An insight from an anonymous commenter on the Mid East war religion and on religion itself.. Islam never can be wrong. Thats the kind of absolutist babble that has led throughout history from one holy war to the next, with my own religion (Christianity) no doubt the worst offender. The Bible, the holy books, the scriptures, the Psalms, histories, etc.--all were written by mortal fallible men (the gender specific probably fits here). Theyre full of contradictions, exaggerations, distortions. They kept changing according to the needs of different men (i.e. religious councils at different historical moments). Then we have all of the translations, which are as much interpretations as they are a scientific, cultural-neutral transfer of the original document into a more user-accessible language. In the beginning was the Word, but it became man, and in the process it went through numerous permutations that can obfuscate as much as clarify the original meanings . Jesus never wrote a single word. Nor, for that matter, did Socrates, the father of Western philosophy. But at least Socrates had a student named Plato, whose writing is often so compelling that its easy to believe he was an A+ student in his note-taking. Jesuss story and message, on the other hand, were constructed centuries after his death by committees which, as Martin Luther would show, were often ignorant about the invisible church and the role of faith in the road to salvation. But Luther also made mistakes of his own (the Reformation may have been one). The only absolute pronouncements that carry weight are those that link Islam, Christianity, Judaism by their common heritage: all 3 worship the same God (by any name--Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, da boss--), all trace their very existence and identities to the God that Abraham worshipped. After that, come the arguments--about the Trinity, etc. But thats good, as long as the believer comes to each controversy with a goal of discovering a noble truth. Religion is not a set of rules that must be followed (leave that to the boy scouts and U.S. marines) Religion is a longing, a reaching, a desire for assurance from a superterrestrial, unbounded, loving power that can be in the world, guiding us in the here and now, yet is not of this world but of a spiritual realm beyond human attempts to represent it in language.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:47:27 +0000
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