Last week, I posted a diary at DK that questioned how well this great, longstanding blog and blogging community are covering the ongoing war in Palestine and Israel. The diary ended up both engendering a lot of comments, but also a lot of provocative comments that I thought were valuable for deepening discussion, even when I disagreed with the comment.
Eventually, and somewhat surprisingly, Markos chimed in, claiming that my characterization of Israel as being increasingly authoritarian and apartheid was “bullshit.” I responded. Quickly, someone had my response removed from the diary.
So, jumping back into the fire, I’m reposting a Facebook post I wrote a few weeks ago, when pressured to assert why I believe what I do about this battle among beliefs:
CREDO
Watching the world come closer to spinning out of control hour by hour is worse than watching it spin out of control week by week.
I have a few friends who are atheists. I'm not even close.
I have many, many, many friends who are Christians. Although baptized and confirmed as a Lutheran, I'm not even close to Christianity anymore. I came to a point where I couldn't recite the Apostles' Creed or Nicene Creed anymore, because they are false statements. Jesus did not rise from the dead. There's no such thing as the father, son and Holy Ghost, literally or figuratively.
I have many friends who are Jewish. I'm not even close.
I have several friends who are Muslim. I'm not even close.
I regard all your faiths as cults, pure and simple.
That was okay until your hatreds toward one another spiraled into what we are now witnessing. Your superstitions and weird rituals might have once and again in our past served to advance civilization. But - hey - the Aztecs and Mayans built monuments as awesome as Notre Dame Cathedral. But they were built to be platforms to cut out human hearts.
I call Judaism, Christianity and Islam "The three interconnected Abrahamic Vengeful Male Sky God Cults."
The basis of these cults are myths with no more substance in reality than Jason and the Golden Fleece or King Arthur. King David is a myth, yet every day of the week, Christians and Jews venerate him as some sort of epochal empire builder. They call the hymns known as Psalms the Psalms of David, yet nobody has ever shown that to be factual. Abraham, the interconnecting tissue of these superstitions, is a myth. However, his supposed home, Hebron, is a bedeviled city of warped hatreds between two cults fighting over what that myth might mean.
Like the Aztecs of 1500, the Christians of 1500 sacrificed people. Mostly women who were midwives or healers. Unlike the Aztecs who quickly killed their victims, the Catholic or Protestant clerical executioners watched their victims slowly roast as they screamed. Like the Aztecs, this was all done in front of large crowds. To warn them.
Imagine living in Gaza right now. Really try. It has been an open air prison since Hamas took over 17 years ago. Not that it was much less of a prison before that. Hamas, which has become a boil on the flesh of every person in that prison, has picked this particular time to put a collective suicide vest on every person living in that hellhole.
And so, another branch of the vengeful male sky god cult (Zionist Judaism) has convinced the third branch of the cult (Christians) to accept what's going to happen over the next several weeks. Live on TV. To warn us all.
I'm not blaming one of these cults more than another. You are all, if you believe these dangerous superstitions, responsible for enabling this, either by rooting for one or another of the cults, or by idly standing by as thousands of kids die without even understanding why they are being rendered up to the alter of Moloch.
The reality is that your superstitions are, as much as anything else going on now, keeping us from keeping the entire planet from soon becoming unlivable.
Own it!
