Unholy War?
This was the headline in an article in The Times – rather appropriate, I thought, in the light of the present pleasantries being visited on the Middle East by the nascent Islamic State.
Earlier in the week I set out why I believe the Islamic State has an obsession with methods of execution and punishment/torture which revisit the worst excesses of mankind’s bloody and torture ridden past, notably slicing of hands and feet, crucifixion and beheading.
I believe the answer lies in what many call a literal interpretation of parts of the Quran, plus the assumption that the Prophet Mohammed sanctioned the beheading of more than 500 men of a particular Jewish clan during the so called Battle of The Trench (further research suggests that he did not, as such: he may have left their fate to an arbitrator) and the reasoning that since he was perfect in all ways it is holy to mimic his behaviour. To this add the reasoning of a closed system of thought which believes that it is divinely revealed and trumps all other systems of thought, philosophy or religion, and you get your result.
It occurred to me that I might be being a complete hypocrite. In my conclusion I opined.
“…the acts of these groups are evil, and by whatever means they must be annihilated.”
With some irony I have been reflecting that this might, ironically, be construed as exactly the kind of hard core, sectarian, ruthless and cold blooded ideology as advanced by IS itself.
So one has to grapple with the nature of evil. What is “evil”? Does it exist? If it does, how is it to be confronted, or should it be? Was I evil?
Evil is a loaded word, because it comes with preconceptions of moral hierarchies which are of course debatable. Take, as an example, the Ebola virus. The virus is cruel and deadly, but I don’t think it would be correct to call it evil. It is doing what a virus does, and in fact there has been some sort of unfortunate event, because a virus which kills its host is killing itself. It is a dreadful state of affairs but it is not an evil thing. Or to take another example – a rabid dog. If it was necessary for me to do so I would shoot the dog, which is suffering and may well spread the disease. I would not hate the dog, I would do so out of compassion for it and others.
Compassion is an important word. I believe in God. I have been best helped in my spiritual understandings by the works of Marianne Williamson, or more particularly her discussions of something called “A Course in Miracles”, and Neale Donald Walsch. Neither as far as I am aware is aligned to a particular denomination. Both might be regarded by some “orthodox” Christians as heresy, in that they view Jesus Christ as a teacher and an older brother rather than as God. But in short they have both, in their diverse ways lead me to the conclusion that the nature of God is the nature of loving thought that conceived the Universe, and is the love within us. Not a Sky Pixie.
You will have heard it said that “God is love”, and I accept it can appear a trite aphorism in the words of some “Happy Clappy” clean cut evangelist. I am not a “Happy Clappy” clean cut evangelist; far from it. I do not propose to dwell further on it for time and space are against me, but when you get it, you get it.
What is evil?
Many years ago, whilst I was at school, I studied E.M. Forster’s novel “A Passage to India.” There was a particular line given to (as I recall) a Brahmin wise man called Professor Godbole.
“Evil is the absence of My Lord,” said Professor Godbole. It stayed with me.
When we talk about God and holiness we are – at least in part – talking about psychological conditions equivalent to, or which are aspects of, love. Some people have a problem with such a namby pamby word. It is too simple. I prefer to express it in terms of compassion. Kindness, compassion, caring, forgiveness, generosity – these are the conditions of God, which is Good.
Their absence creates a void which is akin to darkness. Darkness is merely the absence of light. It exists and can be defined only by the absence of light. In emotional terms it is expressed by fear, reflected in the hate, attack, violence and war, as well as addiction and depression and despair.
Heaven and Hell are not provinces of an afterlife. They are descriptions of our personal realities. I know this profoundly, having dwelt often and long in my own personal Hells.
The person who did me the most evil I ever encountered was evil. He or she was very nice, very charming, but turned out to be a moral vacuum, with no conscience or sense of right or wrong other than their own perceived interests. A sociopath, if you like. If you think about great evil in the world, it is called by the absence of love and good conscience. Take the Nazis. They had no compassion; and they acted accordingly. And yes, the death camps can rightly be regarded as evil. The warriors of Isis are devoid of love or compassion for their fellow man, unless they conform to their own opinions. That is or manifests itself as a truly wicked act. The closed mind set takes away the humanity – literally de-humanizes. Another dangerous concept, but I will say it.
I have nothing to say about the practicalities of how the situation is to be dealt with. But the Islamic State is an evil institution, and I have learned from bitter experience that evil does not need a reason to attack.
I have no great desire to introduce more war into the world. I don’t really know how IS is to be dealt with. The Middle East is a messy cauldron at the moment, who knows what the consequences of intervention might be. But evil left unchecked will spread. I do not think it is possible to reason with or deal with it. I have seen and experienced such evil.
I would not grieve the utter destruction of the Islamic State and its soldiers. I would welcome it in the name of compassion for my fellow man, like the Kurds and hapless Yazidis. Call me a hypocrite if you like.
Gildas the Monk
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August 24, 2014 at 10:55 am -
“To this add the reasoning of a closed system of thought which believes that it is divinely revealed and trumps all other systems of thought, philosophy or religion, and you get your result.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t take a single word that a Muslim says as true, or having any validity, until one has proven that the kpran is God’s word.
If every Christian, Jew, Hindu etc.etc., along with all the secular people, made an effort to treat Muslims with disdain, until they return to the land of reality… It might help.
This mob of Mediaevalists should be ignored, by governments and regarded as a pariah by grown-ups.
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August 24, 2014 at 11:34 am -
Ignoring them may be a noble thing to do but it will not contain, let alone re-bottle, the jihad genie.
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August 24, 2014 at 9:00 pm -
Who let the dogs out?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection?currentPage=allHighly prescient, your man.
Our policies created the perfect space for ISIL.
The sooner we free ourselves from the mistaken notion that we are the sole bringers of light to the world and our military andc ommercial actions are motivated by the highest principles, while out enemies are” just plain evil”, the better positioned we will be to reach the inevitable deal.
before we bankrupt ourselves in the process.
“Perpetual war for perpetual peace.”
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August 24, 2014 at 11:45 am -
“If every Christian, Jew, Hindu etc.etc., along with all the secular people, made an effort to treat Muslims with disdain…”
I have noticed that a lot of people who advocate this sort of reaction do not count any Moslems in their circle. I’ve lived and worked in quite a few different Moslem countries, felt perfectly comfortable with the majority of people I met, and made friends there.
Every religion spawns its extremists: are we to castigate all Christians because of the likes of Westboro Baptist Church or The Lord’s Resistance Army? By the way, I am an atheist.
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August 24, 2014 at 1:55 pm -
Yvonne,
I agree that treating all Moslems with disdain won’t help much. I am sure there are decent Moslems that don’t deserve that.
BUT, if the “silent but good” Moslems remain silent in the light of the continuing barbarism in the name of their faith, and if they continue to support Mosques and Madrassas in our country that churn out brainwashed verbatim followers of the many ugly parts of the Koran, and if they continue to subvert and radicalise tax-payer funded state schools, then they are as much our enemy as were the “silent” Germans who let Hitler prevail.
Your other comments are ridiculous, they sound like the usual tripe that comes from the BBC: “All Moslems are good (mostly), especially when compared to us nasty westerners and the extremist Christians I cherry picked.”
I seem to recall Saudi-funded Moslem extremists murdering thousands of innocent men and women 13 years ago on 9/11 in a most brutal and barbaric way. Even rational members of the USA’s enemies could see no excuse for 9/11.
Somehow I don’t recall any Westboro Baptist extremists crashing planes into the high rise offices of Saudi, Qatar or Bahrain. Do you?
I don’t recall well-organised Christian terror groups spreading to all continents to murder innocent civilians, such as Moslems have done.
Do the hundreds who were murdered by Moslems in the Madrid train bomb have any meaning to you? Or the 60 or so who were murdered by Moslems in London in 2005? Or the victims murdered by Moslems in the Bali bombings?
In your travels amongst the Moslem communities of the world, that you find so comfortable, did you ever encounter Saudi police forbidding women to drive? Or were you witness to some of the many enlightened Moslem punishments meted out to women for being raped?
In the Moslem communities you came to know, were any of them in the cities and towns of England where mass rapes by Moslem men against white under-aged girls have been occurring (and apologised for and ignored by lefty liberals) for almost decades? But not just in our country, Scandinavian countries with high populations of Moslems are experiencing high numbers of Moslem-on-White rapes.
Of course I don’t apologise for or agree with the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq, that was truly appalling, but it and our western so-called decadence are not justification for international Moslems from Saudi, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Britain, France and Belgium to murder innocent Shiite Moslems, Zoroastrians, Christians, Yazidis and western journalists.
Quite simply, the type of 21st century Islam that has taken hold in the West and in parts of the Middle East, is looking to become as evil an ideology as those that created the statist dictatorships of Hitler/Mussolini/Hirohito and the mass murdering communist regimes of Mao Tse Tung/Stalin/Pol Pot.
Modern Islam is an unpleasant, brutal ideology, not a religion, and certainly (ha) not a religion of peace!
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August 24, 2014 at 6:10 pm -
Spot on, Daedalus. A very large part of the problem is the fact that Muslim communities are permitted, particularly by western governments and media, to disown their extremists; the result is that those extremists — the young radicalized — are not controlled by those best able to control them.
ΠΞ
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August 25, 2014 at 1:13 pm -
Indeed Indonesia with a population of over 200M who identify as Muslim has officially declared that ISIS & their murderous mobs do not represent their religion.
And we should ask who much influence did the far right Christian fundamentalists in the USA ,which includes George Bush Jnr have in creating the mess that is now Iraq.
And is Tony Blair a shining eyed Christian?-
August 25, 2014 at 10:18 pm -
When Dubya was president there was this idea going around that they could bring about the second coming of Christ. I found this link from 2004 which seems to back that up.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-05-11/news/the-jesus-landing-pad/All very well for Dubya and his bedfellow Yo Blair!- but they forgot the bit in the Bible where Jesus says-
Matthew 24:36 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven,but My Father only.” (NKJV)So US foreign policy of that time was based on a misreading of the Bible by Christian Fundamentalists. Nice One guys!
“They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind” Hosea 8 v7
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August 25, 2014 at 11:17 pm -
Please do not put words in my mouth. I said nothing about “nasty westerners”. Nor did I excuse the atrocities of the extremists who claim Islam as their justification. What I said was that, in my years of living and working in Moslem countries, I was comfortable with most of the people that I met there: the ordinary people.
And, since you asked, I do know about the Saudi religious police. My Saudi friends loathed them. However, they had to take care about what they said and to whom: the state had eyes and ears everywhere and a word out of place could have dire results. I do not blame them for their caution. Do you have any idea of what it’s like to live under such a regime? I doubt it, because you are privileged: you live in a country where you can voice your dissent publicly without fear of consequences. For now, that is.
I assume you’ve read the revelations re. NSA/GCHQ, who also have eyes and ears everywhere? Their blanket surveillance raises the possibility that one day, when it suits TPTB, any man-in-the-street may find his past disclosures deemed criminal. The only upside is that it might then engender some sympathy for moderates who were living under repressive state regimes.
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August 24, 2014 at 3:27 pm -
Yvonne, I have also lived in a number of Moslem countries, had Muslim business partners and a divorced Muslim girlfriend .
It is the way their societies have developed over hundreds of years , and the all pervasive influence of their religious teachers, which is the undeniable problem, not the actions of a few nice ones you happen to make friends with !
It really is not possible to have a sensible dialogue with someone who”s primary education has consisted of learning the koran off by heart, especially the bits refering to Kufirs.
European politicians thinking muslims will integrate into their respective societies like Hidus, Sikhs , etc, have done, are deluded fools.-
August 24, 2014 at 7:43 pm -
…of course it is a piece of cake to have a sensible conversation with a Christian Fundamentalist…
…and Islam revealed it’s true colours by initiating the Spanish Inquistion…
Religion, any religion, is as good as the way you absorb and use it…no more, no less…
Fundamentalism, any fundamentalism has a tendency to be an excuse to be ignorant, bigoted and despicable.
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August 26, 2014 at 12:55 am -
I’m sorry that your experiences were less than pleasant. But I do take issue with your comment about “a few nice ones”. I managed to learn enough (halting, imperfect) Arabic to communicate with market sellers, tradesmen, taxi drivers and bedu — most were illiterate; at best, they’d had a Madrassa education. Even so, I found that they were willing to converse with me (not only a kaffir, but a woman!) and treated me with respect.
Many of the tertiary-level academic institutions in the Arabic world now use English as the language of instruction. Thus, in my various workplaces, my University colleagues were bilingual and (as their English was far better than my Arabic) our language of communication in our personal interaction was English. And, when we’d become comfortable enough with each other, the after-dinner talk might turn to politics and religion. I learned a lot from those late-night chats.
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August 24, 2014 at 12:11 pm -
Thank you for an interesting piece. For me the question of goodness, and how we define it is central to any question of spirituality. We always give words our own meanings (I’ve always been impressed by G.F. Kelly’s theory of personal constructs) and therefore we need more information to understand what someone is saying.
I’m familiar with the God = Good position which you ascribe to the adherents of the Islamic State; and in my experience also applies to many evangelical Christians (and possibly other religions). In this case it is not possible to discuss “goodness” because it is simply discovering what God wants though some form of revelation. It rather cuts out any further use for the word “good”, although it does allow further arguments from the canon (e.g. other scholars say… etc.). Personal revelation is more difficult to deal with (“God told me directly that x is evil”) although that’s easier to ignore unless the person concerned has a position power.
For the first person the question “Is God good” has no meaning because it means “Is God God”. And that way all kinds of pain and suffering are possible.
It is interesting to see you reverse this position so essentially the equation becomes Good = God. Is this an aggregation of lots of individual “goods” or some form of Platonic overarching “Good-ness”? Surely Good is just an aspiration. We can never know what is really a good deed. For example if I could give my children a huge amount of money would it make them secure philanthropists or might it lead them to gambling and drug-abuse.
Like you, however, the worst evil I’ve seen comes from those who define Me=Good and therefore never address moral questions at all.
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August 24, 2014 at 12:43 pm -
Chris, that’s exactlty the kind of informed comment I like about this site. I shall ponder.
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August 24, 2014 at 12:11 pm -
I take no pleasure in depriving decent people of their comfort, but I cannot help quoting the famous and beautifully reasoned epigram of the admirable philosopher Epicurus (Epikouros):
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”-
August 24, 2014 at 12:46 pm -
Because God gave us free will, and in one sense does not care at all what we do with it. At the heart of all creation is a paradox.
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August 24, 2014 at 2:30 pm -
Free will doesn’t help with the questions of Epicurus.
Why did God give us free will if he knew the result would include evil ?
And you also have the tricky problem of defining “freedom” and “will” and determining whether we do have either or both of them.
Is there any real difference between the fighting in Syria and the wars that go on between neighbouring ant colonies ? I think not.
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August 24, 2014 at 6:09 pm -
In Shakespeare’s time evil was the name for a privy, a lavatory.
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August 24, 2014 at 6:19 pm -
There is, of course a simple theological answer to the questions of Epicurius:
It would suggest therefore that God is neither good, nor evil but rather impartial and objective.
Good is, in and of itself totally ineffectual without a grain of evil, whereas evil is simply boring without a tang of good to give it spice and interest.
“Clockwork Orange” caught that rather well.
As I read it, Jesus had the most terrible, of the wall, temper when roused, and asked a whole fishing fleet to abandon their families to certain destitution (not generally considered admirable behaviour in any circumstances) and follow him…but without those traits, and what they added to the rest of his personality would he have earned any kind of remembrance at all??
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August 24, 2014 at 7:24 pm -
Actually “Clockwork” was bog-standard Augustinianism – an odd one for the” British Pelagian”, Mr Burgess. Evil is not a summum, or a state in itself,which can be regarded as the counter-weight of “good” but a defect in relations, freely chosen. In other words, it is a process. BTW, you can’t “be” good any more than you “be” evil. Only God “is”. You can attempt to conform your will to His, or not.
To think it is would be Manichaeism and heretical, blah-blah.
As to why God permits evil to arise or for people to make wrong moral choices, well to create a universe where every one automatically chose to do the right thing would actually be to bind Himself to the laws of his own creation – in other words to subordinate Himself to what He had created. Of course, if you think the purpose of creation is for human beings to have a lovely time and nothing ever to go wrong for them, then you have misunderstood why God brought creation into being. At least according to Sts Thomas Acquinas and Augustus.
Disclaimer: you don’t need to believe one word of this, but Anthony Burgess, that bad Catholic boy did. This is classic Catholic theology and not an original contribution to the debate.
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August 24, 2014 at 7:46 pm -
Amazing! Do you know I had no idea they had invented clockwork at all in the 4th century?
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August 24, 2014 at 8:35 pm -
Lol, it’s unknown what these guys were capable of.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
All our thinking is derived from the Greeks, filtered through the Xtian scholars with a bit of help from Arabic numerists.
Not that you’d notice it if you watched UTV.
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August 24, 2014 at 11:46 pm -
Can you get UTV in Spain?
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August 25, 2014 at 12:01 am -
???
If you are on your holliers, try ITV I-PLayer, downloaded through a proxy connection. Assuming you are desperate for Frank doing the weather forecast.
Or in other words, don’t get cute with me
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August 24, 2014 at 1:51 pm -
Years of theological study and decades of hitchhiking down the Damascus road , a lonesome cowboy riding the Sinear Range with a handful of nasty shiny sharpness and a bucketful of redemption-reneging on deals with God as I go, has led me to this definition of EVIL;
What is Evil? Answer: a 4 letter English word from the Old English ‘yfel’.
No. I’m not being flippant. Personally I prefer to think of evil in terms of the biblical word for ‘sin’ which means something akin to taking the wrong turn on the moral Sat Nav or , aptly, missing the paper cut out target of divinity.
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August 24, 2014 at 3:03 pm -
@Gildas, even as a committed atheist, or perhaps even BECAUSE I am an atheist, I worked out long ago that faith is an emotion. It works like an emotion…you don’t get to pick it, it lands on you whether you will or no and you are stuck with it, deny or not.
The only faith I think that I have is in the belief that each man creates the god he needs. (I am not sure how relevant that is to what I have to say, but let’s leave it there and see?).
I have only really started looking into ISIS since they were in the frame for killing my little sisters (all sex workers are sisters, we have to be, and Iraq even has a long tradition of former sex workers caring for the younger ones) a few weeks ago:
http://mymythbuster.wordpress.com/myth-sex-workers-in-iraq-are-very-different-to-us/All I am seeing piecemeal, is coercion and evil. They want to force genital mutilation on educated Islamic feminists in Mosul. They kill gentle Christian Journalists…they are terrorising everyone they touch (the vast majority of whom are Muslims) .
They are nothing to do with Islam. I have always had great respect for the Prophet, and if I were able to believe in any God at all (I am not) I would be Muslim, because it is the way of sense and reason and I can relate to it. Even as I got through the documentary you gave me a link to I am more and more certain of what I believed at first sight, the ISIS would absolutely horrify the Prophet.
Just as the Inquisition, and the Magdalene Laundries (and today’s lucrative political antics by their descendants) would horrify Jesus.
Let us then call faith and emotion and draw a comparison to falling in love.
You can fall in love, or in faith and join yourself to it’s object for life, or you can find an object of faith, or love which you can use to your advantage and bind it to you for as long as it is useful.
You can share your love, or faith for others to take as they will, or you can shackle others to your faith as a means to do with as you will.
It is easy to see which is (roughly) good, and which is (roughly) evil but far harder to identify where the line of difference is to be drawn, and how it is to be identified.
Evil cannot be the absence of emotion, because that would define objectivity as evil, when, often it is it’s true opposite.
Evil cannot be the absence of God when an atheist such as myself can be profoundly aware of Evil with no sense of God whatsoever.
I think, perhaps, evil is the absence of altruism combined with coercion, power without responsibility, proclamation without truth.
I doubt if evil is a simple thing at all.
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August 24, 2014 at 5:00 pm -
Wherever you find angry and powerless young men, they are likely to be attracted to some radical movement that gives purpose and standing to their lives, whether this be Jihad or the IRA or Jews for Jesus. If religion is involved it is easy to cherry pick lines from ancient texts to justify almost any iniquity.
If you were in favour of reuniting Ireland, but didn’t approve of the atrocities committed by the IRA, would you have spoken out, or would that have made you a target for retribution? Sensible Muslims are probably scared to speak out.
In Christianity, forgiveness is recognized as being more psychologically healing than bearing a grudge, which probably makes it a more technically advance religion than most. My own family was profoundly affected when my grandfather was stone to death by a mob in Mosul, Iraq in 1939, leaving my father and his siblings as young orphans, but I have never heard anyone in the family EVER discuss anger or bitterness aimed at the somewhat primitive mentality of the residents of those parts.
However in the USA, one of the reasons why the death penalty is retained is that apparently even after a generation has gone by and the legal processes and appeals are exhausted, it is necessary for the descendants of the victim to obtain what is called “closure” by witnessing the execution of the (now usually) middle-aged murderer by being present at the execution. Personally I can’t understand why people would put their lives into limbo for 20 years waiting for revenge that may never happen, or when natural causes might intervene, I am just reporting.
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August 24, 2014 at 6:22 pm -
Interesting point, Jonathan, about capital punishment. Surely the efficacy of a punishment is a function of its immediacy. This is why there must be no delay in stamping out this vermin that calls itself the Caliphate.
ΠΞ
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August 24, 2014 at 6:56 pm -
There’ll be others along in a New York minute, ready to take their place.
The US went a very long way to help create ISIL.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/20/kuhner-how-obama-arms-al-qaeda/
I’d rather look at how our policy in the ME is sowing “Dragon’ s Teeth”. Political problems have political solutions: the metaphysical problems I leave to the metaphysicians.
Mr David Davies and Ms Yvette Cooper have both made quite good practical suggestions for how we discourage wanna-be British jihadis from taking a gap-yah among the Soldiers of the Crescent. That’s what we want to do, isn’t it?
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August 24, 2014 at 5:20 pm -
All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. Killing others is evil, and should be avoided; but when the options are killing a relatively small number of evil extremists, or standing by during the killing of a much greater number of generally innocent, peaceful people, the choice is clear. The greater good of the greater number means that killing – or at least stopping – the evil is necessary. What ISIS/ISIL/whatever is doing isn’t remotely spiritual, compassionate or loving, it’s pure evil.
I’m not sure you were being hypocritical, though I do understand your qualms. You were just being realistic.
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August 24, 2014 at 5:30 pm -
Thank you for your writing Gildas. However I don’t come here to read promotion for that piece of New Age tosh “A Course in Miracles” (supposedly dictated by Jesus to a 20th century Jewish atheist). Perhaps best understood as an amalgam of misunderstood Christian Science and misunderstood Catholicism, this major part of the nonsense industry has luckily been intelligently and diligently researched by experts. New readers might like to start here – http://www.skepdic.com/cim.html – or here – http://www.inplainsite.org/html/a_course_in_miracles.html.
Aware that by writing this I may trigger howling reactions from well-meaning folk whose lives have apparently been improved by this stuff, I apologise in advance for hurting anyone’s feelings and promise never to post on this subject again, or to respond to follow up comments (so you can have the last word). But I couldn’t stand by and let twaddle creep on to the record without saying something.
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August 24, 2014 at 6:26 pm -
I think you’ll find, Geoff, that, what ever any-one might think of your particular point of view, this hostelry entertains all and respects the freedom to express all views.
At least … I hope so.
ΠΞ
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August 24, 2014 at 6:41 pm -
I’m with you, Pericles – this place is both intelligent and tolerant, a rare combination which keeps the intelligent and tolerant popping in and enjoying the content, from whatever source or opinion. We all learn from views different from our own, we may never agree with them, but we still learn: sometimes it helps to modify our own views, often it doesn’t, but the process itself is stimulating.
Brother Gildas is particularly stimulating, always writing with knowledge, curiosity and passion – I don’t always agree, but I always enjoy – I’ll be back for the next round.
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August 24, 2014 at 7:46 pm -
Basically what the Course teaches (for anyone unfamiliar with it) is that physical life on Earth is really just a “nightmare” the collective human race is having while in a state of psychic sleep, (text pg. 18 and throughout) everything you see around you is an illusion,(lesson #14 and throughout) that sin and guilt are not real but, “solely an invention in your own mind”(lesson #70) that, you can neither hurt others, nor be hurt (text pg. 96 and throughout)… that “you can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you”… if you see your neighbor as sinless, “you will be released entirely from all effects of sin” (text pg. 474) that “the reality of everything is total harmlessness” (text pg. 158) … that you alone are the sole cause of anything hurtful that’s ever happened to you (lesson #23, #304, and throughout) … that, “The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist.”(lesson #14 and throughout).
With the greatest respect to anyone engaged in study of the Course, I have frequently attained many of the same insights after having consumed the better part of two bottles of Chardonnay.
“… that (I) alone (am) the sole cause of anything hurtful that’s ever happened to ( me) ..” is the one that strikes the morning after, when I lift my fuzzled head from the pillow.
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August 24, 2014 at 6:27 pm -
“It occurred to me that I might be being a complete hypocrite. … Call me a hypocrite if you like.”
I don’t think so, Brother Gildas. Perhaps you were just addressing realistically the other strand of the rope (as stated by Engineer).
Yours seems to be largely the theological strand (it would, in my view, be a travesty of language to use ‘theosophical’ and thereby to juxtapose religion and wisdom); there’s another: the logistical one, which is my (military) view of the problem.
Religious extremists — one might say all extremists — are inimical to life and, just as, for example, smallpox, must be eradicated. Once one has overcome the distaste felt by 21st.-century westerners for that task, one need only address the problem itself … ignoring the rights and wrongs of this god or that one; of this dictum or that tradition. The Chinese, at least, seem to have grasped this fact.
One might be tempted — returning briefly to your theological theme — to do as the ancients did and simply to proscribe all but ‘our own gods’ … but that’s not my field. That might indeed be hypocritical.
(As to the ebola problem, by the way: humans are not the normal host of the virus, whose life cycle appears usually to involve only certain animals, sometimes becoming epizootic in them. Humans are ‘aberrant’ hosts in this and similar outbreaks or epidemics; a danger is that a species of ebolavirus will evolve that can cause permanent serious harm to humans without killing them (rather as wounding enemy combatants can be more effective than killing them).)
ΠΞ
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August 24, 2014 at 7:06 pm -
I think evil is simply the product of the mind of man, influenced in believers in the Abrahamic religions by ancient beliefs which picture a God very much like man himself, with a similar will and with a special regard for mankind above all other forms of life, even the other primates with which man shares most of his DNA. What huge conceit! Beliefs like those are incapable of assimilating scientific discoveries about the grandeur of the universe we live in, which surely demand a correspondingly grand thought about the nature of its creator, if there is one.
For what it’s worth, I do believe in the existence of God, the God of the poets, an infinite God both transcendent and immanent in which “….we live, and move, and have our being…” (The Acts 17.28). I don’t believe God intervenes within our affairs as It (never the anthropomorphic He) is often implored to do, except to the extent that Its presence within us may act as an influence. I think man has a dual nature: the ego and the divine. In most of us the divine is imprisoned within the shell of ego (as Browning wrote in “Paracelsus”) but is ultimately accessible, as the lives of the great prophets and mystics have shown. Christianity (and perhaps Sufi Islam too, although I don’t know about that) contains traces of this kind of belief, often expounded in English verse. If it were more widely held, perhaps the future for our species would look less bleak than it does now.
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August 25, 2014 at 12:56 am -
Thank you, Gildas, for a most heartwarming and uplifting article. Whilst I am not a Christian in the accepted sense of the word, there is nothing in your thoughtful and perceptive article that I would disagree with. I especially warmed to you mentioning the well-known, but little understood axiom, that ‘God is Love.’ Or one might say with equal truth that ‘Love is God’. As you say, one either ‘gets it’ or one does not. I strongly suspect that our esteemed landlady ‘gets it’ too, but wisely keeps that particular aspect of her ‘light’ under a bushel…
God bless you and keep you, Sir!
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August 25, 2014 at 1:20 am -
At the risk of de-railing this thread, my answer to Epicurus’ proposition would be, “Yes, He (or it could be ‘she’) is both able and willing. All the evil comes from Man. And if you were to ask me why the Creator permits man to choose evil, I would probably answer that it is because it is necessary to experience evil in *some* form before one can appreciate its opposite, and, of course, vice-versa.
In case this sounds a little callous I would add that I personally find great comfort in the well-known verses from the Scottish Play:
“Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”In short, we are, as the Bard says in another of his masterly plays, merely actors in a play so convincing and compelling, nearly all believe it to be real. Rather like those, whom I am reliably informed, actually believe that the characters in EastEnders and other ‘soaps’ are ‘real’ people. Shakespeare knew better when he wrote:
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleepFrom which, perchance, some of us may awaken into quite a different dream…
On that note, I bid you all, and our dear landlady goodnight and sweet dreams!
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August 25, 2014 at 1:46 am -
“I have no great desire to introduce more war into the world. I don’t really know how IS is to be dealt with”……….no point worrying Gildas, the government has this well in hand. Ms May the home secretary will be giving all beheaders an ASBO when they return to their life of welfare-sucking in the UK. Serves them right too!
No comment so far whether the beheaders of drummer Rigby might expect to be ASBOed.
Osama bin Laden said it perfectly ” when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse”. The west under pathetic leadership of camoron and Obambi is demonstrably the weak horse. -
August 25, 2014 at 8:53 am -
I think they like cutting heads off because it scares the crap out of people without needing much advanced equipment.
Think of the Romans; the cultured, civilised Romans, all those nice statues and art and literature. They crucified, they disembowelled, they threw to wild animals, they maimed, eviscerated, flogged and flayed. Constantine’s punishment for governesses who allowed their charges to be deflowered was to pour molten lead down their throat- good, Christian Constantine the Great.
You want to terrify people, you do terrifying things to them. I don’t think much more explanation is required, really.
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August 26, 2014 at 11:58 am -
Spot on. If there’s one thing everyone now knows about Isis it’s that they cut people’s heads off.
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August 26, 2014 at 12:29 pm -
Romans? There’s a much more recent exemplar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rYSYZmWr80
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August 25, 2014 at 5:48 pm -
Just wanted to make a historical point about the fishermen that Jesus recruited as his disciples. These were not poor men by any means. They were quite wealthy, making good money by dint of their occupation – they pretty much controlled the fishing fleet on the lake. Zebedee, father of James and John, owned his own boats, for example. So, no families were left ‘destitute,’ they were already well-provided for. More here on the fishermen of the Galilee, and why Jesus selected them. http://www.americancatholic.org/newsletters/sfs/an0704.asp
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