|
|
|
|
Not bothering to investigate and find out what the word ‘God’ represents, or whether it is just a word, with nothing behind it, Christians have waged wars, carried out merciless persecutions and crimes, and egoistically gone forth to conquer and colonize other countries in the name of this ‘God’ or ‘word’, which they claim to be good, loving, omnipotent and omniscient. Regardless of whether there really is such a God or not, they were laboring under tremendous delusion, for if their God were really as they claimed of It—not ‘He’—It could have brought ‘true religion’ (as they like to call it) to everyone in the world had It so wished, without leaving others to do it by violence. All this is such a blatant sham that it is truly remarkable that people—any/all people—should not have seen through it long ago, or to have entertained the notion for even a minute! But was it not said by the Buddha that there are two things without limits: Space and human stupidity? To merely know the word and to think that we know what it represents is a great mistake, which we are all guilty of by reason of our upbringing. We use words so lightly, seldom stopping to think about what they mean. If we were to stop and think about them, many doors would open where we didn’t know there were doors. A little examination would probably reveal that narrow-minded and bigoted people are tremendously ignorant about the words which form the basis of their belief that they alone are right while everyone else is wrong. The word ‘God’, for example, has been—and continues to be—the cause of untold suffering. The Crusades (or ‘Holy Wars’) of the 11th-13th centuries were carried out ostensibly because of God, called by one side Jehovah and by the other side Allah. They both worshipped the same God but called it different names, which was enough to cause incredible carnage and destruction on both sides, and it’s still going on today. This is just one example of many where words have been responsible for bloodshed; the list, if compiled, would go on and on! Yes, those people believed in God, whatever their concept of God was, but could they, with minds full of hatred and cruelty, be regarded as religious? What did their belief in God mean except, in many cases, a license or excuse to fight and kill? And this is still going on in numerous places, with Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland—who both believe in the same God—killing each other relentlessly, and Jews and Arabs—who are both Semitic, having the same common ancestors, whose languages are very similar, and who worship the same ‘One God’—living in conflict with each other. What has their belief in God done for them? It has certainly not made them peace-loving, has it? If it has improved them in any way, what must they have been like before? It doesn’t bear thinking of!
|
|
COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE THE WEBSITE, PLEASE CLICK HERE
|
