Holte's corner

Burning Bushes and Warring ones

I have always felt sympathy for Israel. I guess part of it is due to my, as a child, not following instrustions. I was told to read the bible. My teachers wanted me to start with the New Testament, but I started with Genesis instead. It was such a frustrating project that I ended up studying history, archeology, philosophy, and then mythology and cultural anthropology and comparative religion just to make sense out of my project. I got frustrated with trying to figure it out, especially after relatives told me the bible held all the answers to all my questions. I went and looked and couldn't find them. For one thing I wasn't even sure what the right questions were. I asked for guidance on the subject and I was told to pray to God. I did. I never did find that burning bush.

In frustration I eventually wrote a poem about the experience:

The Burning Bush

There ain't no burning bush,
no beckoning pillar of fire,
There ain't no miraculous wind,
that's going to save us from this mire.
If there is a God on high,
he's whistling in the wind.
He's not booming in my ears,
not answering questions I can't ask.

....It gets longer and has a lot of stanzas....But that's for another post another day. The point is, eventually I went around in circles, gave up on God, got involved with Buddhism, Got told that the Ultimate Law would do all those things that God hadn't already done. Got nearly, as confused, but learned to ask the right questions. To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions.

In this case, the questions are pretty difficult ones. I've found that asking difficult questions with the right attitude is worthwhile. Asking impossible questions expecting impossible answers is absurd, but some hard questions need to be asked. One of those questions is; "What do we do with impossible people who want to do us in?"

I ask that question because of a number of incidents, two of which are fresh on my mind. One is in Iraq, when two folks were kidnapped at gunpoint only so that the "insurgents" could make a bloody point by desecrating their bodies and then putting them out and booby trapped for the "Coalition forces" to discover. This is the stuff of a mothers nightmare. Yet the US is hardly conducting a perfectly just war, and war is brutal by its very nature. I can hardly fault folks who my country is trying to force to do things my way for trying to kill me. It's the nature of the beast. Yet this is hardly "just war." It certainly doesn't give genuine faith and credit to the notion of Islam as a religion of "peace" or a worthwhile equal to the Judeo-Christian Religions. I might be tempted to pray to God, but my main question is; "how do we stop these people without making more of them?"

Then the incident in Israel comes to mind. Israel is trying to wage just war. It's rather difficult. There is no reciprocity. After 50 years of doing their level best to subjugate, kill, murder and drive off every Jew in the Middle East, the Palestinians have failed miserably -- so what do they do? They paint themselves as victims and claim it's Israel's fault they are poor and miserable, because Israel has remained a Country, been obnoxiously aggressive, and not acknowledged the supreme righteousness of Islam. Israel has not always waged just war. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, and some hard nosed actions by the Hagganah as well, guaranteed that some Palestinian grieviences would be fairly legitimate. But there is no reciprocity. For a long time Israel has been doing penance (the word is tikkun Olam) for blowing up a hotel, kicking people out of strategic properties, and their relatively few lapses. Okay they looked the other way while the Phallangists went wild in Lebanon. Okay, their bombs miss, and they have tortured some prisoners and treated the occupied territories brutally. To get a perspective imagine the shoe on the other foot. Literally the alternative has been genocide. That is no excuse for lapses, but being human is a reason -- and on the whole they have been trying to get some foothold into getting negotiations going, building bridges, and settling this nasty war. For some reason the Jihadists have no problem with fellow Jihadists being brutal, mean, violent, ruthless, deceptive and dishonest -- but this is a fault punishable by death for everyone else. Oh Give me a break. I don't follow religions propagated by hypocrites -- and the only people who walk the walk and talk the talk -- are not islamicist extremists. I don't see much of a model in Hadith calls for deception or for violent reprisals for criticizing Islam. It's not my call to criticize Islam, criticizing people who betray their faith and show its uggliest face is not criticizing Islam. It's criticizing people who act like jerks and monsters.

Talk to 8 Jews and 100 Arabs. 10 of the Arabs will be Palestinians, 90 from other countries, All of them will claim that their failures are Israel's fault. Oil, investment money, education in the West, all of it is a nevermind. The failure of their elites to raise up their poor is Israel's fault. Jews may have keys to properties in Egypt, Syria or Iraq, but only the Palestinians seriously expect to ever return to homes -- in Israel. And the Hamas folks are showing that they are as bloodthirsty and ignorant as any of the folks fighting us in Iraq or Afghanistan. If even an innocent Jew falls into their hands he can expect no mercy. The only silver lining is that now that the US has shown how a less just society would react to Islamicist behavior, these folks are increasingly blaming the US instead. They might have a case if they blamed the oil companies, their own elites and the British and French -- but we'd all be better off if these folks would just decide to "get over it."

Instead they've declared a long term Jihad. Okay, we've dealt with Jihads before. Khruschev promised to bury us. Lenin was sure we'd sell him the guns he needed to do it. We out-waited those people. Can't we do that with the Moslem Jihadists?

Oh no, not so easy. In comes the Christian Crusaders. These guys were conjured up by Bin Laden out of his imagination. He wanted to fight Crusaders. It's the Islamicists answer to "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here." For Bin Laden it was "we provoke them over there, so we can train Jihadists and impose a Moslem theocracy here." This is win win for the Jihadists. Our Christian Fanatics get to fight their Islamicist Fanatics. In the process they keep expecting the Anti-Christ to arise and the 2000 year tribulation to arise. They can execute each other and fight one another for that whole time. Heck they've already been at it since about 700 AD.

Moreover, since the Annointed one (Christ) was supposed to be a Jewish King who would restore Israel, peacefully (I think his donkey was supposed to be led by an Arab). And since the heart of Judaic theory, as embodied in the "old testament" is that there is one ineffable God, that it is a crime to image God.

And it is a crime, according to the ten commandments, to raise up a single person into a world-conquering hero. That is God's job. Any Christian King who seeks to impose peace by waging a war is basically acting the part of an anti-christ. Throw in anti-semitism and the formula is certain. The prophesies in John are based on the prophesies in Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; all of these had to do with Jewish Subjects, and the problem of dealing with hero-worshipping masses led by world conquering fearless heroes. By that reckoning, Bush is yet another manifestation of the "anti-Christ" that has been plaquing Christians since Constantine made a syncretic Jewish origined Sect the national religion. Popes, Kings, Emperors, CEOs, they all have a habit of magnifying the ego and mythologizing "fearless leaders" into Golden images that people confuse with Gods. Hence the word "stars" for human Gods, and the "host from heaven" for both the Stars and for the myriads of "Gods" that people worshipped before Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastorianism, etceteras...came along.

Before that it was Roman, Greek, Persian and Babylonian "fearless heroes." before that Israel was haplessly caught between the ambitions of Chaldea, Assyria and Egypt. The Israeli Kings would side with one and get conquered by the other. Now I think I understand the Bible. It's talking about these idiotic warriors. The first word for what they are doing is "self fulfilling prophesy." The second is completely misinterpreting the Bible. In biblical times, the failure to walk a tight "just war" and "just peace" diplomatic tight-rope of good government, ethical civic behavior, and equanamity turned Israel first into Israel and Judah and then into Jews, Christians, Samaritans, and other offshoots. Now they get to do it all over again. Must be tiresome. The modern Arabs are worse than the Babylonians, about the same as the Assyrians. They claim that the "God of Israel" won't protect Israel and like RabShakah they taunt Israel. But there have been miracles of a sort. Israel is still around and there are still Jews around. Maybe there is a God. There have been countless battles at Armaggedo. That prophesy may happen again, but it doesn't have to. We are living in an end time -- ends are beginnings.

But of course, an ineffable, un-imaginable God, sounds more like an eternal principle or "root" to existence than an imaginable being. But then my understanding of the Buddha has evolved in that way too. I suspect that this vision is a bit better than all the ones that somehow manage to image "God" or the "object of worship" as some human being. That might be harmless, except that the Human being imaged, always manages to get the idea that he should follow the footsteps of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. And the world always defeats them, a pile of earth rolled into a ball that in each case destroys these false images of what a supreme being should be.

So my own internal answer. The one I hear after all the thunder and lighting, booming and raining, dust and smoke, have passed. Is that there is hope for peace. Not sure how to do it. I'm not sure that war, no matter how just people try to carry it out, can do it. On the other hand, none of us are captive to other peoples images of G'd. If they forbid the imaging of G'd, insist that Mohammed was His perfect messenger, and criticize other messengers and their transmissions for distorting the message, what makes them presume that their transmission has been so pure? Is not making someone infallible, who was human, kind of inconsistent? They criticize Christians for doing this with their founder -- why should they get away with doing the same thing with their founder.

If you ask me Shakyamuni, Gandhi, Jesus, Mohammed, as historical figures are nearly unavailable. Moreover, some of the versions of their lives don't impress modern folks all that much. The historical personages were probably fallible human beings. And all of them said so while they were alive. So what is with this using their theorizing and story telling as an excuse to war and hate? What gives here? What counts is the message over the messenger, and in that case, a little humility about the quality of the transmitters of this message is in order. Even if the message itself is perfect -- we aren't. A Golden man sitting in the sand, only shines by reflection of the Sun above. And he is only Gold due to the craftsmanship of thousands of hands. So why not admire the craftsmanship, take it seriously, and work to flawlessly uphold principle without conveniently interpreting principles to justify evil behavior?

I end up with more questions but there is a reason there are no Burning Bushes. We get to puzzle, argue, figure things out for ourselves. Whether that is accident or design is no matter. We get to be the architects of our own existence.

Chris

Posted by cholte at June 28, 2006 09:50 PM