I'm a little bit bugged by something as of late, and I must speak out. I'm not the only one this bothers, either. This might anger a lot of my friends and family, too, but it must be said just the same. If Anders Behring Breivik wasn't a Christian, then Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't a Muslim.
In his own 1,518-page manifesto Breivik identifies himself as on a mission to defend Norway against the invading Muslims. Also, in that same document, he clearly states his faith in Jesus.
Believe it or not, when I was a kid, I went to church most Sundays, as did nearly every single other kid, in my small Texas town. I can't tell you the number of times I heard the preacher say all a person had to do to be saved was to confess Jesus as their savior – which is what Breivik did. He truly believed he was on a holy mission. The man identified himself as a Christian, plain and simple.
Along comes Bill O'Reilly, playing the no true Scotsman argument, and I find it bothers me. He's ready, willing and able to accept Hasan's self-identification as a Muslim, in spite of millions of Muslims decrying his actions as opposing what they believe to be a “religion of peace,” yet when it comes to Breivik acting on his own disturbed psychotic impulses, suddenly “he's no real Christian."
Personally, I think the problem goes so much deeper than what most people see on the surface of things. These kinds of mentally unstable individuals are unstable no matter what. Regardless of what God someone might happen to follow, a crazy man will start to hear that God telling him to go kill in his name. Anders Breivik suffered from the same sort of mental instability as did those who committed the atrocities on 9/11, as the Oklahoma City bombing and every other atrocity in the name of the religion they happened to grow up believing. I hope humanity grows up enough to abandon these myths altogether, before it's too late, and we end up wiping ourselves out.
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