An angry person scars everyone and injects permanent scars!

[Guest guest]

Hello Benjamin,

What you detail there from the O.T. and the Koran could be described as the

tribal rules of engagement. It was their version of the ultimate deterrent.

You fight and win or you die and so do all your relations. In that way you

would fight only 'rightous' wars that you were sure you could win. In a sense

that was their version of M.A.D. (mutual assured destruction) which has

actually served us well until recently. It is deeply unpleasant reading but

wonderfully deterring to the hasty hotheads. Remember also that the O.T. is a

history book with all the special pleading that implies. The Psalms and the

Book of Job are there too.

 

Will advaitins please pardon my lapse into dual speak but I want to sketch an

idea in the form that most faithful will understand (of all faiths).

Throughout the ages the Divine and the human intersect through the mediation of

saints, sages, qutubs, prophets and avatars addressing the particular

predicaments of that age in a language that age and that people can understand.

Any serious reading of a scripture bears this in mind. It is only the

fundamentalists that regard a scripture as absolutely unequivocally true for

all times. By the way, those with a negative view of religion who gather those

quotes agree with them, not you Benjamin you're only passing them along.

 

Not to have a perspective is impossible. We have moved on from tribal R.O.E to

M.A.D. The successive waves of saints and sages are expressing the goal of

universal brotherhood progressively clarifying that vision in their reading of

the scriptures.

 

Still the fundamentalist reading is omnipresent. Are those that read the Koran

and the Mahabharatha in the original, as they see it, capable of eroding the

sense of M.A.D. that cools the secular temper. I don't know. India getting

involoved in Iraq to humiliate the vanquished Muslim is a low, cheap idea and

bad policy.

 

So Benjamin the idea is this - scriptures are read - scriptures are interpreted

- the interpretation that follows the trajectory of the saints' readings is to

be trusted. That isn't in the least naive but requires a meditative attention

to the signs of the times.

 

Shanti,Michael.