Yashua Hamashiach, Jesus Christ and Issa Ibn Miriam,
supposedly one and the same, said:
“Who among you with no sin… let him throw the first stone”
(John 8:7).
I have neither the intention to conduct a witchunt study of the carnage and atrocities that are happening all over the world in the name of one religion or another nor the expertise to dissect the perceptible “coup d’état” intended by the perpetrators. I rather share with fair-minded than mean-spirited people snippets of my article about religion, praying that it will help those religious “Holier than thou” jungle dwellers from every faith on the face of this earth to properly and piously honor their Creator. Let us live in harmony guarding with our life “Sha’ret Muawiyya” (“the single hair of Muawiyya”; the Umayyad Caliph Ibn Abi Sefyan 602-680 AD), which is a metaphor standing for: “When someone pull that hair, you let go and when he lets go, you pull” in order not to break it; in other word: “Give and take” with no killing, exterminating or torturing those who disagree with you.
My bewilderment stems from the fact that all self-proclaimed honest, frank and decent people are now a day extinct. All religions confirm that there is no one good, honest or decent, no one, except for whatever they allow God and Allah to instill in them of their Mercy and Love. Hiding behind clichés of thoughts, arguments and debates is no more than intellectual debauchery.
If self-proclaimed decency is a label, then it is a libel where hypocrisy is a king, double standard is a norm and deceit makes of God, Allah and religion, a hoax, a prank and a joke. Not everyone who raises his hands towards heaven is praying and many find it simple and uncostly to ostensibly go down on their knees pretending piety than to rise and do good alleviating the suffering of this wounded world.
Trashing other religions’ tenets and discriminately killing innocent people is not Holy Jihad but nothing short of sheer piracy, sordid bestiality and utter aggression. Our passive, uneducated and raw actions and emotions are embodiment of the maxim that says: “A human will remain human if he loses his sight but turns to a beast should blindness take hold of his heart”.
All Holy Scriptures collectively command us to worship God and Allah in “Spirit and Truth” and not in vain dissertations armed with all kinds of intellectual, physical and social weapons of mass destruction. I believe we have developed such a vicious cycle of inhumane habits of mind, attitudes, aptitudes and acquiescence that coils itself around our heart suffocating and stifling its generosity. God and Allah extol a generous heart, a loving heart, a forgiving heart as well as a giving heart coupled with a helping hand and a divine attitude in order to allow their light to shine through and reflect their goodness, loving-kindness and above all their unconditional undeserved mercy.
Piety is a journey while religiosity is a destination, because piety is divine while religiosity is manmade; piety is peaceful while religiosity is belligerent, and finally piety is compassionate while religiosity is cruel. No wise person ever said that the opposite of love is hate and hatred, because it is indifference, and indifference leads to suicide, homicide and finally to genocide.
Before we tackle the never-ending family feuding between ourselves and among the descendants of Abraham and others, it is appropriate to delve, in general, into the notion of what din (religion) stands for including its wide concepts and desired tenets.
There is at least one mystical, man-made or deified spirit “god” or deified human “god”, and road map to every religion, belief, system, way, creed, conviction, faith etc. Each assigns qualities, functions and powers through attributes to their god or gods. To understand the diversity, let us try, I repeat try, to define religion, as there is no one definition that can satisfy the appetites of zealous followers of any religion. Various encyclopedias and dictionaries give little if not arbitrary definitions. It is easier to describe what religion is not than what religion is. According to the encyclopedia of Religions: “The word religion is derived from Latin root religio, either from Religare: “Tie back” or Relegere: “Being bound”. The American College Dictionary’s definition is: “Religion is fear of God or gods, religious awe, sacredness, scrupulousness.” Din is Arabic for religion, which means a way of life, a system, or a religious conjecture.
A religion comprises followers, united by their spiritual identity either through a universal religious setting or in legalistically communal, national, territorial, cultural environments, while being ready and willing to embrace scripted mystical theologies coupled with ordinances, doctrines, set rules and rituals for worship, as well as laws and statecrafts to be promulgated and approved by their founders.
In either case, first and foremost, it is up to the psychological and sociological and even political connotation of faith given to the word “religion” by different groups within the same religion, let alone the other faiths, citing different understandings, interpretations, cultures and traditions. All faiths claim practically that their deity created religion to serve mankind in love, co-habitation and tolerance. Nevertheless, the word is best associated with the devoted desire that denotes earnest observance of ritual obligations, sense of belonging as well as an inward spirit of reverence and discipline.
On one hand, religions are theoretically the gates through which love and fellowship enter, and on the other hand, they are supposed to be the focal point where the bodies, souls and spirits of the adherents to never find peace in sin, sufferings, vanities, aggression and death, but to give strength and solace in stamping out their causes and their effects, thus balancing the ethical divine tenets: spiritual and personal Liberties, godly Freedoms with Equality from an equal opportunity egalitarian Deity, infused by human Dignity in order to achieve Solidarity, Peace and Co-habitation for mankind.
Notwithstanding the many challenges, inconsistencies and controversies each religion is masked behind, this should not constitute a license to kill, a reason to exterminate or motive to subdue others. No matter what a religion teaches within its Scriptures, a true believer will behave humanely and passionately only if that believer is spared the guile and misguidance of the scholars, the theologians and the self-serving clergies, those God or Allah’s self-appointed and self- anointed Doctors of the Law or Religion, as well as those privied experts in the mysteries of the Deities they claim to serve, who maliciously substituted the Divine teachings with men’s teachings, changing and manipulating God’s and Allah’s Laws, claiming to have the authority and duty to do so.
The three Heavenly Faiths have instituted interpretations and applications undertaken by different schools of thought and jurisprudence in the form of religious rulings and judgments far beyond what their Deities have stipulated. The Jewish “Mishpat”, the Roman Catholics’ papal “Encyclicals”, and the Muslims “Fatwa” among others share the same connotation and purpose and are in essence a self-proclaimed authority to progressively propagate decrees and edicts humanly stamped correct and infallible thus binding all their respective followers, regardless of their alignment with scriptural mandates.
Every religion’s Deity confirmed, unambiguously and methodically and in stern commandments and words, that: “Vengeance is mine” say Jehovh, God, and Allah etc. Who are we to usurp this unique right and distinct privilege? Who are we to claim divinity and sovereignty? Who are we to contradict the commandment: “You shall not kill”? And who appointed us to be the harassing rascals and slayers of the human race.
I only can guess that when Karl Marx labeled religion: “The opium of the masses”, he might have concluded that the majority of adherents to those religions were only spiritually empty, hypnotized, sedated and comatose, no more than marching zombies, mechanized robots and rewindable androids, manipulated by few of the larger than deity and life charlatan clergies, who turned us to be like tombs marbled from the outside rotten from the inside.
Religion may be considered an absolute or accidental necessity, keen knowledge, zealous fanaticism, social ignorance, wishful thinking, mistake of nature, or freaky and eccentric aberration, but it is nonetheless that sacred cow and spiritual engagement undertaken by a group of people as a spiritual and cultural trademark of their beliefs and the common foundation of their religious life, which pervade the whole of their public and private life, centralized around a holy figurehead of one cosmic god or hosts of gods, starting with cosmogony.
All faiths “advertise” bittersweet colorful clichés of brotherly love, mutual respect, sham tolerance, open-ended forgiveness, this or that Deity’s mercy, this or that Deity’s given human rights, peaceful co-existence, freedom of choice, of religion and of speech, coupled with holiness and sanctity. All mankind are brothers and sisters in Adam and Eve, but not necessarily in all beliefs and faiths.
How many religions are in our present world? Are they in the hundreds; are they in the thousands or beyond? There are reportedly some 4200 documented and identified religions in this world (Wikipedia). The major Religions of the world are five, but they remind me of the Russian doll the “Matryoushka” (the great grandmother of all), their offspring, offshoots, brethrens, siblings and kindred are numerous. What a sad reality, everyone can kill a person, but no one can kill a thought; the reason is so simple, when you kill a person, you only kill his body, while the thought stems from and lives in his/her soul; his/her soul is eternal, hence his/her thought is also eternal. It is not possible for the original thought to die, but it might become forgotten, improved or its application modified.
Since the beginning of time, the various Gods instituted distinct religious beliefs; the believers, who supposedly were followers, elevated themselves to the rank of their divinity, more knowledgeable and keener than their god, thus witnessing daily the story of Babel Tower on the stages of our lives, where in addition to the religious multi-lingual babbling, we witness the thundering of killer guns, evolved into all kind of weapons of mass destruction we dart against anyone who dare to differ with our beliefs.
They cover within their concepts and dispensations respective theologies and theosophies. A variety show that homiletically encompasses a system of religious attitudes, beliefs, rituals and practices, coupled with claims of superiority, accusations and claims of distortion and falsification. The principal and typical religions are those subscribing to the major outline of: Monotheism, Dualism, Polytheism, Manicheaism, Panentheism, Pantheism, add to that meager list Agnosticism, Animism, Atheism, Cultism, Satanism, Idolatry etc… all are “e pluribus Unum” plagued by dissents, schisms, heterodoxies and heresies.
Humans like sheep; they need a shepherd, a dog, a flock and a pasture. The shepherd is the few exquisitely sophisticated elites of this world who are likely to be deists more than atheists; the dog is those literally educated theologians who tend to be fundamentally intrusive but fanatically believing in a deity, the rest of the masses constitute the bulk of the blind flock who lost their free will and free choice, and the pasture is that religion or faith, which is presumably a little short of the ultimate Heaven.
Bias science and twisted knowledge seem to farther us from accepting God and Allah, their Existence, their Creation and their Omniscience, because both portray them as an illusion. Someone once said that: “Ignorance found God long before mankind found science”, as well as this statement by a certain Muslim writer, Mr. Shahid Bin Waheed: “Ignorance is weakness, and self-inflicted ignorance is suicide”. However, ignorance proved to be the only necessary wisdom in accepting by faith the concept of an unseen God or Allah, and the yearning to worship them “In spirit and truth”, to venerate them with our honorable conduct, and to reflect their goodness with our good deeds and love of their creatures by acknowledging them as the one and only giver and taker of life.
The tenets and doctrines of any religion consist of both intellectual questions and answers that trigger further unsettling questions and problematic issues, where the epistemology of religions is in the form of a written invitation for an intellectual and philosophical extraterrestrial journey to blindly submit. No human mind can ever prove that God or Allah exists, as only the heart can discern, detect and sense that Powerful Presence, that Creative Hand and that Absolute Sovereignty, together with that Love and Wrath, and that Mercy and Justice. Ignorance through natural means is what makes us seek and search for that Power that is beyond our intellect and grasp.
Bunyan once said: “Religion is the best armor that a man can have, but it is the worst cloak” while these two statements by Charles Caleb Colton describe it best: “Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it”, and “Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost”.
In Brief “I used to complain having no shoes until I saw someone with no feet”, thus at the absence of a direct simplified meaning of religion, let us say that religion is the most mystifying and baffling confusion and embarrassment that plagued humankind, and the atrocities and blunders that were and are carried out in their names under the banners of a specific deity, stamps religion as a taboo and a machine of destruction. Now, we might all agree with Karl Marx about religion being the “Opium of the masses”.
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