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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
12 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Georges Lemaitre: The Priest and the Scientist

Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) The Big Bang theory that brought about a new revolution in science was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lamaitre. When this priest-scientist suggested that the universe began from a “primeval atom,” Pope Pius XII was eager to link that primeval entity with God. But Rev Lemaitre told the Pope gently enough that science and religion are two different things and it’d be better to keep them separate.   Both science and religion are valid ways to truth, according to Lemaitre. Science uses the mind and religion uses the heart. Speaking more precisely, science investigates how the universe works, and religion explores why anything exists at all. Lemaitre was very uncomfortable when one tried to invade the other. God is not a filler of the gaps in science, Lemaitre asserted. We should not invoke God to explain what science cannot. Science has its limits precisely because it is absolutely rational. Although intuition and imagination may lead a scient...
6 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more