At this moment, Israel is in the last phases of its war against Hamas and the people of Gaza, who apparently threaten the Israeli in their safety by firing rockets at them all the time. Since a full scale war, like the one waged momentarily, can’t be as precisely calculated and constrained as one might want, Israel is keeping the press away from the war zone. There is a dirty war going on, with a lot of “collateral damage”, that much seems clear.
In the mean time, my government, the Dutchies, refuse to condemn the Israeli aggression. They should, however, just as they (should) condemn the Palestine-Hamas aggression against Israeli civilians. Both are indulging in their stupid violence, forcing the other side to either defend or – more primitively but fully in line with obsolete scriptures – to retaliate.
One can haggle about who is to blame for all this bloodshed. And precisely this is done with great enthusiasm in the international press. It is obvious that this disaster is a religious war. So I am inclined to blame religion, or even better: god himself, were it not for his blatant non-existence. But the national governments as well as the United Nations and many other interest groups are taking pot shots at Israel and Hamas. For them, this is a more earthly thing in relation to which any allusion to proper religion is avoided. Or so it seems. And everyone has an opinion on how to stop the one side of idiots firing rockets at the other side of idiots.
Everyone? Not entirely. Not our Dutch leaders. They cautiously choose the Israeli side by refusing to classify Israel’s aggression.
Of course, we have one slight complication sitting in the way in this country. “Our” culture is of Judaic-Christian origin. This shows up in the pussyfoot way, out of solidarity, in which Israel is handled. It is likewise across the great pond with the opinion leaders and lobby-cowboys in New York. The USA will never really heavily rebuke Israel for anything it does, because the Israeli influence, through their religious kinsmen and wealthy bigmouths with a lot of leverage over USA foreign policy, is too strong. Any reproach will always be on the kinder side of strict, I reckon.
In the Netherlands, “we” are strong believers in that appallingly violence-saturated scripture we call the bible. And we share our unforgiving, vain and despicable god with the Jews.
We also share that god with the Muslims, of course, which puts the whole thing into a bit of a weird perspective: the big three – Jews, Christians and Muslims – believe in the same god, and they share many prophets. For instance, all three were founded by this mister Abraham, who was fully willing to sacrifice his own son to please his god. (How terrible!) This kind of silly violence – real or in writing only – spawns violence, I’m sure. One of the effects is that the Muslims, Christians and Jews find it so important to promote their interpretation of their imaginary friend as the only valid one, that they eventually feel justified in getting a lot of people into real heavy trouble.
In this context, real heavy trouble means “loss of life”. And as usual, the most vulnerable people, including children, bear the brunt of it. All this is happening in the name of “faith” and “belief” and “god” and a bunch of fantasised books which claim eternal truth for themselves.
There is only one way to go if we want to survive this idiocy as a species. (We might NOT survive other idiocies, though.) This religion crap has to end somehow. It should be forbidden, abolished, lobotomised out of existence, I don’t know how, but we MUST get rid of it. Religion has cost us too many lives already and it puts a much too volatile fuse into the many faithful powder kegs. I suspect that religion has served as THE provocation for most of humanities belligerent clashes. I dare to say that it is also, as a bottom line, the most important reason for many a small inter human conflict.
God, in short, is not good for us. Why can’t we just grow up, and out of it? We are smart enough and nobody who has enough self confidence and who can appreciate the full marvel of the natural world, really needs a god. We could easily do without.
