Two of my cats have not gotten along well, both males and territorial. They first fought, then avoided, but now they sit on a bench a foot from each other. Peace has broken out.
I personally support the right of Palestinians to self determine and occupy the lands of their forefathers, but I do not support Palestine the country and its regime in their continued religiously-driven acts of violence and oppression against any persons internal or otherwise. I strongly feel that Israel are the main aggressors in the middle east, and their religiously-based oppression of another people is illegitimate and unjustified. Their actions are horrific, racist, apartheid, and genocidal, and not at all recent since they have been doing what they are doing now in some fashion since the 1950s.
To be against the killing of Palestinians is not to be pro Palestinian, this is an important distinction that some leftists, people I would generally politically align with, seem to mistake when they do not realise that the state they are supporting is not secular and has no wish to be. To wave a Palestinian flag cannot be the correct action to take in that it is going to be taken as the indication of support for a regime that openly wishes to harm the liberal cultures and varied democratic political fabrics of the west, and we must realise that they would do so if they had the opportunity. We know this because we already struggle in Britain to integrate two particular religious cultures into our western democratic process and social fabric (Islam and Judaism). In truth their religiously-based cultures, religiously-biased trading systems, and religiously underpinned legal systems are wildly incompatible with western liberal secular democracy. This is obvious to anyone who thinks at all and it is not a racist statement since these are not races, they are systems of organising tribes, political doctrines.
Let’s start seeing this situation for what it is, a fight between zealots where there are only bad political actors in power representing peoples who I suspect would wish to be free of them if given the choice, the result of which will be greater tensions and further bitterness with a strong possibility of a near-endless conflict. One side has a massive advantage currently, and it may be that advantage that makes them look much worse than their enemy. In truth if the other side had such an advantage they would be doing the same thing, so we should not view them as purely victims even though they are obviously the victims of something we cannot sanction. The real victims of conflict are the children on both sides since they are too young to be culpable, they have not elected nor supported the religious lunatics that enact the violence. There are no religious children, merely the children of religious people, nobody is born religious that would be a ridiculous thing to assert.
We must see in these children the possibility of change, of intellectual growth beyond scripture, simply because we must realise that scripture is what humans knew when they did not know any better. Yes there are developed countries where highly educated people still culturally identify with Christianity, but these are not real Christians because they do not follow the edicts of the book they see as the truth of the world, and if they actually do we tend to treat them with the same suspicion we would treat any lunatic. No, they are cherry pickers, or they are assuming and using the effect of the still warm corpse of Christian influence to enable their own prominence by conning gullible folks (those that have not read) into an interpretation of this mythology that promotes what they set out to achieve. If the same could be done with a Judge Dredd comic they would use that instead. Religion is a cultural fashion item in the west, not a conviction.
The conflict needs to end before the cultures can change, and for it to end the international community must take action to stop it. For that to happen the political representatives of the international community must first stop sponsoring and supporting conflict for the purpose of selling war toys and setting in concrete guaranteed revenue streams for war toy producers in their fiscal government commitments. Protest against war and the actions of nations requires of course to be seen and heard, but without taking a side and waving a flag, because that is too partisan. What about a universal flag that indicates an anti-conflict stance, has nobody thought of this? The important thing to bear in mind is that Israel is wrong because it is wrong, not because Palestine is right. It’s possible for both sides in a conflict to hold no moral basis for their acts of violence.
Both cultures need to change, one is militant Judaism supported by militant Christianity (the west), and the other militant Islam, all are militant Abrahamic monotheism. Militantism will exist as long as moderates exist, as moderates are the real enabling force. It is the apologetic tolerance of any form of religious false consciousness that poisons the intellectual reasoning of all mankind. Religions tend to face little scrutiny, not because that scrutiny is prevented in law, but stifled by the social forces of moderation that prevent real conversations on this important freedom retarding subject. This is especially true of any monotheistic religion that is derived from bronze age thinking, yet still holds sway over those that wield space-age destructive technologies.
The danger of people who hold such destructive power welcoming, and possibly enacting, the oblivion of this existence on behalf of all persons, is very real and not to be dismissed on the basis that those people happen to live in modernity and are assumed to be just as sane as those of us that do not hold such obvious human-made nonsenses to be truth. We are in grave danger and ever occupying the brink of being harmed by zealots from the east and the west simply because we are tolerating a false contention that morals are derived from religions. This is demonstrably not so, and the argument against it as a primary postulate could easily be made by a reasonably educated 10 year old. If the edicts of the old testament are morals then all of western moral philosophy is a falsehood, kindness is unimportant, violence is an act warranted, justice is the decision of monarchs or preachers, love is abhorrent, women are property, and wisdom is dangerous. The god of this time is capricious, jealous, and often erratic, and his words are written down by illiterate farmers. I personally do not think this forms a justifiable and reasonable basis for organising a state or deciding who has a land deed.
If religions, as now, were to be eradicated, it may be the case that they would be reinvented. They would not be the same though, they would be reflective of the power that creates them at the time they are created, as they always have been, and prejudiced toward the promotion of power for those that write the scriptures. By this realisation alone we can see that they are false. We mostly hold this sceptical view of modern religions of the 20th century, so why would we not see it in every historic one also? People seem to need to fill the gaps that science has not yet explained (the god of the gaps theory). But we as an educated people have very much filled a lot of the previous gaps using science already, and in doing so have reduced religious explanations for the phenomenons of the universe to be no more than the ridiculous postulates of people who were obviously motivated by the power they may have gained by manipulating the uneducated with the made-up rules of a made-up higher power. Rules that just so happened to bring those that wore dresses and spouted edicts from books of myth to prominence.
Religion enables power, power enables conflict, conflict then enables the power of people who lead peoples using religions to capture real estate. The leaders of nations use the adherence to religion, and their position as speaking on behalf of its deity, to underpin the horrific actions they then inflicted on other nations that have differing beliefs, and it is mostly for the purpose of gaining land or some other resource. We see this in Palestine/Judea where the beliefs of each side enable their perceived right to occupy the region. I would make one distinction between them though, that post WWII the region was Palestine and the UN charter was supposed to protect such places. Since then a bunch of other people have occupied that land and that occupation has grown and caused much harm, so they are not equal in their implications.
What is at the heart of all this is an idea, a bad one, that a religion begets and deserves a state where it can express itself without anything arguing with it. If a religion needs a state then it is an obvious falsehood and it shouldn’t be allowed by majority of reasoned international community leaders to have one because what presents itself as a persuasive force, the word of a divine being, would not need a militarized force to impose it or a state to protect it. We refer to the time when religions were strongly linked to power as the dark ages, and not because it was dark.
Have at your response, but be rational! If you call me antisemitic or islamophobic it will be no insult, I am against all religions in principle, so I suppose I am those things and will wear the implications as a compliment. Do I wish harm? Yes, but only to stupid thinking.
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