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 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

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...

Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Why India Needs to Reclaim its Liberal Soul

Russia’s Putin announced the demise of liberalism, America’s Trump wrote its obituary, and India’s Modi wielded the death as a political forge that transmuted him into a demigod. We are, unfortunately, passing through an era of so-called “strong leaders” like Putin, Trump, and Modi. A 2024 report based on a 2023 Pew survey found that 67% Indians endorsed a governing system with a “strong leader” who can make decisions without interference from courts or parliament. This support for autocracy was the highest among all surveyed nations and has increased consistently after Modi became the PM. Shockingly, the same 2023 survey found that 72% of Indian respondents expressed a favourable view of military rule. Indians don’t want individual freedom, it seems. We are used to the many gods who incarnated at appropriate times and destroyed evil ( Sambhavami yuge yuge ). Modi is our present divine incarnation. It is the duty of these avatars to conquer evil; hence individual freedom doesn’t ...