Does God cause people to murder?

What caused Charles Lee Thornton to shoot up a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri Thursday night?  As he left his home, he reportedly called out, "To God be the glory!"

Patricia Arnold is a veteran broadcast journalist and author and the Spirituality Editor of The Daily Voice.

To many, God and violence seem mutually exclusive. To others, the two are synonymous:  Thursday night, as Charles Lee Thornton left his Kirkwood, Missouri home, he reportedly called out, "To God be the glory!"

The next thing anyone heard Thornton say was, "Shoot the mayor!" as he fatally shot two police officers and three city councilpersons. His sixth victim, Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda, is in critical condition.

Thornton has been described by a friend as an educated, positive, church-going man who had been socked with 150 tickets for parking his commercial vehicles in a residential zone. Neither his rowdy appeals to the city council nor legal action in the courts had relieved him of $18,000 in fines and code violations.

As Thornton walked into the Kirkwood city council meeting, another man, 1,260 miles away, was being held without bond, accused of threatening to "shed the blood of the innocent" at the Super Bowl. According to the Associated Press, court documents claim that Kurt William Havelock drove within sight of the University of Phoenix stadium with an AR-15 assault style rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. He was angry because he had been denied a liquor license.

These are merely the latest in a series of incidents that led me to conclude that there is a link between violent behavior and a person's perceptions of God--more accurately, a person's misperceptions of what God is and what God does. Far too many, particularly those who take the Bible literally, believe that God is vengeful, conditionally forgiving, solves problems by severely punishing or killing people, and mandates the live sacrifice of innocents.

I drew this conclusion from my observations as a journalist and spiritual sleuth. However, until minutes ago, I knew of no scientific research. Then I discovered a March 5, 2007 news release slugged: "When God sanctions violence, believers act more aggressively." 

Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah and Vrije University in the Netherlands conducted two studies to determine whether reading violent scriptures increases aggressive behavior, especially among those who believe that the Bible is entirely true. The first study involved BYU students. The second study involved students in Amsterdam.

Both groups were instructed to read a passage adapted from the King James Bible that described a woman's brutal murder and her husband's revenge on her attackers. Half the participants were told that the passage came from the Old Testament, the other half that it came from an ancient scroll found by archeologists. One version included a sentence in which God commanded his followers to take arms against others.

According to the news release, researchers found that both religious and secular students who were told that the passage they read came from the Bible were more aggressive to their study partners. This aggression increased when the participants read that God had directly sanctioned violence. In fact, researchers noticed a higher level of aggression among believers than among secularists.

"Even among our participants who were not religiously devout, exposure to God-sanctioned violence increased subsequent aggression," said University of Michigan professor Brad Bushman, lead author of the study published in the March 2007 issue of Psychological Science. "That the effect was found in such a sample may attest to the insidious power of exposure to literary scriptural violence."

What's more dangerous is the fact that most of us don't understand the implications of what we believe. Let's take the Adam and Eve story, for example. These prehistoric beings were born as adults, did not have the benefit of maturing through childhood, and were kicked out of the only home they knew because they acted like disobedient children. At minimum, this story says that God is not forgiving and possibly excessively punitive. Is that what we believe about God--or is that what we believe because it's in the Bible?

How about the Flood story: Do we believe that God is vengeful and genocidal, or do we believe it because it's in the Bible? Do we believe that God is sadistic (Revelations), homophobic (Leviticus), racist (Ham, et. al.), filicidal (crucifixion story) and misogynistic (too many stories to count) and promotes violence--or do we believe it because it's in the Bible? We have a choice and what we choose to believe reflects in our behavior.

Bottom line: If we believe that God can be inhumane, which is the portrayal in many of these stories, we can't expect humans to act more benevolently--and we certainly can't expect the headlines to improve any time soon, either.

Havelock dramatically revealed this. He discovered, as he approached the stadium, that his core belief was that killing innocents is diabolical, so instead, he turned himself in.

To God be the glory!