The points of mutuality, as with the validation of the Torah, are also points of appropriation. The Jews, already hard forged in the crucible of history, rejected Muhammad in his day and Muhammad who had prayed toward Jerusalem turned about and prayed toward Mecca.
The central psychology, divinely blessed or crazed and gifted, places the “locus of control” in Muhammad, a presumptuous position from a Jewish perspective, an infallible stance from a Muslim point of view, for if Muhammad is the Prophet of God, then the defiant (rejectionist) Jews have erred. Pandered or true, the implicit political program — it hasn’t been much different with Christianity — places the Jews as backwards on the periphery of the Real Deal, and, whaddayaknow — the fighting begins.
I’d rather go back to being brothers, recast from Judaism after Hillel a neo-Judaism accessible to all (inclusive) and amenable to adaptation and favored labeling. Probably “ChriJewsLims” will not work but it would be good to get to about the same page without (!) getting to the apocalyptic end of each thread.
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It’s not hard living entirely offline.
It’s impossible.
We have to check our e-mail for business and domestic obligations, if nothing else.
Then we may check our blogs, Facebook presence, Twitter account.
We / I have followings.
We’re not going to disappear on our fans (if we can help it).
I thought yesterday’s observation up top worth repeating here.
It’s rich.
It certainly attacks the idea of one monotheist “true religion”, although it’s completely accurate and fair to note that without the Torah and the Jews, neither Christianity nor Islam have any other completely different and independent foundation.
As he did for Pharaoh, Moses proves unavoidable and powerful.
Today’s follow-up:
The power of poetry gives us our minds — many symbols, many arrangements, many perceptions, many interpretations x social grammar, normative language behavior . . . so ye poets 🙂 , let’s go and find the good together.
And with the help of God, nature, and the universe, build some things — a little at a time — for the mind more helpful, greater, wondrous.
Are the readers hunting the atrocity for a less than forensic peak?
Are they in the market for emotion?
Arousal to anger?
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After six years of touring conflict from a desktop — what a way to see the world! — I’m probably not going to get away from it for long: I’ve developed some ideas about contemporary politics, psychology, and religion that may be useful as regards comprehending how some pernicious things work and facilitating their diminishment over time.
Syrians, I’m sure, for example, would rather have had an army responsible to them rather than to Bashar al-Assad or al-Nusra, but not having that army has positioned them between the armed madness of the two representations of secular and religious despotism.
For as long as the constituent-victims of that civil war continue to relate to the features of either fascism — all for Assad / all for Allah — they’re stuck.
Add to that encrustation the ever present “socialism of fools” that is anti-Semitism: there you have a revolution on the outside that wants deeply for another on the inside.
It’s good having a voice, but a voice needs rest now and then.
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“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
Hillel the Elder revolutionized Judaism and Jewish outlook across a lifetime of decades preceding 0 CE and a for few years afterward. Where Jewish thinking had been exclusive and literal, his arguments in law urged it toward inclusion and adherence to it toward abstract principle and good intention.
“That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. All off the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Hillel’s Torah-derived humanism resonates through contemporary liberal humanism and the reformed — and, perhaps, post-Holocaust chastened — Christian world, and it reverberates also through the thought of myriad Islamic Humanists, i.e., those who know that what ISIS in Iraq or Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Taliban in Afghanistan (ad infinitum) are doing is evil.
Muslims know as artists and physicians, businessmen and the full suite of professionals, much including military professionals, that something has gone wrong, and the “cavemen” are making a mess of the legacy of what they would have as their “Religion of Peace”.
Can they, will they, when will they resolve to eject the Muslim Brotherhood from the main base in body and philosophy associated with and developing from out of the religion?
While global military intelligence and related field capability work on the “Islamists” and diplomats do battle on their various fronts, it’s the Ummah overall that must choose between choice in belief and the dignity inherent in the freedom to reason and reflect on God, nature, and the universe independently and the closed, cowed, intimidated, and passive acceptance of obedience before the will of despots, i.e., being told what to think.
While the proudly Islamophobic argue that al-Qaeda’s Islam is Islam and Muslims across the Ummah vociferously argue that that same is not but rather a deep perversion of Islam — if that doesn’t amount to cause in common, what does? — I give a slight nod backward to Hillel as a point of departure into the modern world, for without Hillel’s methodical work in law and generous spirit in faith, I wonder if Jesus-Paul-Constantine or Muhammad would have had at hand — as thought drifting in the atmosphere — a Jewish technology for appropriating into their global outlooks and strategizing to gather unto themselves the wandering, the lookin’-for-somethin’ of their day, and building from that thought immense institutions and new bodies of lore and literature.
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Linguist Daniel Everett went to Brazil on the Christian mission: learn a language, translate the Second Testament into it, and spread the word. The mission failed in that respect. Dr. Everett lost his faith, as he notes in the above clip, but, perhaps inadvertently, my encounter with his observations and thought has altered irrevocably my own appreciation of language as a cultural invention and suspension: I believe we are our language and that may include our behavior with language as well as possession of the intellectual machinery of a communicating tool.
BackChannels has long had a page highlighting Daniel Everett’s work, and I mention him and it here in relation to the presence of a humanity in possession of somewhat fewer than 7,000 living languages, each one of them an invention, a place, and a reflection of the mind of a people. As the world loses a few languages across the course of each years, we should wonder about who has just gone missing, what they were dreaming, and whether or not it might have been good to have had some of that talk around after all.
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I’ve covered a lot of ground over the years, have done my time with Maslow, and have been loose from institutional constraint and plodding, which is kind of cool — a writer should know freedom — but . . . what have I done, really?
“We find a strong correlation between religious fundamentalism – actually among both Christians and Muslims – and hostility toward out-groups like homosexuals or Jews.”
“In Europe… there is something called sex slaves. What did they do? They steal little girls. Glory be to Allah (سبحان الله), You know number one in the world who does that? Number one country in the world? Israel.
And this is the way things are today in Britain and everywhere else in the so-called free world. Islam has only been a feature of our society for a couple of decades or so, and everything we think and say about it now is weighed against the possible threat of violence, even down to a simple drawing. That is a definition of terrorism. That is cultural terrorism, and we are pandering to it shamelessly and shamefully.
I don’t have great answers for what Shaykh Saed Rageah does with language, traversing a line from, in essence, the west know prostitution to (Israel) “steals little girls and sells them.”
Pat Condell tells the truth about telling the truth — but to what kind of distracted world?
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On BackChannels, “shimmer” deals with some perhaps clarifying divide between the Islamofascism that lies, slanders, and ambushes its way to power and Islamic Humanism that would eschew that same Islam and, indeed, would seem to become its target as Muslim-on-Muslim violence exceeds that of any other across the Islamic Small Wars.
At the end of any given day in this area, I / you / we are left with impressions from a day’s worth of major media, Facebooking, and Twittering, and any correspondence we may do on the side.
Islam: Baghdad, Damascus, Islamabad, Kabul, Mogadishu, Tripoli: how is it going?
My bet at the moment is that it goes with the hotheads and magical lost when it should go with a grounded, middle, moderate, and strong leadership possessed of integrity and the greater love for humanity and God.
Again, I’m concerned with transitioning from observation and complaint — and with open warfare, that’s about all an online pundit may do — to working on a project and solving problems, and I think that may be much more doable on the other side of conflict: development.
It’s just that kind of Facebook morning, the argument at the dinner table resuming at the breakfast table . . . .
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“Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth has been made clear from error. Whoever rejects false worship and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy handhold that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things.” (Quran 2:256) / “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).
And God (and nature and the universe) did not make others?
The MEMRI clip involves play with symbols with the veiled Dr. Noha expressing the modern ethical-humanist-skeptic-religious perception and the modern news interviewer espousing a terrifying retreat into the medieval atmosphere.
Textual ambiguity in scripture enables the narcissistic and venal to adapt injunction and prophecy from on high to murder and plunder. Much of the world has been victimized by these robed (more often) mafia methods, and one hope it might develop the wherewithal to fight back: however, what it may want to engage (fight) is a kind of personality, and the available text is less important than that.
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The PROBLEM is a mightily complex machine — what more could one want to look at than “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” in the interests of peace? — but a problem in the head may be language-driven, and the invention of that language may fall to mouths that in serving themselves poison the perceptions of others whom they use.
Narcissistic supply.
Self-aggrandizement.
Grandiose ambition and delusion.
When it starts to be seen, it may start to be solved.
Institutional competition and the want of supremacy inducing wealth by subscription has brought to the world an immense grief. A system devised and parlayed as perfect for one both expresses and guarantees “all against all” where what we all need and must have is “all for all”.
Hillel around 0-CE may have inspired early Christianity — just my thought but his outlook fits that new religion — but while striving to explore the law — Torah — to produce a more embracing and inclusive Judaism, he could not have foreseen the development of General Constantine (272-306-CE) or General Muhammad (570-632-CE). The resulting supersessionary warfare, broad at times as with the Crusades, narrow as on the Iberian Peninsula, sometimes on the surface (perhaps Turkey and the Armenian population suit that description), sometimes burning underground and erupting like volcano (about where we are today) has been ugly in every century. This is where to stop it.
One cannot blame scripture — Jewish, Christian, or Muslim (or other) — for this state of affairs but rather perhaps the ascent to power of men whose ambitions combine venality with grandiose aspirations.
The Colossus of Constantine lays on the ground in Rome, a ruin, and the Brotherhood affiliates (is their another umbrella?) purport to be building new civilizations wherever they have their adventure, hold themselves together, and get away with their crimes. The secular dictators are no better — in fact, I suggest they are mirror images in personality and that whether language promotes a secular ideology or a religion, in the hands of such men, the results are the same. WE need to get them off the stage.
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I will distill all of that down to 140 characters.
It’s all about axis in power – dictators, dictatorships, and despotism vs listeners, open conversations, mutual constituent-leadership risk.
Thirty-one children and one adult were killed in Colombia on Sunday when fuel exploded on a broken-down bus returning from a church event, an official said.
The poor countries have old cars, with many repairs who are out of rules from dealer, maybe this was something about Diesel filter, Diesel tank or brakes . . . When I see the video cameras to road control in U.S. is amazing see all the cars with new models, truck Ford F-150, high cost cars . . . The bus in which 32 children died transited without insurance SOAT and technical review . . . The driver of the accident bus in Colombia had no driving license, this is the reality of the poverty . . . 😦
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