Thursday, September 30, 2004
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BUDDHA, SOCRATES, JESUS.
THE SEMANTICS OF RELIGION,
PHILOSOPHY, AND MYSTICISM.
GOOD AND EVIL.
GOD AND THE DEVIL.
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Abandon old habits of thought. Do not even think in terms of good and evil, or right and wrong. Forget what you were taught. Get rid of all preconceptions: that’s the only way to grasp reality. This indeed is the central message of Buddhism.
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Now compare this with Christianity’s “Love your enemy,” – an idea so new, so strange, and so much against the grain that after two thousand years of countless sermons in countless churches it has yet to penetrate our crocodilian brain. The only way to understand it is by abandoning all definitions, because (according to the recent academic discipline of semantics) words and their definitions are at the root of all our misconceptions and prejudices.
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Abandoning all definitions: that’s also the mantra adopted by Socrates. In his dialogues Socrates begins by stating that he knows nothing and ends by proving that his interlocutors know even less. And who are his interlocutors? Generals, statesmen, philosophers – in short, la crème de la crème of Athenian society at the peak of its Golden Age. As the dialogues unfold, Socrates makes it abundantly clear that the commonly accepted definitions of such terms as justice, goodness, beauty, and courage are full of inconsistencies and contradictions.
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What I am trying to say here has been said before by far better men than myself, among them Aldous Huxley in his PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, and Arnold Toynbee in the 10th volume of his STUDY OF HISTORY. The aim of all religions, schools of philosophy and mysticism is the same. It is only when religions acquire a power structure, a hierarchy and bureaucracy, rituals and mumbo jumbo that they betray the original intent of their founders and become instruments of the devil by legitimizing intolerance, fallacies, prejudice, hatred, war and massacre.
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Friday, October 01, 2004
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ON FANATICS
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Fanatics are not born but made, and what makes them are fanatics in the opposite camp. Armenian fanatics exist today because Turkish fanatics existed yesterday; and Turkish fanatics will exist tomorrow because Armenian fanatics exist today. Fanaticism is an endless cycle and if allowed to prevail, the world is bound to drown in blood.
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When fanatics fight, it is the defenseless and the innocent who die.
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All fanatics operate on a number of false assumptions or illusions, among them: (one) they are the only answer to a very important question; (two) they are not fanatics but realistic moderates who understand the nature of the adversary; (three) they are instruments of a noble principle or even messengers of God; and (four) they are la crème de la creme (rather than la crème de la scum).
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One reason the Bible is a perennial best seller is that there is something for everyone in it. Good men will find many passages that speak of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, tolerance, and love, and bad men will find many more lines that justify criminal conduct, including the massacre not only of enemy tribes, including their women and children, but also their cattle. Hence Shakespeare’s dictum: “Even the devil can quote the Scriptures to his advantage.”
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One of my born-again critics – make it, crypto-commissars or frustrated executioners parading as devout Christians – writes: “There was a time when we burned blasphemers like you at the stake.”
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If “a bourgeois is a bourgeois regardless of nationality”(Lenin), so is a fanatic. A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic might as well be interchangeable, faceless units that share the same ambition: to drag the world back to the Middle Ages and to hell with such degenerate Western concepts as democracy, human rights, free speech, and the separation of church and state.
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For every proud Armenian, there are probably ten or more proud Turks. In a battle of prides, we don’t have a chance. Which is why I prefer to identify myself as a humble human being that has no use for pride.
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Where there is chauvinist pride, there will also be self-righteous arrogance, intolerance, hatred, fanaticism, and inevitably bloodshed.
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Saturday, October 02, 2004
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WE ARE ALL ASSASSINS
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From an interview with Yan Moix, a contemporary French author: “There is only one reason that prevents us from behaving like animals: the laws of the land. Without laws we would behave like wild beasts in the jungle.” (LE POINT, September 2, 2004).
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Where there is power, it will be abused. This might as well be one of those rare rules that have no exceptions.
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Knowledge is power. But so is phony knowledge, which can be even more dangerous than abysmal ignorance. By phony knowledge I have in mind the kind that we ascribe to religious leaders, be they popes, ayatollahs or gurus.
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Think of the countless heretics who were persecuted, tortured and killed by the Church on the grounds that church leaders knew God’s will or the workings of the divine mind better than their victims.
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Closer to home: consider the ease with which we verbally abuse one another on the Internet simply because the computer gives us the power to do so.
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I remember the title of a 1952 French film directed by Andre Cayatte, NOUS SOMMES TOUS DES ASSASSINS (We Are All Assassins) that became a widely used slogan. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a fraction of our brain is crocodilian, (students of anatomy tell us this to be literally true), and it will seize the flimsiest excuse to take over our “human” brain.
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If a Pope of Rome and a Stalin can behave like ruthless killers in the name of a religion of love or an ideology based on the brotherhood of all men, who among us will plead not guilty or pretend that his brain has no crocodilian fraction?
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The Turks massacred us because they had the power to do so. Does that mean we wouldn’t have done the same to them if our positions had been reversed? To put it differently: Is the crocodilian fraction of the Turkish brain bigger than ours? Or, are all men assassins except us?
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