Skip to main content

God is War

A Palestinian child whose dear ones were killed
Pic from Malayalam weekly  


They are killing each other because their gods are different. Each of the gods is a jealous entity. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, admitted his own jealousy. He told the Jews, his chosen race, “For you shall worship no other god, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” [Exodus 20:4] Allah of Islam makes no less claims. While Yahweh allows other gods to exist, Allah apparently isn’t as generous as that. La ilaha illallah.

Both these gods together have caused endless misery on the earth. They have made their chosen people squeamishly narrowminded and incapable of living in harmony with others. Why on earth did anyone think of putting these two people together on a desert?

Mahatma Gandhi was right. He was against the creation of Israel as a country for the Jews. He was not one who would give credence to fairy tales such as a race being God’s favourite and so on. “I am not moved by the argument that the Jews must have a country of their own,” Gandhi said. “Why can’t they make their own country wherever they are living? If England belongs to the English and France to the French, Palestine belongs to the Arabs.”

Giving a portion of that Arab land to the Jews was like giving enough space for the camel to put his nose in the tent. Gave them an inch and they took a mile. And they kept on taking more. It’s not much unlike what the European invaders did to the American native population. Whose country was America? No wonder the Mahatma did not say: “If America belongs to the Americans, Palestine belongs to the Arabs.” Today’s America is an ally of today’s Israel. No wonder. 

Having said that, it must be asserted loudly and clearly that terrorism is not the solution for anything. What the Hamas did to the Israelis is utterly inhuman. I wonder what Allah thinks of his Hamas warriors? Is He keeping seventy virgins each for them all in Jannat?

I have argued time and again that the most fundamental remedy for this sort of wars is an effective education that makes us all grow up beyond the childish tales in our holy books which we take seriously. Yahweh’s jealousy and Allah’s solipsism. Eden and Jannat. And a whole lot of stuff in other religions too.

We need to civilise our gods first. Can we be better than our gods?

You say God is love. But I see that your god is war.

The only murder I long to commit is a divine one. To redeem humanity!

Request: Don’t take this post literally.

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Very powerful words... can they be heard by Gods?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    What is occurring now in the middle east on top of the gurglings in the Balkans and the ongoing (out)rage in Ukraine... I hear the despair in your words and add to it my own... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Why don't people see there's so much more similarity in our shared experiences than the differences written in these holy tales!?

    ReplyDelete
  4. So heartbreaking what's going on right now.

    ReplyDelete
  5. War solves nothing. Innocent lives are lost. What makes it sadder is that we see two wars happening simultaneously and there seems to be no end to either war. What a miserable and sorry place our world has turned into!

    ReplyDelete
  6. When religion is used to promote nationalism there is a loss of humanism.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Powerful and thought-provoking post.
    Religion was supposed to make better human beings of us? Look at how how it's dividing us! I think you're right. Our gods have to do better, first.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Allah, Bhagwan and Yahweh are synonymous to the the almighty creater. They have different names in different religion but the prayers are answered by the same person. The sooner people get this concept into their heads, faster peace shall fall onto this earth. Peace out 🙏

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...