Who is whom to judge? Or who is to judge whom?

The psychology, which may be shared in the many subcultures residing beneath the umbrellas of major religions, involves “locus of control”, or in more familiar terms, who or what is the central power and who and what are peripheral to it.

God always wins this one.

🙂

A portion of unfortunate and perhaps misdirected mankind chooses to argue through a figure of human agency.

Judaism — at least contemporary Judaism — most strictly separates its prophets, all of whom are depicted as imperfect and riven with faults from their earliest introduction, from its God.

Critics of Islam, I believe, point to conflation that perhaps inappropriately elevates the human to be as like a god even if not God.

What headaches we have given ourselves with this combination of metaphysical (therefore unprovable by empirical standards) conjectures and their installation into culture. Before drawing rebuke, I may remind that in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed to discriminate against Jews were upon implementation applied equally to Muslims, which is my way of suggesting that whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (alphabetical ordering guides that method of listing, nothing else), we need together to step down from the bloody merry-go-round and pause to reflect and wonder at legacy with both compassion — I favor ethnolinguistic coevolution in my outlook — and the determination to look forward rather than backward, to become free of the past and more able to embrace a new dawn.

Before Jesus, Paul, and Constantine and not much later Muhammad, the Jewish teacher Hillel the Elder had spent his career shifting Judaic arguments from the defense of rote and ritual to the promotion of derived principle and in doing so had produced a more accessible religion, it’s uptake in a restive Rome being perhaps no accident. However, the politics of power intrude, competition develops, and we are left “full of it”. Becoming or being aware of that as well as more sophisticated about how we’re really put together psychologically and spiritually should help mitigate the adverse effects of the endowments of each.

The atheist’s argument may be specious in that anyone interested in leveraging license to lord over another may claim victimization and the imperatives of defense. As much becomes a transparent ploy — and one that cynical dictators apply by producing “false flag” attacks . . . or more recently, drawing retributive fire and treating the same as unprovoked. As much also becomes a juvenile and dirty way of working. As the same becomes more apparent, it becomes also more shameful.

Inspiration for the above rant:

Jones, Kile.  “ISIS and Radical Islam: An Atheist Examines a Stupid Meme.”  Patheos, June 9, 2015.

What magic Mumbo Jumbo calls an end to conflict seated primarily in the mind?

I wish I knew.

By way of the example of Putin and Khamenei and their common interest in feudal absolute power, we may know more about political criminality than in centuries past.  One may review from “The Russian Section” exactly how a vicious authoritarian system may be made to work to privilege a class of overlords or piratical wealthy.  Of course, the same develop the “realpolitik” in politically repressive power to keep themselves in business (Mugabe’s proof as far as I’m concerned).

Along with locus of control (mentioned above), the taking of license — the power to make others suffer with impunity — should also be viewed as politically and socially problematic.  Dictatorships concentrate power in one entity (person, cabal, junta, party), and that power becomes the power to capriciously visit suffering on others with impunity; authentic democracies distribute power and constrain the powerful in such a way to leave God and the law more powerful than any soul that may chance to be born human and pass beneath both.

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