RELIGION!
(brace yourself!!!)
It's like standing outside Madison Square Garden and from there you can hear thousends of people inside arguing, shouting, fighting and swearing at and with each other loudly and clearly. The arguement is theological, details of belief called into question and pulled apart, scripture shouted out of the context of peace and love to win an un-winable debate and make an un-makable point. In those conditions would you really want to enter that arena, would you really want to open the door and go inside.
Disclaimer:
It seems to me that this is one of the worlds tender spots or 'tinder boxes' and while I will try to treat the subject with the reverence it deserves, there is an outside chance, that if you are the sort of person who is both extreme with their religious beliefs, and easily angered or offended, then please either read with caution or not at all. I am not a theologian, I am not a priest, I am not member of a religous sect. I am merely a citizen of the world remarking on how the machinary seems to move around him. It is not my intention to cause offence, and if I do then let me apologise now. :-)
That said,
'Jesus was born in the middle east, how come in paintings he always looks like one of the Bee Gees'. D.L.Hughly Studio 60
Along time ago, in a land ravaged by injustice and hatred there was born a child born in a stable in bethlehem. He grew into a man who then wandered around telling everyone who would listen to him, that we should all love each other, that we should look out for one another, that there was a god in heaven who loved us, cherished us, and didn't want to see human beings suffer. Such was the everyday reaction to these teaching's, that the man in question built up quite a following and became a clear threat to the established Roman order of the time. The usual shannanigans ensued, a P.R hate campaign was started where this man was accused of heressy by the priests who suposedly served god as he did, but nothing the establishment said about him was heeded by the people who had grown to love him. The Government then did, what any other dictatorial resigme would do under similar circumstances, They put him to death. Nailed him to a cross with a crown of thorns on his head, in this case, as if that wasn't enough, a Roman Centurian then saw fit to stab him while he was crusified.
Of this much at least we can be sure, everything else is a bit more sketchy.
The trouble with organised religion is that a good two thousend years have passed since the enlightened one trod the earth and stories of what the man said & what he did is not only dependent on the interpretation of the chronicallers of the time but also the people who have subsequently translated the chronicles from Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek. Plus, one also has to take into account how the vested interests of the established religious orders of the time might dictate the content of such literature, it all has a profound effect on the descriptions of what this man might have done, and his message.
Thus with different interpretations of his message floating around, there were bound to be discussions, discussions turned to arguements, arguments became heated, heated arguements became wars. The ultimate irony is that a war can erupt over, what is essentially, the content of a lesson of peace. All this before we've even moved on from Christianity. Throw other religions into the mix, like Islam, Judeism, & Catholicism and the wars get longer and, the fighting, more widespread.
'A man came to earth eons ago, preaching that we should love each other and we spend the next two thousend years, arguing, fighting and dieing over 'exactly how he said it'. When you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy' Micheal J. Strazinsky. ( taken from the crusade episode, 'Ruling from the Tomb'. )
The Crusades.
One of the darkest periods of the christian faith, seen at the time as an elightenment mission, to take the word of Christ to the heathens of the middle east. Firstly, the greatest myth surrounding King Richard the Lionheart was that he was possibly, the greatest king that england had ever had. The truth was that Richard hated england with a passion, and the papel authority, given to knights and kings all across europe to take part in these 'Crusades' was all the excuse he needed to spend as little time as possible in the dank, grey pit that he saw england as. In the ten years of Richard the Lionheart's rule over england he spent a total of...... Just over six months here and while the greater part of his body is buried in Fontevraud Abbey, Anjou in France, his 'gizzards' or entrails were buried in england as an insult to, as he saw it, that hateful country. Mind you, this 'buggering off to fight the good fight' attitude did end up giving the english one of thier favourite folk legends, 'Robin Hood'. That's by the by of course, cause the whole crusading idea was just used as an excuse, for those taking part, to rape, pillage and murder their way across foriegn lands, forming christian settlements as they went. Mind you, saying that, the crusades may well have been justifiable in a war mongerer's eyes because one of the holiest sites in the christian faith had been lost in one of the many wars that plagued that region of the world. King Davids temple in Jerusalem was, legend has it, the resting place of the Ark of the Covernant, the vessel in which the broken tablets the Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai, on which the ten commandments were written. This site was lost in 587ad, destroyed by the Babylonian hoards.
Truth is that Jesus Christ is present in most religions from Europe, through Arabia to the Far East. His presence is obvious in Christianity, Catholasism and The Church of England but in the Kuran, Jesus apears as one of the most heralded of profits, and of course a false profit to Judeaism. His message is pretty consistant throughout these religions which does beg the more obvious question as to why have these religions been at each others throats all this time? The obvious answer would be power, power over the people of the world. Religions are controlled by people after all, whether it's the Pope in the Vatican, Dusty Iotoller's in the case of the Islamic faiths, King Henry the eighth for the Church of England or the Sephadi in the case of Judeaism. Whether they saw the control of the people in each of the provinces of each religion as threatened by the other religious faiths, is a debatable point but there is much to be gained from war and there always has been.
The amount of money needed to bring clean water to every person on the face of the planet, would roughly equal the U.S.A's defence budget for three weeks, or two years of Microsoft's profits. To put it another way, if you cauld spend one million dollars a year from the birth of Christ to the present day, it would still be painfully insignifcant next to the amount America has spent arming itself since world war 2. Saying that, it didn't stop the U.S's armed forces getting thier arses handed to them in the Vietnam war but once again I'm getting a little sidetracked. I guess the point I am trying to make is that human beings seem to define themselves with confrontation and conflict and religion evokes a lot of emotion in those discussing it.
I have recently had cause to comment on a You Tube entry by a man named Matt Slick of a group called C.A.L.M Christian Apologetic Research Ministry, in my first encounter he was bad mouthing a book by William Paul Young called 'The Shack'. Now, in the book, the father of a murdered child is invited to where his daughter died by God, and during the spiritual and emotional journey, the principle character not only meets God, but Jesus and the Holy Ghost as well. Given the subject matter it is easy to see how a radio evangialist such as Slick would get his knickers in such a twist about it, but even I was suprised and saddened with the furosity that Slick went at this 'fictional' book. Slick quoted verse after verse of the bible to show how the shack was a mis-interpretation of god and the word of god. Truth is the shack is a good book, a spiritual book, a book about healing deep unhealable wounds, and to have this evangialist pull it apart because it didn't precisely follow the word of scripture demonstrated, in my view, what is fundamentally wrong with relgion these days.
The 'evangelist', by and large, is how religion is seen by the general population purely because that is the side of religion mostly seen by the general population. Not only does it end up tainting the message they are trying to convey but also it gives the rest of christianity a really bad name. The same is true of Islam, ruined by Muslim Clerics like Abu Hazma al-Mazri, preaching completely overblown messages of hatred about the enemies of Islam, completely oblivious to the notion that, from a conversional perspective, He himself is Islams greatest enemy. Not only does this man completely mis-interpret the Koran to serve his own ends but, to casual onlookers, he is yet another raving lunatic and another reason to give religion in general, a very, very wide berth. Religion has been so mis-interpreted throughout history by poeple with the power to do so, and a vested interest in preserving the old order of things, that the bible, the koran & the torah have ultimately become untrustworthy to many, symbols of control and conflict that have ended up repelling people on mass.
There is little wonder why religion has become so rejected by the greater general public. The crucifix is the worlds most recognisable religious symbol and yet it has become synonimous with war, oppression and death, and who is to blame for that? The Vatican? The Church in general? Every King, Queen or Emporer that wanted to scare thier people with tales of fire and brimstone in order to make them to behave? Whatever it was it has, not only, marginalised the believers of the world but also God in his many forms. The churches around the globe are nothing without the people who fill them but that fact seems to have been lost on the heads of these places. Churches are there to provide a theolgical connection with your god, not to tell you time after time that your going to burn in hell for all eternity. The truth is that if you are a believer, then believe. Whatever faith you have, believe it with all your heart. If you are a retractor, then retract. Doesn't mean that some day a form of god might not begin to grow in your heart, nothing is set in stone after all. Whatever it is you believe, believe it, but don't get angry at others for believing something different. Don't badger them, belittle them or try to turn them to your way of thinking for that road leads to oppression, merely discuss your views, present them the best way you can, and walk away. Remember, they have the right to believe just as you do, and those beliefs are no less valid than yours. There is so little point in wasting your precious life on this planet bickering over differences in detail. Oh, and believe with one eye open, if you are asked to do something in the name of your religion, don't regard it as dis-respect to question it. After all, your god would not have given you the ability to reason and question if he did not require you to use it. For that ability gives you the freedom of choice, and that really is a gift.
God. "remember I can't interfere with free will',
Man. "can I ask why?"
God. "yes you can, that's the beauty of it!"
Bruce Almighty.
