“God is Great.” Or, in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar.” It is one of the central slogans in Islam, but surely its essence finds expression in Judaism (any of the Shabbat prayers) and in Christianity (hundreds of quotes about Jesus or about God). In the current Iraq conflict, the various terrorists who blow themselves up regularly yell “God is Great” as they take their own and dozens of others’ lives. Surely God’s greatness will bestow them eternal paradise, so they imagine. After all, one better be sure that “God is Great” if they are going to end their own lives for some “holy” purpose.

But what of victims of violence. This is what has always puzzled me about religion. Buried in the middle of this article about daily carnage in Iraq is a quote from a man who barely survived a suicide bombing in Hillah.

“The ground was covered with the remains of people and blood, and survivors ran in all directions,” said Muhsin Hadi Alwan, 33, one of the wounded day laborers. “How will I feed the six members of my family when I return home without work and without money?” Mohammed Abbas Kadhim, 30, said he was thrown several yards by the explosion.

“I couldn’t see or hear for a few minutes as I was lying on the ground. People were racing everywhere looking for their missing sons, brothers, friends _ all of them shouting `God is great.'”

All of them, in the midst of an increasingly absurd conflict brought on by fanatical proclaimers of God’s greatness, can only proclaim God’s greatness. What does that mean anymore? Will this hideous religious war provoke the sort of existential, post-religious consciousness that emerged only slightly after Europe’s 30 Years War, and strongly after World War II? Many Europeans decided that no God, supposedly all-powerful, could “allow” for such carnage as beset Europe. Many Jews, in the death camps and ghettos of Poland, wondered the same thing. How could God have chosen us for this fate? While some, famously, used the Holocaust to restore their faith, many others read into it God’s non-existence – or at least irrelevance in daily affairs.

I am constantly struck by how people in the midst of crisis turn to God – and in contradictory ways. I drove through Tennessee last March and a tornado destroyed a megachurch on the side of I-65 in Gallatin. A week later a sign emerged declaring God’s greatness. Surely it was a sign of God’s power, as it were. But greatness? Some Tennesseans believed God was punishing them for some sort grand transgression – too many gay people, rejection of the poor, too much war, too little prayer – whatever fits one’s pre-existing politics.

And so I wonder, what does it mean when Iraqis who suffer daily unspeakable outrages, reaffirm God’s greatness? Is that a sign of their true “submission” to God? Is it a sign of delusion? Is it just an anthropological gesture through which Iraqis “make sense” of the chaos?

I wonder what others here think about this? What does a war so horrible as that in Iraq do for one’s faith? How does one reconcile “submission to God” with atrocities committed in God’s name? This strikes me as an increasingly relevant, spiritual question for Iraqis, and for all of us.