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

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 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

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...
7 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more