It is impossible to forget the uncensored video of a French policeman being murdered on a Paris sidewalk.
In the face of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, it is now undeniably clear that the theme of 2015 must be religious murder in the modern world. It is the inescapable subject for a number of reasons, the foremost of which is the images that have defined it, which, in this case, is the murder of 42-year-old Ahmed Merabet.
Like the French Holocaust documentary "Shoah," it is both a nauseating and necessary viewing. As adults, it is important to turn vague ideas of free speech, terrorism and murder into something visible, if not tangible.
Keeping the limitations of film in mind (what the video appears to show but doesn’t), one can only understand what the world is dealing with when one clicks play.
See the gunman snaking around parked cars, approaching the wounded and surrendering man on the sidewalk. See the Kalashnikov rifle performing the service for which it was created. See the two men jogging back to their vehicle as if they were simply late for work.
To witness this is to understand that the worst part about these attacks is that they are casual. Killing requires little more thought or motivation than is given to them by faith. To become a murderer, all one needs is a good enough reason.
And the reason-giver in this case is the oldest, most sick and most obvious source of violence in the world: religion.
Religion, like all primitive human systems, is inherently violent and will continue to exercise that violence until they catch up with progressive moral standards. Over time, religions catch up with morality. They become less an absolute source of truth than a mushy platitudinous paste that colors and not commands the way people live their lives.
Religions learn to live with each other, presenting a smiling face while feeling, deep in their hearts, that they are the sole possessor of the truth. The self-righteousness and self-pity of all religion is hidden by a facade of an almost-humanism. Tolerance, a grudging and mistrustful word, is triumphed in inter-faith communities as the next-best alternative to taking out the knives.
For instance, the Catholic church will never be strong enough to launch a land war. No one in this age will be initiated into the mysteries of the auto-da-fé. As a result, it became weak, splintered and formed the Christian archipelago we know today.
Islam is relatively new in the field of world religion, and it’s the only one that still feels that it has to prove, through violence, that it’s the correct one. It has, once again, shown a side of itself that is incompatible with the world.
The fact that the Hebdo murderers are followers of Islam apparently wasn’t made clear by the video. Newspapers across the world have wasted valuable print space trying to separate the “Islam” from the “murder.” The murderers are relegated as “un-Islamic” instead of being recognized as a product of different teachings of Islam.
There’s no reason to jump on a “no true Scotsman” kind of argument when the case is much more simple: both moderate and extreme forms of Islam stem from the same place. They are different interpretations of the same doctrine. One can only distance oneself so far from the people who believe in the same God and prophet.
There’s no question that, on the whole, very few religious people are violent, and that more docile, socially acceptable versions of faith tend to live longer. Like the way dogs evolved in such a way to placate humanity and therefore live longer, the religions that conform to modern values are more likely to be accepted and adopted by successive generations.
In the end, the evolutionary imperative towards humanism is the reason we don’t have to worry about religious extremists. That which does not evolve ever closer to the dominant moral values becomes unnecessary. The more terrorists struggle to reassert themselves and their society through violence, the more they are hated and the more resources are allocated to stamp them out.