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 rise 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