Religion and violence.

My new article will present the view that the extreme institutionalised violence evident today (genocide, through xenophobia) has its roots in Abramanite religions. This is evident at present in ISIS and similar religion-motivated political forces.

The connection between religion and violence has always been immense.

Violence and Religion

I will soon begin a new essay on Violence and Religion, published in a month's time, on the change in Wisdom Literature in the ancient world from the wisdom of men (predominantly men) to the wisdom of god (s). This change, I believe, brought in violent punishments for breaking social taboos, largely based on sexual behaviour. This remains with us.

Poem-ying cao

My thoughts are like clouds
drifting slowly
My thoughts are like fire
Burning fiercely
My thoughts are like air
Invisible but life-giving
My thoughts are mine.

sun sets-ying cao

When the sun sets
the snow rises
When the moon descends
flowers grow
As a man dies
A child is born
As a man dies
A baby cries


Ying Cao

The gullible Christian lady.

Going about my daily grind, I fell to talking with a nice middle-class Christian lady. I asked her why Christians believe that Jesus advocated marriage when there is nothing in the Gospels to support that. She adamantly claimed that was not true, but failed to provide any evidence.

Why is the religious mind at least one step away from actuality? Why do so many support a religion or cult that they know little about, investing it with their own prejudices? They, like Christian fundamentalists and too many Moslems, take literally what is written and then/or make up swathes of material.  

NEVERMORE-ghosts and whatnot

Walking over the moor on a sunny day, the wind at my back,

I saw before me a woman over-burdened by a voluminous rucksack

She trudged along face against the wind

Reached a gulley filled with bramble bushes and turned around a bend.

I looked for her when I reached her point of departure

But could see nothing. In fact as I looked I became increasingly unsure

That I seen her that day. The moor was full of mist,

And in truth, I was fairly pissed. 

Walking over the moor the following day

I searched the land for the best possible way

To reach Croven, a village first settled by the ancient Brits,
Whom the Romans had routinely cut to bits,

Where I had left my wife and car.

Going around in circles, up and down, lost in the mire

Of marsh and bog, the mists kept descending

And my return to Groven, wife and car, seemed never-ending

When I saw the woman approach me again

The rucksack straddling her back like a fin

I called out in a tired and plaintive voice

She walked through me over the purple grass in a trice

Stopped, looked back, noticed my agonised expression of a man completely lost,

Squealed, dropped the rucksack and began screaming about a ghost

I did the same belting headlong into the marsh

Dying swiftly there, which I thought was kinda harsh!

I still see the woman when I trudge a sad spectre through the moor

But we greet each other now, knowing each is Nevermore.

 Rod Simon

Jesus, or the Christ figure, was, according to the Gospels, a magician and healer who brought a message of the Apocalypse. It was, for him and his followers, the end of days. He required his followers to reject their families and the temporal. Husbands rejected wives and children. They no longer looked after them. Given this, it is strange that Christian churches, whatever creed, propagate marriage as an essential part of Christianity.

Jesus followed John the Baptist. There appears to have been established an organisation in parts of Lebanon, Syria and Anatolia that concerned itself with John's message. Christians used that organisation to spread their own message.

Like many preachers of the time his  message was supported by widows or bored rich women. In fact, women were central to the message. Jesus would instruct 500 men at a time in the secret knowledge of his cult and send them out to preach and gain converts. Women could also be disciples, as clearly was Mary Magdalen. The Jesus cult was specifically Jewish. He had no interest in the gentiles-calling them dogs. The essential idea was for his disciples to obtain inner and outer perfection for the coming end-perfection of thought and action.

As so much of his career was spent on healing, was Jesus establishing a medical school? Were his followers taught medicine as well as the nature of god?

RISING

The rising sea floundered on the shore,
circled by birds. As the sun rose,
the heat increased. Flaming, corrosive spikes
struck the land.
Ravenous, the sea spurted forward
consuming the rocks before it.

POEM

 A bit of geography:

 

A terrible noise rising and falling

Cutting through the wind. It was a

Very bad day. Only before war or during

 

its sullen aftermath, are there

Such days.

In the valley, between tree stubs, were

The bodies of long dead men. Now

Ghosts waiting for their respective funerals

With expanding stomachs and darkening

Complexions.

 

Yellow roots spreading swiftly across

The valley, protected by immense oaks. Sunshine

Filling the sky like a reflection. Succulent unbothered

Grass. The weeping

Of undiscovered winds

The call of the past.

 

In such a land centuries

Have left their spittle

Memories have faded

Like empty laughter at a funeral.

The broken, fragmented landscape

Declares human violence

And human domesticity.

Each event the examination of the one before.

 

We walked up this road

Among these ochre leaves,

Among these expanding roots,

Primary coloured flowers and swirling daffodils.

We witnessed time evaporate in the chemical

Obduracy of love. We arrived at the end,

A dusty path that rarely went straight,

And said ‘goodbye’.  In such instances, time

Ends with a caress.

 

jia coa-poem

Religion is like a storm,
powerful but ephemeral
causing destruction, bringing sadness:
distorting behaviour.
Immersed in old books full of lies and myths
people kill for pleasure.

Violence and peace

In the Times today Dr Fareed Ahmad defends Islam from the charge of embedded violence by asserting that Islam only permits violence in self-defence. The problem is that Bin Laden's insistence on violence was for self-defence against infidels in Saudi Arabia, there to protect the country from Hussain, and is an argument commonly used by extremists.

A religion should surely not advocate violence at all?

He omits, by the way, violence urged against apostates. But as any criticism or rejection of Islam is seen as an attack, the self-defence position is applied there.