According to the research conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, “There are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84 percent of the world population of 6.9 billion.” This result shows that religion is the essential part of majority of people’s life around the world. However, religion nowadays is tending to be used as a tool to accomplish certain will of people rather than a machine for peace and love. For example, people in politics use religion as their weapon to win over the election, and some religious groups such as Islamic State are committing a lot of terrorism in the name of God. Therefore, I started to question myself recently: Is God still alive?

Even though the separation of state and church is stated as the law in many countries, religion still serves as an important role in politics due to the high percentage of voters who have religion. For instance, in Korea, Christian believers exert so much influence on the election because they tend to vote for Christian candidates. Therefore, the ex-president Lee Myung-Bak appealed a lot not only to people in his church, but also to most of Christians in Korea. This political and social consequence violates the secular state’s particularistic value and the religion’s undefiled reason for being.

In addition, dictionary states religion as a set of beliefs that “contain moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” However, there is nothing that could be found considered as “moral code” in election system, which confuses me about the current function of religion in our society. Religion, especially Christian religion, tells people to practice many conscious moral activities so that they could be saved in their afterlife. Ironically, some people try to get some benefits out of religion by using the name of God.

Moreover, some extremist religious groups such as Islamic State of Iraq are using religion as a self-defense of their terrorism. Muslims base their belief in the “Jihad”, which is broadly knows as struggle or effort to live a good Muslim life or to defend Islam. The issue is that Islam “permits the believer to wage military war to protect them” when their faith or territory are “under attack.” This is why the Jihad is interpreted as Holy War, which gives extreme impressions to international society. However, the fact is that Jihad does not support the war to “take territory for economic gain, settle disputes, and to demonstrate a leader’s power.” All those things are currently practiced by Islamic States, and therefore represent the unjust and unpardonable behavior of that specific group.

Likely, saying in Quran, “Fight in the name of your religion with those who fight against you,” could easily be considered as violent, however; it depends on who and how they interpret the verse. The serious terrorisms that Islamic States is causing currently totally oppose the genuine belief of Islam, and therefore ruin the righteousness that religion should pursue in human society.

Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher in 19th century, declared that God is dead in his book “Thus spoke Zarathustra.” Unlike the quote’s literal meaning, what Nietzsche meant was that God is dead in the “hearts and minds of modern men.” To sum up, people in modern world should be more aware of the real value of having a religion, and therefore try not to kill God in their own mind by committing selfish practices like people does in the issue of politics and terrorism. Lastly, let’s ask ourselves “is God still alive in our heart?”