Worth a Thought.........
"The contrast with the hidebound ignorance of our day could hardly be greater. Or, as Bob Dylan once put it: "Easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred." Certainly not the rights, or lives, of individual human beings, now being shredded everywhere you look by self-declared lovers of God. The fundamentalists have been steeped in murk for so long that they mistake their darkness for the light.
No doubt every well-wadded, White House-connected televangelist justifying aggressive war, pimping for tax cuts and frothing with anxiety about homosexuals thinks he's walking in the footsteps of the backwoods preacher from Galilee, who spent his entire ministry serving the poor and the despised, the powerless and the discarded, the sexual outcasts and the victims of wealth, and was finally killed by the satraps of what was then the world's only hyperpower.
No doubt every Kalashnikov-toting enforcer of Islamic "virtue" -- schooled in a hatemongering madrasa funded by cynical Saudi potentates glutted with U.S. oil money -- who beats "unruly" women and slaughters ice cream vendors and CD hawkers because "they didn't have such things in the Prophet's time" thinks he's following the example of Muhammad, who forbade the imposition of Islam on others, continually refined his thought and married an independent female merchant who hired him as an agent for her caravan business, then proposed to him, in defiance of ancient custom.
No doubt every "settler rabbi" issuing edicts approving the killing of Arab civilians or blessing a cruise missile bound for a Beirut apartment complex believes he is a worthy heir of Rabbi Hillel, the great Pharisee who, when challenged to reduce God's law to a single statement, replied: "What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others. That is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and study." This formulation, the Golden Rule later adapted by Jesus, was in fact a powerful distillation -- and revival -- of the Axial sages' core teaching.
But this core been lost once again, washed away in the blood being shed by the People of the Book in their global war of terror: state terror, sectarian terror, death squads, black ops, "asymmetrical attacks" and "disproportionate force" -- an orgy of egotism and greed, violence and unkindness, with the name of God being invoked at every turn."<br>
By Chris Floyd
Published: July 28, 2006
