Read this quote by Voltaire today on Open Culture, in the wake of the terrorist atrocities in Paris last night:
Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities
While the post linked above is no doubt in support of those hurt in Paris by ISIS terrorist it should be noted that Voltaire was referring to religion in general – or perhaps just to Christians as he also said:
Tout homme sensá, tout homme de bien, doit avoir la secte chritienne en horreur.
(Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.)
Voltaire
Thus the cry – and defence – of every religion is of this form:
"The {insert ANY religious book or God or figure} says…"
Y’think!
Yes, indeed. But what do YOU think, Mr Random Jihadi?
I didn’t ask what some person is said to have said, millennia ago, in a long-dead dialect or language, (quoted long after their death).
Nor should I need to point out that their wisdom (allegedly the word of GOD no less) was, over many centuries, edited and rewritten a hundred times over by a succession of men in power. People with power, wealth, position and their own agenda and interpretations differing from the last editor.
If it is indeed the word of God, what right has any mortal to amend it!?
No, I asked what YOU think! You, an individual with your own life, brain, thoughts, think – without the baggage of religion or doctrine or cultural pressure.
Holy Romans, Batman! KAPOW!
Nobody – not even the Vatican’s accountants know the extent of the churches vast wealth – guesstimated to be trillions of dollars. Try Googling the ‘worth of the Roman church’, it’s an eye-opener! Who else can find a couple of million, forgot down the back of a proverbial sofa? Let alone afford to spend, in a single year, $170bn on things like healthcare, schools and parishes, (American Catholic church, in 2010).
While ISIS are, without question, a nasty piece of work, the issue isn’t one faith or sect, it’s the mindless support and belief in religion, in the idea that there is some wonderful afterlife for those that do ‘the lord’s good work‘. For instance:
Good Catholics – historically burning heretics, leaving their entire wealth to the church to buy redemption.
Righteous jihadis’ – burning heretics, leaving their entire wealth to the Caliphate.
Or even the Scientologists – surprisingly this time not burning heretics that we know of, but still asking for the wealth of their followers.
Take Tibet, home of the monks and Dalai Lama. Peaceful people, also not big on burning people alive. Met a Tibetan guy in a hospital once, just a cleaner – that spoke seven languages fluently. Anyway, very spiritual people – and when they have a baby, their nearest high lama comes round, blesses the child – and takes a fee (or at least an offering) for helping name it, thank you very much.
Can anyone else see a pattern forming here?
This isn’t exactly the Chamber’s or Oxford definition, and fair to argue it’s a biased entry, still, the urban dictionary, talking of Scientology, sums it all up perfectly if a tad bluntly:
Basically, it’s a falsetto ‘religion’ in which eternal happiness is attained by donating all of your money to the leaders.
Founded by L. Ron Hubbard as a way to scheme money and make a fast buck off his books. One of the ‘holiest’ days in this religion is Hubbard’s birthday.
Because most celebrities such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta are too stupid to realize it, they belong to this group.
If you even THINK of joining Scientology, you should be kicked in the balls …hard.
Hajj time?
Having had a bash at Christians let’s take one more look at Islam. Forget Disneyland, pretend I’ve been converted to Islam and like a good little Muslim (if they’ll let me in), I’ll make my pilgrimage to Mecca and pre-book a room at the Abraj Kudai hotel:
With its 45 storeys, 10,000 rooms, 70 restaurants and 4 helipads, the multi-billion dollar Abraj Kudai will be the biggest hotel in the world. The top five stories are reserved for the Saudi Royal family, but that’s OK, I can slum in another of the five-star suites.
Point being? There’s a LOT of money invested in religion. A LOT of profit if you happen to be in the loop.
So, yes, Paris. Quelle horreur!
That and all that follows in these coming weeks is a pattern. Predictable. Preordained almost, but no, that would imply fate; there is no hand of god involved here. These are just power struggles, fuelled by wealth and ego and hidden agendas, paid for with the lives and blood of the innocents, the bystanders – and the guilty.
Guilty is a point of view. The suicide bombers no doubt see themselves as heroes of their cause, destined for paradise. (As Morticia Addams said, "Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly").
They aren’t, of course, they are gullible and frankly a bit stupid, or at least unthinking!
What is it that turns a healthy, normal baby into a psychopath? Psychology has been asking that question for decades, what with the atrocities of the second world war and all that. Or Vietnam, or…
What makes an ordinary person do these things? Social sciences and historians look for answers. "It’s situational", they say. And certainly, that’s true in many cases. "It’s in the genes", say others. Again, a certain element of truth as some people – a tiny percentage – are wired wrong.
Stig of the dump?
Consider carefully this entry in Wikipedia on Hira, a cave near Mecca:
It is notable for being the location where Muslims believe Muhammad received his first revelations from God through the angel Jebril. … To Christians, Jebril is known as Gabriel and to Jews as Gavri’el
What is the central word? Believe. As in: I believe (think) he went there but I don’t really know. Actually, nobody knows for sure, but it’s good enough for me. I have faith.
Meaning no offence here to any Muslims reading this but while to you he was the prophet, to me he was just some bloke. A man. Not a deity, not a demi-god, or even a djinn, but some bloke in a cave (maybe) that claims he spoke with an angel.
For you it’s faith, belief and heretical – unthinkable blasphemy – to say otherwise.
However, common sense, stripped of religious indoctrination, offers more plausible, believable and realistic scientific options, such as:
Or he ate psychedelic mushrooms and imagined the vision;
Or he fell in the dark cave, banged his head, had hallucinations;
Or he suffered a mental breakdown and heard voices in his head….
Perhaps your first thought at this moment is of pitchforks and burning torches and talking to your imam about a fatwa. First, though, imagine, consider this:
Some dusty bloke strides into Riyadh (or up to the gates of Mecca) and informs to the first official he meets that he was out in the hills, in the midday sun, and that Jebril appeared before him, saying all the followers of Islam must unite and rebuild Syria.
Now, would he be taken to the central mosque to educate the imams – or would he be spitting teeth as the guards set on him?
You see the point here?
Angelic thoughts
Now, to the real point of the Wikipedia link: Jebril is Gabriel is Gavri’el.
You could look up Ezekiel too, who Christianity, Islam and Hebrews all acknowledge a past prophet.
Quite a coincidence that y’all have the same angel as god’s messenger, the same messenger as a prophet, eh.
You all agree there’s only one god, as opposed to a pantheon.
A million years ago we were little evolved past monkeys. Zipping forward a million year…
If I wanted to get you worked up, I’d point out that the earliest known culture – the proverbial cradle of civilisation – wasn’t in Britain, or France or Russia or America – it was what is now ISREAL!
The Natufians if you want to look it up.
Syria, which the nutters from ISIS are intent on levelling, is pretty much ground zero for most of the human race. If you take away computers and the industrial revolution everything in modern life stems from around Israel, Lebanon, Syria. From Babylon, even. Name ring a bell?
Suppose the true reason ISIL are destroying every historic building and heritage site is because they found out Jews and Arabs are all one tribe, bound by a long-lost common language, predating Arabic, Aramaic, back to some proto-language, lost with Babylon.
Yep. Suck it up. Jews, Sunni, Shi’ite, even Yazidi all probably come from the same ONE tribe that spread across the Levant and half the world.
So why the hell are planes getting blown up, people raped, tortured, beheaded, immolated, blown up…?
Why?
Why? Because at some point a sociopath twisted culture into religion and you’ve been killing each other over it ever since!
Who knows, maybe we atheists are wrong and there are gods and angels. Or maybe the whole Chariot of the Gods idea is correct, and Ezekiel (along with Brian in ‘The life of Brian’) was visited by an alien race, rather than an ‘angel’.
Imagine what an Airbus 330, a Russian-built Mi-26 (Halo) helicopter or the F-22 Raptor jet fighter would look like to a civilisation that had barely invented farming! How would they describe it? Now magnify that by how stunned the entire world – even now – would be if some alien mothership did the whole ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ routine in Manhattan’s Central Park.
Gods of Thunder
So no, I couldn’t care less what religion you are, what nationality you are. At the end of the day, we are all monkeys that, even a few thousand years ago, were living in caves, eating bugs and raw eggs and ****ing ourselves in fear of ‘angry gods’ every time a thunderstorm or comet passed by!
Then we got "civilised" and started beating each other’s brains in with rocks because Ugg the Righteous said the god of thunder was called K’rash and shone with white fire, while Urkh the Noble was adamant the god called himself K’boom and flashed with a bluish-white light.
Does anyone now remember K’rash? No! Why? Because Urkh and his mates had a few too many fermented apples and beat poor deluded Ugg’s skull in with a stone axe.
And do we recall K’boom? No, because some Vikings found these neanderthals in a lost valley, explained that, no, the God of Thunder is called Thor, and settled the argument with three-foot of cold iron.
And do men still worship Thor? How many how can read Futhork? How many, outside of academia (and possibly Iceland) recall the teaching of Wodin, the meaning of Yggdrasil? And yet… And yet how many millions will, instead, instantly recall this:
It’s been 15,000 years already, give it a rest!
Here’s a haunting SCENARIO for you:
ISIS already have a high yield nuclear bomb. Not from black market weapons-grade uranium, built up a few kilograms at a time, but a Russian nuclear warhead, stolen from the Ukrainian border. Specifically, a 300 kiloton yield device fitted (in violation of international law) to an Iskander-K GLCM.
Could be far worse, ISIL really would have liked the Russian Tsar Bomba – at 100 megatons!
A 300kt yield will still vaporise everything within a mile, for another mile out in all directions the world is flattened in the blast, then for another mile or two after that the spreading firestorm burns your world to ash. After that, it’s the spreading of fires, chaos and inevitable radioactive fallout.
With a trillion-dollar war chest to achieve their insane aims and apocalyptic vision, it could as easily been stolen from any other nuclear power, just happens that it was the Russians.
ISIL, after really upsetting Russia twice over, France twice over and several other NATO countries besides are now on the back-peddle. Even the other Islamic countries have begun to realise they are dangerously crazy and are now distancing themselves. So you have an army of homicidal zealots, hundreds of willing suicide bombers eager to martyr themselves for their cause. They have nothing to lose and a statement to make. We cannot expect rational dialogue.
Option a) The COP21 climate summit in Le Bourget, France. I do not think they would appreciate the cruel irony of that target, but as a United Nations conference, it would gather all their perceived enemies together.
Option b) They seem to have a pathological hatred of everything in Syria, a nuke, specifically in Dabiq, would finish off what their bulldozers and conventional explosives started and drive untold millions of Muslims into the west, which would collapse. And if the wind blew the fallout into Turkey, would they care, or would it suit their cause?
Option c) is unthinkable, but I’ve thought it, so there you are, it’s not. They detonate it outside Mecca and turn their most holy place into a dead zone for the next 10,000 years. The reasoning would be simple malice. If you aren’t with us, you are against us. If we can’t win, nobody in Islam will.
All that because Ugg and Urkh were too ignorant to understand the weather!
I’ll leave you with this Dave Allen sketch. It’s about a pope and an atheist arguing.
(You can, of course, replace the pope with any other religious leader).
(Image at the top is grabbed from a clip of the film Armageddon)
Addenda 18th Nov 2015 – See, Buddhists get it!
Dalai Lama: Humans Created Terrorism, So Stop Praying To God For A Solution
The problems that we are facing today are the result of superficial differences in religious faiths and nationalities. We are one people.
Nice dig at the pope there too (wholly agree), the same goes for all those saying "pray for France" or indeed any other natural or made-made horror. If god exists – which in my (atheist) faith he doesn’t – he’s shown us that he takes a hands-off approach to, well, everything. Earthquake? Praying won’t get the people out of the rubble, manpower is needed. Same for those in floods, mudslides, tsunamis – and victims of suicide bombers. If I was this supposed ‘God’ I’d be down on Earth, personally nailing the terrorists, corrupt politicians, child molesters, rapists, drug dealers, and a whole lot more to trees. Then, before I let them pass away, I’d make them feel all the physical and mental pain they are responsible for. Every last act returned unto them, with interest.
From the Arnie version of Conan the Barbarian:
Conan: What gods do you pray to?
Subotai: I pray to the four winds… and you?
Conan: To Crom… but I seldom pray to him, he doesn’t listen.
