DOES RELIGION DRIVE MEN MAD?

 THE IMPLACABLE NATURE OF THE IDEA

I  observe, as many do, the unfolding disaster in Gaza and thoughts emerge unbidden in my mind.

I wonder about countries and religion and how so often these modes of supposed salvation drive men and women into vortices of complete madness leading to unthinkable cruelty and barbarism.

How human men (and they are mostly men) will murder children, rape women and torture their fellow humans with gleeful commitment, even enthusiasm for inflicting the maximum level of pain and humiliation. 

How is all this possible?

My answer is expressed with all humility as these are simply my thoughts, those motes of dust in the wind.  But I strive for some anchor for the immense pain I feel in my heart upon watching this unfolding cataclysm of hatred and horror in the Middle East.

My sense is that this all begins in the mind.  That what we witness here is a result of thoughts and imagination replacing reality.

Let us take a comparison.  Look at what we call countries.  Do they exist?  Well yes, we consider we come from a particular country. When we are asked the question where are you from we will often reply, well I'm from the UK or I am from South Africa or I am from Brazil or I am an Israeli or I am a Palestinian. 

In this sense our country of birth or a new nationality we have taken on becomes a large part of what we may refer to as our identity, it describes part of what we perceive as our essential Self, our being.

Then we may be asked by this imaginary interviewer-What are you about?  What do you believe?  And often, what do you do?

But let’s pause a moment at the question of our country.  What is a country?  Is it not simply an idea?

There are no real lines of demarcation in nature that determines what group of Homo sapiens will live in a specific area. Those borders are created inside someone’s head and often collide with other ideas of conquest, war, colonisation and economic expansion.

These ideas collect behind the original idea of ‘country’ and what is an imaginary reality becomes more real than the actual reality. An endless train of countless carriages hurtling on its way to another constructed idealised reality.

Because the fact is that countries do not exist in actual reality. In many ways they are fictionalised entities that are concretised in imaginary nature but they cannot exist in nature because they are not real.  They are ideas.

If we imagine the human species were to instantly vanish what would be left?  Well there would be buildings, temples, prisons, immense cities, ports, lots of walls and fences, military bases and seaside resorts.  But there would be no countries.  Because countries do not exist in independent reality.  They are ideas of place rather than place itself.

If we look at a mountain, say Kilimanjaro, we can see that it exists in nature.  It is an existential fact that is not dependent on thoughts or belief systems for its being a concrete part of nature.  Unlike countries, which only truly exist in the minds of their inhabitants and therefore have no concrete existence in nature.

Is it not the saddest thing that what drives the great wars and slaughters is simply an idea?  

Perhaps we should get rid of this idea and simply live on our planet?

Religion too is perhaps the most powerful of these ideas based as it is on the single strongest driver of division between humans - the idea of God. And then inevitable meditations upon the nature of this God.

Whether it be called Jesus or Jehovah or Allah or the Lord Buddha or the Creator, or Shiva, these are all versions of the same idea.  An imaginary Being that requires a set of rules and beliefs and behaviour to be placated or worshipped or honoured.  Rules that can be infringed with resulting punishments.  Highly varied schema of intolerance is directed between these different ideas and it underpins the continuing holocaust between humans located in their various idealised territories that we call countries.

I will nail my own colours to the mast.  I do not know if there is a God.  I choose not to believe that there is because I choose not to believe in something I cannot understand.  If God has existence it would surpass our understanding containing within itself all meaning. 

In the seventeenth century Spinoza made the case that God must be part of natural law and that therefore miracles cannot have taken place because they are in defiance of natural law and that consequently the Bible must be taken as metaphor, not fact.  He also stated that this God acting in accord with natural law, with Nature, is highly unlikely to require strictly determined rules of behaviour or ceremonial activity or specific dress as these are simply ideas from the imagination of humans.

Spinoza’s ethics, massively simplified, state that humans should live in accordance with natural law and thus acquire what he called ‘blessedness’.

I can live with this ‘idea’, it makes sense to me to seek ‘blessedness’ though I struggle with the acquisition.

However given my own ‘ideas’ on the subject I am most content to allow my fellow humans to worship and pray to whatever God they imagine and I wish them comfort from it.  I do not however consider this gives them any right to predate and destroy and discriminate on those who interpret this most ungraspable of notions in a different way from themselves.

I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Faith and even attended a Seminary as a boy, destined for the Priesthood, when, as a devastated 14 year old I came to the realisation  that this was all nonsense upon stilts.

Perhaps then we should get rid of both ideas.  That of Nations and that of Religions.  Perhaps we should just be in the world.

None of this helps the men, women and children of Gaza facing annihilation or the avenging Israeli’s who have lost their loved one’s in Hamas’s shocking assault.

But like many others I stand mute in the face of this unfolding catastrophe.  I stand mute, looking at the cold, hard and vengeful eyes of the leaders and the blood of the innocent which will once again flow into the river of human time and the circle of hate growing, ever growing.  Once again I stand mute and uncomprehending at the implacable nature of The Idea.