No child is born hostile or aggressive. It becomes so only when its desires to be loved and to love are frustrated, that is, when it expected satisfactions are thwarted—and the thwarting of an expected satisfaction is the definition of frustration. I entertain the hope that in our venturing we shall get addicted to wonder and know the joy of constantly feeling something a little new. Grief can take care of itself, but to get full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. In Bamako, Mali—an unknown number of Islamist militant gunmen stormed a Radisson Blu hotel on the morning of 20 November 2015 in Bamako, the capitol of the West African nation of Mali, taking at least 170 people as hostages, and killing an estimated 3 people. Because of all of the terrorist attacks, many people are wondering if Muslims and Islamist are religions of terror?

 Over the centuries, churches, synagogues, and mosques have had a number of important socializing effects on their participants as well as on society as a whole. In the main, these have to do with an individual’s approach to how to answer certain important questions about life, death, how to deal with people, and the structure of one’s value system. Perhaps the most important socializing effect of many churches is to teach members that there is an answer to every important question—and that leading a good life consists of learning these answers and following them to the letter. In effect, people were provided with a whole code of ethics and set of rules for living. Many decisions were eliminated. All the devout person had to do was find the church’s view of the answer.

 Many people are learning to abuse religion. Because God forgives anyone of any sin, people use this as an excuse to partake in bad behavior, and then pray to God and ask for forgiveness. Even if you are evil and bad your entire life, you can ask God to forgive you on your death bed, and he will. So people have no incentive to behave. This position, too, has seen and experienced much change. Churches today are more inclined to encourage individual responsibility. For some, this has contributed considerably to the amount of anxiety in the World over the number of unanswered questions “running around loose” in each person’s head. Much of the popularity of the Back to Jesus movement may be due to the desire for renewed certainty—the feeling that the Bible and the church have a certain answer for every difficult question. And those who do not participate in such religious experiences may look elsewhere for that sense of certainty—whether in drugs, astrology, political ideology, or even psychology.

 Many people have left organized churches because of difference between what the church teaches and what goes on in the real World. Others left because their religion insisted on dividing people into believers and unbelievers, teaching hatred and rejection for those with different beliefs. Many young people have begun to borrow ideas from oriental religions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Indian meditation cults. It seems to me that if we are going to live sanely, then we must respect and be sensitive to differences, realizing that no two individuals are alike, and that is we really understand someone, we understand how they differ from us. Freedom in religion, freedom in life, asks one fundamental overriding questions: Who do you want to be? It does not tell you who you must be, not even that there are some real and productive laws of your being that you were destined to become. Religion asks you never to forget how each day can be described by the possibilities it contains and how tomorrow shall be as well. All freedom can do is to illuminate the possibilities that can be opened to us and toward which we can steer ourselves by making our choices real.