There are things I just don't understand. I may have put my best brain cells to work on these things, and still, I don't get it. As time passes, I find more and more things that I have to concentrate on in order to catch them. When you have a severely limited supply of brains to begin with, and then you ruin most of them with stuff like cigarettes, cholesterol, wild-living, excessive drinking, work, etc., as I have, you're in deep doo-doo when it comes to comprehension. This is my pathetic condition.
For example, one of those things I don't understand is calculus. My life has managed to wend its way onward without calculus, but still, it would be nice to at least know what the word means.
Another thing I don't get at all is the whole Shiite-Sunni conflict. The mass murder for the sake of salvation. What in the hell are these people thinking? I've read about it, but I don't get it. How long has this been going on? Are the differences worth blowing up children for? How can any mind so distort a religion that it can justify the slaughter of thousands of innocents?
By what twist of religious fervor does blowing up a market full of old women make sense?
Today, I read that someone has blown up some minarets. These stood proudly in the rubble left from a former explosion which took out one of "the most sacred Shiite shrines in Islam." What? What profit falls to anyone in the whole damn world by blowing up someone else's shrine?
I have no doubt that there is, lurking in this country of ours, similar possibilities for widespread religious violence. All you need is the certainty that you know what God is and wants, and the other guys don't. And the other guys wish to take exception to your certainty. Now it's an even smaller step to bloodshed. I'll never understand it, I hope. This is the calculus of religious violence.
Here are some things I DO understand: The Freedom of Religion, and the Separation of Church and State. Both! Not just one, both! This I get.
4 comments:
It's mind boggling alright! I agree about what gives anyone the right to blow up other peoples shrines. And in my way of thinking it starts one on one. Listen to how people talk to each other on a daily basis. It's cute, cleaver etc. to whacl at other people verbally to "blow up" their thinking and to belittle them. Peace has to start with individuals. I don't know maybe I'm not making any sense either. Alice
I think you make complete sense. Thanks for contributing.
I have never understood man's inhumanity to man, whether it be war, simple murder , or slavery.
I could never even hit my dog-----
How can anyone take the life of another ??
Let us not forget that we are animals first and foremost. Animals that strike out violently when other animals try to take our food, shelter, habitat and/or sex away from us.
I watched a television show where a Stallion who was head of a group of horses in the Rocky Mountains violently trampled and bit a fowl to death because it was born in his herd and it wasn't his. The mother of the fowl stood by the dead fowl and mourned for several days and then rejoined the Stallion and his herd. The horse that father the fowl was banished from the herd and had to start his own. It was disgusting and horrible to watch, I felt for the dead fowl.
Perhaps the violence results from too many herds in too limited of a space.
Also as a person who believes that religion in general was contrived for the purpose of controlling populations of otherwise free thinking and free acting animals, it is easy to believe that thousands of years of crafting those messages could result in effective crowd control. It has been the direct cause of most of the mass murders in human history. I suppose it will remain so.
woodsman
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