Terrible Violence: Question and Answer

Extracted from BBC News: Thailand's shadowy southern insurgency

Someone is killed on average every day in the provinces on the Thailand's southern border with Malaysia, where a shadowy group of Islamist extremists are stirring up a deepening sectarian divide.

"So many of my relatives have been shot and killed I feel bitter inside. I want to know how to shoot, so I can help people in the village."said Monthira Peng-Iad, a 40-year-old farmer.

In a community in which Muslims and Buddhists used to live side-by-side in peace, her rhetoric shows how divisive the insurgency has been. In just five years 3,800 people have been killed and more than 6,000 injured. But what they want is not totally clear and no group has ever publically admitted they carried out an attack.

"My house was burned down, my husband was shot dead, my daughter was shot and my son disappeared," said Kuang Narumon, a 52-year-old Buddhist.

I do not have time to talk about the atrocities and violent deaths in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

What could possibly drove a man to carry out acts of senseless violence? How can cruel violent acts such as the Holocaust, Khmer Rouge massacre and Rwanda genocide be possible?

Remember the days of old? "Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways" - Genesis 6:11-12

Ever since the fall of Mankind, sin has spread, deepened and got worse.(Gen 3-6) The only possible answer to horrendous acts like the bombings and killings is sin. There is no satisfactory explanation to why a thinking person would kill himself so that he could kill others - whether those killed are babies, innocent children or bystanders. There is no satisfactory explanation to why a thinking person would smash dead a baby, chop up a child with a machete or shoot an innocent man at pointblank range; except for the fact that it is the wickedness of sin at work.

I know of no other way to deal with this problem the world is facing than to point to that one way. "Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord," Acts 3:19-20, and to "love one another as I have love you," John 15:12.

But who will go?