Am reading The Kite Runner (by Khaled Hosseini) and came across a scene that says something very sad about the way we humans sometimes tend to think. (Warning: if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to know what happens then click away now...)
The scene I'm talking about is the beating and rape of a young boy by a gang of kids. They're the neighbourhood bullies and they hate him because he's of the "wrong" ethnic group and because he once dared to stand up to the gang leader. They've cornered him in a secluded alley and this is their opportunity for revenge. They beat him up, and then, as they're holding him down on the ground, there is a debate amongst them about whether or not to rape him. (It's not that they're gay and are attracted to him, the purpose of the rape is not sexual gratification, just a way of thoroughly humiliating the boy and teaching him not to mess with them.)
The bit that got me thinking was when one of the boys says: "My father says it's sinful."
You could easily miss it, it's such a brief sentence. But if you pause for a moment and think, you will see what is so horrifying about it - and this kind of thing happens all over the world all the time, not just in Afghanistan in the 1970s. This boy expresses no problem with cruelty to a fellow human being, he has no issue with the three of them beating this kid to a pulp, he is not concerned for their victim's feelings. He is concerned about one aspect of this: that his father told him that having sex with another man is a sin, so if he does that he may get into trouble with his God. He is worrying about getting punished for contravening a certain regulation to do with sexual morality, but he is not concerned about what to most of us hopefully is clearly a sin, which is cruelty and violence towards another person. He's not thinking it's wrong to treat this kid in this way, he's just worrying about contaminating himself spiritually by doing an immoral sexual act.
It would be easy to point fingers and say, well, what do they know, they're moslems. But that wouldn't be true - people of different faiths have managed to do this sort of thing, to focus on certain aspects of right and wrong whilst developing a blindness to other aspects. Didn't our Jewish prophets cry out to us centuries ago to wake up and realise that God is much more interested in how we treated the poor and marginalised than in the sacrifices we brought to the Temple? (And I can't help thinking of some of our folk today who somehow manage to think it's okay to throw stones at fellow Jews because they are seen to be violating the Sabbath. Focusing on Sabbath-keeping but not quite practising Love Your Neighbour...)
And sadly Christians too have been known to fall into this trap. Those who tortured Jews during the Spanish Inquisition thought of themselves as very devout Christians!
When I was learning to drive, much emphasis was placed on checking your blind spot before moving off. Lord God, help us all to keep checking our blind spots!
