning sinners and enslaving the conquered.

If I, an imperfect man, can understand how abominable such instructions are, how dare some people say that God either approved of such things in the past or that he approves them now? Such assertion is unacceptable. Whoever promotes such ideas justifies the surging of a Bin Laden version in Judeochristianity.

Fortunately, most religious people in the world posses higher moral standards than their “sacred” books. How great that they listen to conscience and reason more than they listen to their books! Reason opposes people like Bin Laden, who are willing to perpetrate evil in the name of their god. Let's promote that everyone reasons about what they read; if that requires to stop believing certain things, then so be it.

One last note, there are those who kill the body; others don't touch the body, but they destroy human dignity. Both are sadists who please themselves in the suffering of others. I call on reason, so that respect will be given to both human life and human dignity.

Cordially, Jor-El Irizarry
Deist, former Baptist Pastor