I can’t.

Yes, I feel a sense of relief – relief that a source of suffering and of violence is no longer present.  But I’m not so sure that removing this particular source of violence is going to remove others – or prevent new ones from arising.

And that brings me to the dominant feeling that I, especially as a Buddhist, have around the killing of Osama Bin Laden:  sadness.

It is sorrow at seeing how inexorably the law of karma really does work.   In very basic, simple terms, the law of karma tells us that when we perform acts that hurt others, inevitably those acts will bounce back and continue to hurt us.  Evil acts produce evil results.

So when Osama Bin Laden, in his anger at what he thought the United States and its “empire” was doing to him and his cause, responded with violence, he unleashed the law of karma.  Inevitably, the violence that he resorted to caught up with him.  As Buddha tells us, when you respond to hatred with hatred, you only produce more hatred.  This is sad, so sad.

But what makes me even sadder is that we – we Americans – seem to be doing the very same thing. For the most part, our response to the hatred and violence of Al Queda has been the hatred of military violence.

Yes, we have to protect ourselves.  But we have to do more than that. It seems to me that we have never really answered the question that George Bush asked, rhetorically, shortly after 9/11:  “Why do they hate us?”

Until we can find ways to respond to hatred other than with more hatred, the law of karma will continue to produce suffering.

Or, in Jesus’ words, until we can learn to love our enemies, they will remain our enemies.

Our breakfast gathering with the Imam numbered a couple hundred people, so things could not get too intricate or intimate.  Imam Rauf was eloquent and engaging as he explained the pain he was experiencing around the controversy between “the religion that I love and the country that I love.”

But a question, raised by Richard Haass, the President of the Council, touched on one of the main issues that I think are fueling the fire of controversy around the Center.

When the Imam, taking his typical moderate and irenic position, pointed out that 99% of Muslims around the world are not terrorists, Haass agreed, but responded that for many people it seems that 99% of the terrorists who march across television screens or headlines every day are Muslim.

Haass’s statement is overstated and certainly needs refining.  Still, his claim is stark and sobering: Yes, the majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But it seems that so many of the terrorists are Muslims.

Why?  — That was Haass’s question – and I suspect the question that perturbs a lot of people opposing Park 51.

Imam Rauf’s answer was, in my view, right on: The primary reasons driving some Muslims to violence in the name of their religion are not at all religious. They are, rather, economic and political – the anger and frustration of feeling pushed aside, taken advantage of, subjected to oppressive systems which are supported by Western powers.

All this is true. But it’s not the whole truth.  There are also religious reasons, or religious motivations, behind this turn to violence.   And these religious ingredients in terrorism have to be faced.

Here Islam is not at all unique.   One can find justification for, even explicit calls to, violence in all the religions of the world – especially, I would add, in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.   In all of the sacred scriptures of these “peoples of the book,” there are examples of Jahweh,  or God, or Allah approving or endorsing the use of violence against the perpetrators of injustice and oppression.

Muslims, together with Jews and Christians, have to face the fact that the God whom they believe in has allowed violence. And to allow violence is to prepare the ground for terrorism.

Unless religious people own up to the fact that their religious traditions have been violent, and unless they try to do something about this, they will not really be providing an adequate, and an honest, response to the critics of religion.

And that includes the critics of Park 51.

That may come across as too simplistic. Sure, there are many factors behind religious terrorism — or violence in the name of God.  But one of them surely is what Ahmad and Eagleton are pointing to:  People get very angry when they feel they are being pushed aside, stepped on, or not respected.  And when they think God doesn’t like that either, they feel (rightly so, I would say) that they can respond with God on their side.  And if they have a notion of a patriarchal father God who himself gets violent when he’s angry, watch out. That’s where anger-endorsed-by-God leads to violence-endorsed-by-God.

So, the solution to religious terror is indeed secular justice. But that is not enough. The solution  also requires theological criticism and reform of a patriarchal God who gets pissed off and starts swinging.