An overstatement or a painful irony..?
Proponents of religion might rightfully argue that God had over the millennia sent his prophets and messengers to guide mankind out of the dark ages of ritualistic paganism into an age of enlightenment and peaceful egalitarian coexistence. Many would point-out that he even allowed his own beloved son to suffer crucifixion for that message; so where is this divine plan going wrong?
The wrong lies in man’s genetic makeup, and perhaps when God was creating the whole of existence to the highest level of symbiotic perfection, Satan sneaked over to the production line and threw a spanner or two into the works of man’s DNA, leaving this creature completely outside of the symbiosis club. Satan’s spanners turned ambition into an insatiable greed for material wealth and an irrepressible lust for power, and in his pursuit of one or both, man would add another spanner into his own works; a level of stupidity that is hard to find even amongst the lowest forms of life.
Man of the first world (the west), desperately covets the possessions of man of the third world (the Middle-East); and since any professional burglar would always divert the residents’ attention whilst ransacking their home, the former wreaks havoc upon the life of the latter by prizing open a box of horrors (democracy) that would send Pandora herself running for shelter, whilst purloining the latter’s wealth.., but this is where oil, gas and religion, God’s greatest gifts to third world man turn into his worst plagues.
Now this is where the robbers’ diversionary tactics become a crime far greater than the robbery, because when this Pandora’s box was opened, out popped Satan’s most destructive spanner: ignorance, and due to the total absence of any cohesive political or social leadership in the entire Middle-East, the world’s biggest fuel station and birthplace of all monotheistic religions, the aggrieved people of that region have to gravitate towards and rally around the only loud voices of dissent that they could hear or even
understand, and those are the voices of religious radicalism.
“In God we trust”, a good adage when proceeding through life in peace, but in times of conflict when man turns to God in despair, it is a banner for extremism that never fails to result in blood-letting at catastrophic scales. It is the loud rallying call of every radical cleric with the IQ, social graces and eloquence of a parrot, who flicks the mothballs out of his long beard and starts spewing forth alleged words of God that no one dares deny or refute, but at long last the status-hungry cleric has his listeners and when no other voice of reason is there to allay their fears, they soon become his followers and finally his soldiers.
Sunni, Shiite, Selafi, Taleban, El-Qaeda, Jihadists, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelists, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, ultra-right Zionists... Religiously affiliated groups of people who commit their lives and those of others to words of God that he had never uttered and would perpetrate atrocities
in his name that utterly demean his divinity.
An ordinary kid from a humble background once wrote a song that resonated with more wisdom than all of the world’s religions combined...
“Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do... Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too... Imagine all the people, living life in peace...”
John Lennon’s immortal words are not those of a sermon delivered by a holy man, nor are they infused with biblical mysticism, but by their honest simplicity they are a message for all of mankind to set religious beliefs aside and find the true path to heaven through simply being humane.