The wise ones explain life's journey to be, "the human soul in search of,and in progress toward,final harmony and intergration with all creation." ( Idries Shah). Religion,which was created to help mankind achieve this goal,has turned into dogma and mind control. Both Christianity and Islam have succumbed to this failure. Christ preached a message of love, but his followers deified him and changed his words until what was left of his teachings became the state religion of the Roman Empire.Dogma was solidified to the extent that if your beliefs did not exactly mirror state dogma, you were burned at the stake, or otherwise punished. Christianity brought us the Crusades, religious wars in Europe and other misadventures and transformed a loving itinerant teacher into an armored Christ bearing a sword. Islam was conceived as religion of tolerance amongst other things. Coexistence with others,equal rights, and a singular focus on God without the frills of man made God,saints and other pagan inclusions. Muhammad(PBUH) stressed jihad, a personal strSPAM!!!le to attain closeness with God. Legal scholars soon added dogma,rural populations added saints and jihad became holy war.
Today, with a growing contingent of evangelical Christian firebeathers influencing politics, with a far right wing Israeli government,expansionist and nuclear,and the Islamic Republic of Iran on the nuclear threshold,we have again succeeded the the the brink similar to the Bay of Pigs/Cuban missile crisis of the 60's. You'd think we'd have learned'
New Year's Eve my lovely lady and I went to Chinese buffet to celebrate the holiday. Both of us have lived in the East and buffet is about as close as you can get to the Far East in Roanoke,Virginia. All of a sudden, I noticed that just about everyone in the restaurant was morbidly obese! Scores of lard buckets waddling around with plates piled high with food.(And I would hazard to guess a large proportion of them were "born again" evangelicals)
What with the rapid expansion of science and technology in the 20th and early 21st century,it seems ineresting that there are people who deny evolution,climate change and.as Glen Beck would have us believe,that the polar bears are doing just fine. Over in the Middle East, you have Salafist Muslims who yearn for the times of the Prophet(PBUH),ie the 7th century. Large groups of population are being indoctrinated to prepackaged belief systems.The poor Christian does not have worry about anything while devouring his 5th plate at the buffet and the Muslim mother will be comforted when her only son is vaporized while detonating a suicide vest.
Meanwhile.large corporate entities have hijacked our food suMFly,our water resources,denuded our forests,cut our mountaintops and dumped garbage everywhere. In America, we deny science as being contrary to the Bible, which makes the porkers at the buffet feel like saints. But really, what they want is to remove all regulations, so our corporates can rape the planet even more. I have heard people sSPAM!!!est we abolish the department of environmental protection and the department of education. What lunacy. Our corporate masters have raped the third world, which is part of the reason you have suicide bombers. We have made a large portion of the world feel hopeless. and Africa hasn't woken up yet!
Yet, I am told that the forthcoming apocalypse "predicted" in the ending of Mayan long count calender( Ah the loonies will out in force this year), is really the ushering in of a new era. An era of peace and spiritual awakening. Signs of hope fill the air. Obama was elected president based on the slogan hope and change. Sure,he didn't deliver much,he was owned like most of our politicians by the special interest lobbies. But the fact that such a slogan inspired us,means we know something must be done. In the Middle East,the Arab Spring ushered in hope and change for those folks,by overthrowing the puMFets that owed their existence to the exploiters and profiteers. We shall see more violence as the money is being pumped into new leaders who will tow the profit line. Egypt's military government is turning out to be " THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS". Oil companies will probably have alot to say over who finally rules Libya, but will the the people endure it? I hope not. In Europe and America, many are fed up with the Kleptocracies that have brought the financial system to the edge of collapse. We don't hear the truth, as our news outlets dispense doctored information to suit their agendas. Yet there is that breath of fresh air that I have smelled, mingled with jasmine in the streets of Tunisia,with the scent of broiled kefta in Tahrir Square, and with the odor of taxicab fumes in Liberty(formerly Zucotti) park in New York.
Let us hope and pray that 2012 brings us closer, as a species, to the dream than was lost thousand of years ago,the dream of harmony and integration with Creation.