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Fear

I was thinking the other day of a scene from the film Battle of Algiers, about the revolution to drive the French out of Algeria; after a cafe has been bombed a group of French civilians find a young Arab boy, a street vendor standing nearby, and start punching and kicking him. It is the ambiguity of the film that children participated in the revolt against the French, but we have not seen this child do anything but be there. The group of ostensibly civilized Europeans see an Arab boy and try to kick him to death. (A French policeman pulls his unconscious body away from the mob.)

What drives a mob to try to kill a small boy for no other reason than being Arab in the vicinity of a terrorist act?  It is clear from the racial slurs that they yell during the assault that they would not have tried to kill a French boy.

The older I get the more I see fear as the source of the evil in my small part of the world and apparently the world at large. Fear of the other in particular seems to justify in the minds of the perpetrators a great deal of violence that they would normally condemn if it were visited upon themselves.

Now I speak as a Christian and acknowledge my ignorance in not speaking of other faiths (although I would be surprised if their views were different). At heart for a Christian, fear is an assessment that God will not take care of you and that it is time to switch teams.

Fearful violent folk rarely articulate their choice to obey Satan, and yet it is not God who calls upon us to hurt and kill folk who look different from us. Matthew 5-7 is pretty explicitly a call to do the opposite.

Perhaps those of my faith need to be more articulate in naming Chrinos (Christians In Name Only), particularly politicians, who advocate fear and violence (because they always go together), as apostates who have embraced Satan and Satan's ways. 

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