To begin with, I don’t know how religion can be used to resist evil, when religion itself is considered by many as the evil.
Besides this, hell to X is heaven to Y.
Hiroshima was a yesterday example. Gaza is today’s new example.
Human history proves that we never learn from our self-made mistakes and catastrophes.
Few years ago I was visiting Sweden. In down town Stockholm, I had my lunch in a small restaurant. I read on the meal list a phrase I’ll never forget, it says:“(They) introduce everyday a new weapon of mass-destruction, we offer a new dish “.
The word (They) is meant, those humans who have been imagining the end of the world since we inherited it. In most of our mythologies the world ceases to exist before it can begin. Zeus and Odin had to wage total war on their for-bears to make way for man. Paleontologists tell us of the five major extinctions, the last of which was brought to a head, in theory, by a mischievous asteroid that did in the dinosaurs and coated the world in a thin layer of iridium rich sediment 66 million years ago.
The 20th century offered us three global stories to follow: Fasicism, Communism and Libralism. The 21 century shocked us with a fourth, religious fanatism and terrorism.
With such cultural –or uncultural- background, it is enough for a finger move to wipe all life from earth. No worry, we have all the means to achieve this satanic destructive goal. But then there’ll be no other to blame, because there’ll be no more other.
What we need today is to be mature enough to save ourselves and the future generations from ourselves. That is –with over simplification approach- to prefer a new dish over a new “Armageddon”. But conflict after conflict, and war after war, and weapon after more destructive weapon, it is clear that we did not learn from our mistakes not even from our miseries.
After the 1st and 2nd world wars, and after the nuclear explosions: from military Hiroshima in Japan to peaceful Chernobil in Ukraine, we humans are moving out of an apocalyptic age to postapocalipticage, with fingers on the trigger and closed eyes. Every other day we know of a new discovery: a new kind of ultrasound nuclear missiles, Hydrogen bombs, cluster bombs, Vacuum bombes. But not a new dish. Now every single human being is intilted to be killed by thiscontinuous advanced and accumulated nuclear weapons, at least 9 times, according to statistics. One time is more than enough.
The bomb used on Hiroshima is a child’s toy by comparison with today’s version.
According to the recent issue of the bulletin of the Atomic scientists, around 700 nuclear warheads are now on Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each has the explosive power of 800,000 tons of TNT.
If detonated over Manhattan it would create a temperature up of five times greater than the center of the sun, extinguishing all life and destroying everything within 150 square miles.
We, humans, never stop inventing, producing, and piling weapons of mass destruction, be it nuclear,chemical, or biological. We go to war to solve problems that cannot be solved but by peace. Ukraine is a current example, and so is Palestine.
Peoples migrate with their beliefs and with their way of living, which are different from the beliefs of the host peoples and their way of living. Evil is there waiting in the corner. So the confrontation becomes imminent. Here in France we have a hot example. Europe as a whole knows this very well, the consequences no matter how hard and complicated are also well known and cannot be avoided.
After all this is one face of globalization, a fact no one can refuse or ignore., especially the master of all evils.
In all cultures it is said that all peoples are one family, sons and daughters of one God, who created them all. But the fact is that God created us differently, and to be different. And the fact too is that we respect in our religious prayers, and in our national culture this theory of being created differently, but we don’t accept and respect it in our daily life.
Look at the destructive war in Ukraine Priests of the same religion are blessing warriors and their armaments on both sides of the conflict. So where is the evil?. We have seen such crazy features in the Middle East too, when terrorists led by their terrorist religious leaders, killed Christians as well as Muslims, and destroyed their houses of worship simply because they are different.
Religion teaches us that God created us (humans) to be his viceroy in caring and administering the world. But neither heavy armaments, nor climate change is an indication that we are up to this noble mission. The truth is that armament is a self-destructive role. It is a man-made asteroid that might make us humans modern dinosaurs.
We are already facing the destructive consequences of a one degree cent-rise in global warming, but we boast that we can produce a bomb five times greater than the center of the sun.
We are already destructively squeezed by climate change and armaments. Both are man-made. And both can and should be dismantled.
How? There is a way if there is a will.
When? Now before it is too late.
Why? Just to be humans and God’s viceroy.
Is it possible ? why not ? All we need is to be humans and God’s viceroy.