I've been doing a fair bit of driving lately, often between the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Québec City. Entertainment while behind the wheel is typically my car stereo as my vehicle is over 15 years old and doesn't have a CD player. Anyone remember cassettes?
I make good use of the seek button and often find myself tuning into American stations which are dedicated to spreading God's word, or the narrow fundamentalist Christian take on it.
Such was the case this past week as I found myself listening to some yahoo expound on Biblical prophecy and specifically what it says about the nation of Israel. You know the story in all likelihood, God's chosen, a master race if I dare invoke that term.
Interesting stuff, and certainly good for a chuckle. You see God, in his infinite wisdom, decided he'd give the Hebrew people the land of Canaan, a nice little present. If you have trouble wrapping your head around the concept of God worrying about who lives where on this planet, try thinking of him as a Re-Max agent.
But what is Canaan? Well, God is pretty specific on that point. In Genesis God promises Abraham and all his descendants certain boundaries, lands occupied by certain peoples. In chapter 15 it says:
To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites
It probably would have been nice if God, being all powerful and everything, if he had let all those people know he was taking their land from them. Then again, it looks like God overstepped himself given that the Jewish or Hebrew people have never occupied all the land that is supposedly their's by divine authority. Don't you hate it when divine beings don't stick to their word?
If God had kept his promise Israel would have included a massive chunk of what we currently call the Middle East. But then the God of the Old Testament could be pretty erratic. God had no problem with Moses ordering the killing of women and children, or with the keeping of slaves, or with taking conquered virgins as sex toys....or if you prefer the more polite term...concubines.
So why do I listen to this garbage when I don't believe a word of it?
Well, it does provide a decent window into the minds of many of today's ultra right wing neo-conservatives.
And it also helps explain why some Conservative bright bulbs, like failed GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, have such a hate on for higher education. Going to schools of higher learning that teach students the art of critical thought flies directly in the face of the blind obedience that so many fundamentalist Nimrods, (a little Biblical nod for those who get it) demand.
God and his prophets say and advocate many things which civilized people would never tolerate. Stoning disobedient children is one good example, condoning the seduction of a friend's wife and then murdering that friend to hide the infidelity is probably an even better one...An eye for an eye? Uhm, only some of the time.
Any rational thinking person would take these writings for what the truly are, and would dismiss the God crap as leaders seeking justification for the atrocities they've committed.
Its okay, God says we're cool, kill 'em all...the land is ours.
Fundamentalist, evangelical Bible beating holy rollers used to cast their franchise in the United States mostly with the Democrats. Not hard to understand, it was because of Jesus' teachings about compassion and being your brother's keeper. At least that was the case until senior American evangelicals were seduced into putting their pulpits to work for the Republican party. And we're seeing the same thing take place north of the border in the last 10 years or so with our Conservative party.
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2 comments:
Your lack understanding of the (Jewish) Bible. That's understandable. But at least consider the phenomenon - that the Jewish people have existed over 3,500 years. Jews have literature dating back to at least 2,500 years, and all of it supports the Bible's history of ancient Egypt, the forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, etc.
The Jewish nation, as Mark Twain wrote, have seen all empires come and go. They remain until today one family. If you take a serious look into world history, you ought realize that Jewish history defies Nature, what with Jews scattered worldwide, always persecuted, killed and chased out, always generating enmity in jealous hearts, always the scapegoat. Yet these people continue to thrive and remain united - no matter what.
Take a Canadian who moves to Thailand, say. Chances are his family sooner or later will mingle and mix and his Canadian genome will extinguish. This is true for any people except the Jew. Why?
That you can brush off Israel apathetically - even if you only see the world with your fleshy eyes and believe that only that flesh's visuality is what defines truth, you ought to take pause and reconsider because - it's not for nothing Israel/Jews remain in constant focus in the eyes of the world.
Don't you even catch a hint there's more here than meets the eye? Do you remain obstinately and completely obscured from seeing even a bit of truth to the "chosen people" concept that you scorn?
I'm not trying to convince you, because I too do not care about your blogging opinions, but as a rational human to another, do you entirely dispossess the validity of a higher spiritual element?
Is your life and that of the ant's on par. One day here, one day gone - gone into the wastebasket of finite history? If you don't believe in God, then you have nothing to live for except to follow your lusts. What sets you higher than the animals you eat? That you can think, calculate and reason is just billions of years of adaptation, and crap like that, is that it?
Alas I waste words upon a Canadian ant (no offense to the ant). (In fact, Jewish sages teach us that we can learn from the ant both industriousness and the proper behavior of No Theft!)
You may be too far gone to make sense to or argue with, but I had to put in my two cents because you are, after all, a human and thus impressionable, and maybe, just maybe, I can expose to you a piece of the mosaic that really exists behind the thick curtain of Nature.
I love Canada, always did, although the liberal slant career politicians have engendered, as in the USA, abodes ill for the country, I think.
I consider myself to have a deeply spiritual perspective, and I absolutely believe in a higher power. But the higher power which I believe in does not have a chosen people, does not rob land from one group to give it to another....to put it bluntly, my higher power is not racist. The higher power I believe in does not call on one group to subjugate another, not as a test or punishment or for any other reason....the voices that call on some people to treat others inhumanely, as less than equals, that comes from a different place.
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