Thursday, October 14, 2004
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A prominent French philosophy (Gilles Deleuze) once said, what mankind needs more urgently than anything else is an objective and thorough analysis of human stupidity, “against which even the gods cannot compete” (Goethe).
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When he runs for a second term, an American presidential candidate may have to defend or misrepresent or cover up four years of mismanagement and blunders. Imagine, if you can, a bishop or an imam defending centuries of intolerance, not to say, lies, sometimes even wars and massacres that have claimed millions of innocent lives.
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We cannot explain the incomprehensible, neither can we describe the invisible, and god is both.
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Truth is an endless search. He who claims he has found it, lies.
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Truth, like god, is beyond our reach. The best we can do is move closer, and the only way we can do that is by exposing and discarding lies, especially the ones that say, god or truth is within our grasp.
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A wise man once said: “I am willing to worship a man who says he is searching for the truth; but I will be glad to kill him if he says he found it.”
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When presidential candidates debate, they come very close to calling each other hypocrite and liar. I dread to think what bishops and imams will call one another if they ever debate.
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Religion is something between you and your god. You don’t need a mosque or cathedral in which to pray. Neither do you need a bishop or an imam who tells you he knows better because he speaks in the name of god.
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He who says he understands the incomprehensible, lies. And he who says he can describe the invisible, is a fraud.
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Friday, October 15, 2004
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Imagine the following scenario: a clergyman in an isolated hicktown somewhere in America (remember DELIVERANCE) is caught torturing and burning at the stake those he views as heretics. Accused of serial killing, he is arrested and tried in a court of law. His lawyer pleads insanity even though the clergyman did what he did because he was following the dictates of his faith just as his medieval predecessors had done. Will the jury’s verdict be guilty or not guilty?
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As far as I know, no serious historian has ever ascribed the Inquisition to insanity. Which may suggest that there is no such thing as a clear and universal definition of insanity, insanity is relative, and insanity is in the eye of the beholder or an extension of the zeitgeist (spirit of the time).
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I disagree. We can’t adapt definitions to suit our prejudices even if these prejudices are ascribed to religious faith – especially to religious faith. I maintain there is rational conduct and irrational conduct, and the irrational becomes criminal when it claims innocent victims.
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One reason I view religious insanity much more dangerous than individual insanity is that, individual insanity may lead to murder, but collective insanity may lead to war and massacre – remember Voltaire’s dictum: “Since it was a religious war, there were no survivors.”
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Throughout history man (who is “wolf to other men”) has always found a way to legitimize murder (or the crocodilian fraction of his brain) in the name of this or that higher principle.
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Which is why to this day the Turks find it difficult to plead guilty to the charge of genocide. They did what they did because they were following their faith, they believed in the authority of their sultan (who spoke in the name of Allah) and his successors. The Sultan was to them what the Pope is to Catholics, and what English monarchs (“defenders of the faith”) are to Brits.
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If we justify religious insanity, or the crimes committed in the name of faith, then we must also agree with the Turks that our so-called genocide is a figment of our collective imagination. Or, the murder of innocent victims is not murder if it is committed in the name of God.
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To those who say, we are not Asiatic barbarians and we no longer live in the Middle Ages, I say, in the eyes of jihadist Muslims, we are worse than that: we are degenerate giaours and riffraff who deserve to be exterminated.
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