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.

 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

  1. DawnanddewOctober 13, 2023 at 11:06 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanOctober 14, 2023 at 12:55 AM

    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. magiceyeOctober 14, 2023 at 8:03 AM

    Tragic.

    ReplyDelete
  4. CareenaOctober 14, 2023 at 12:11 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lux G.October 14, 2023 at 4:57 PM

    So heartbreaking what's going on right now.

    ReplyDelete
  6. marietta pereiraOctober 14, 2023 at 6:50 PM

    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
  7. magiceyeOctober 16, 2023 at 6:30 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  8. DivyaOctober 17, 2023 at 1:10 AM

    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
  9. AnonymousJanuary 4, 2024 at 4:52 PM

    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 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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more