Is it time to start talking about what religion is doing to people yet?
What happened on Bondi Beach — where people gathered to celebrate the beginning of Hanukkah — is nothing short of a national tragedy. Fifteen innocent lives were taken, and dozens more injured, when gunmen opened fire on families, elders, children, and neighbours enjoying a festival of light and community. Australian authorities have labeled the incident a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community, and the world has responded with shock and sorrow.
This is a moment of profound grief — not just for those who have lost loved ones, but for every one of us who believes that human life should be sacred and protected. These deaths were pointless. There was no rational purpose served. There was no meaningful cause advanced. Only families are broken, futures erased, and a community left to mourn.
It is also a moment that, sadly, almost immediately generated the predictable and corrosive reflexes of tribalism: hatred begetting hatred, suspicion begetting suspicion, broad generalisations sweeping entire communities into the narrative of blame. Some respond to this atrocity with antisemitic tropes. Others respond with anti-Islamic resentment. None of these reactions honour the dead, and none of them prevent the next tragedy.
We should be clear: hatred is not a solution to hatred. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both engines of division, both rooted in fear and ignorance. They distort our understanding of the world, and they feed the very cycles of violence and alienation that produce tragedies like this.
But while the targets of our anger and fear change with the headlines, one question remains constant and unavoidable: Why do we persist in attaching moral authority to religious ideologies that so often fail to restrain violence, and that so frequently become vectors for it?
Religion — any religion — claims to offer moral guidance, to elevate us above base instinct, to bind us together in shared values. Yet time and again, religious identity has become a fulcrum for division and justification, rather than a foundation for compassion and peace. When a system of belief can be used to justify massacre and provoke retaliation, it has ceases to serve as a moral compass. It becomes part of the problem.
This is not a claim about individual believers. Most people who practice religion — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — are decent, compassionate individuals striving to live good lives. Of course they are. But the fact that individuals can be good despite their religious frameworks, rather than because of them, is precisely the point. It is the framework itself that deserves scrutiny.
People do not need supernatural narratives to be moral. Ethical behaviour does not require divine sanction. Human beings can, and do, cultivate systems of compassion, accountability, and shared humanity without recourse to metaphysical authority. In fact, when morality is grounded in our shared humanity rather than claimed cosmic mandates, it becomes harder to dehumanise others and easier to work toward mutual safety and flourishing.
This tragedy at Bondi Beach should be a wake-up call — not to collective blame, but to collective responsibility. We must reject hatred in all its forms. We must resist the temptation to scapegoat entire communities. We must focus on the lived reality of human beings — beloved parents, children, friends — whose lives were stolen.
And yes: we must ask difficult questions about how we structure our moral lives and our communities so that future generations no longer inherit frameworks that too readily excuse violence in the name of faith.
To consign harmful ideas to history’s trash-heap is not hatred. It is clarity. It is courage. It is a commitment to a future where gatherings like Hanukkah celebrations are met with joy and safety, not bullets.
The dead deserve more than slogans. They deserve a world that learns.