Main menu:
On This Website: Religion and Politics (and the Environment).
Cultural Struggle and Overpopulation...
But not Music or Sex .
Home Page
This page really is about those who Kill in the Name of God.
One day I think one way:
Kill for God? Let God Do It?
Islam appears to want me to accept Allah or die. I have no intention of converting to that or any other faith, so a very large number of Muslims regard my continued existence as at best pointless, at worst an offence against their god. Despite what the apologists for Islam may say, there is no overwhelming declaration from the Muslim world that this expression of hatred for me is the illegitimate expression of a small minority. A large number of Muslims, it seems, would regard blowing me to smithereens as a gift to their God guaranteeing them paradise and many virgins.
Fundamentalist Christians in their millions, with a powerful influence over the government of the most powerful nation in the world, await their rapture and know that their god will destroy the rest of us, condemning not only me but their own neighbours to an eternal torment which appears to give these soi-disant christians nothing but a smug satisfaction. Frankly none of this would be of the remotest interest to the rest of us if it were not that the fundamentalists bloody their hands with the damage they are prepared to do in the world.
Yet on another day, I can feel quite differently:
The Prophet and The Christian Emperor:
When I was a teenager, an elderly and devout Muslim told me the story about when the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) had to seek refuge in the Christian land of Ethiopia. While he was welcoming the Muslims into his land, the Emperor held up his hand with his thumb and first finger clenched firmly together: he said, "This is the gap between Muslim and Christian."
I don't recall anyone telling me that the Prophet disagreed.
The story, and the good man who told it to me, moved me.
On that basis I therefore state that anyone, Christian, Muslim or Jew (or of any other religion), who holds to the message of the Emperor and the Prophet is my friend. Anyone, of any religion or none, who has sympathy with that message even if their own beliefs happen to be different is also my friend.
What I think of the men of hate and of blood, who see only enmity, will not bother them in the slightest. But I speak to God, too, and I can tell those who reject the message that they will not know God until they repent; and then only because He is, we hope, infinitely forgiving.
13c.