This was the weekend for the Seattle Center Arab Festival. All sorts of nice things to say. I do wish more folks had attended.
I did not see any African Americans .. more of the Seattle Apartheid situation I am afraid.
On the down side there were some phenomenally stereotypic fundie Christians who came to convert the Muslims. I spoke with several ... the theme was that man is bad, we all sin and are damned by the Deity unless we accept Jesus. I think I finally understood the mentality of the abortion clinic terrorists .. these are people who can justify anything in the name of personal salvation.
I am not sure if this quote helps, but there may be an insight into fundieism in the thoughts of Einstein:
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
- Albert Einstein
The insight? Einstein was a believer. He was convinced that there was a cat of SOME kind responsible for the raido AND every other kind of causality. But Einstein's cat was not involved in human free will. The cat could care whether I type SOS or FUCK. So who is more moral .. Einstein or the Pope? The dilemma is not, in my Jewish POV, whether one does or does not believe in God, but whther one or deos not believe in doing good deeds ..what we call mitzvot. GBeleif in God is more than fine by me, I applaud the belief ..if it leads to a Cesar Chavez rather than a Pope Benedict or one of the fundies I met yesterday.
One of the things I have done as a civil rights activist is use my camera to intrude on rightist rallies. I wonder if I should retaliate and bring my kippah and cameras to Church next Sunday? Do ya think these good folks would mind an atheistic, camera toting Jew offering them surcease from their disturbed belief in a vengeful Christ?
2 comments:
Fundamentalists promote the idea that what they're doing is out of love for their fellow man, when, in fact, the deeper truth is that they feel that they are REQUIRED to do these things in order to satisfy their god: it's a selfish act cloaked in "charitable" garments.
This is true for all three kinds of fundies .. the Abrhamites. There are, however, some differences. Christians and Muslims tie their doing the weill of their Deiety to "salvation." There is no similar conce4pt in Judaism.
Jews, even the most fundie, follow a set of rules because doing so is "good." There is no tit for tat.
In part the difference comes fromm the Zorastrian-Greek invention of Heaven and Hell. These concepts somehow did nto arrive in Judaism unitl after the completion of our "revelation" .. that is the Torah. Levainf aside faith in the ev4ents of Exodus, it is considered likley that most of the Torah was compiles at the time of King Josiah before the exile and more was done later after the return.
I have wondered how much of Canstantine's choice of Christianity as a state religion, over Judaism or Mithraism, was that the Chrsitian Deity is pretty accommodating to state seprematism and identification of the Deity with Imperial power.
In my debate with some of these simplistic folks, I asked the question .. would you steal in the name of Jesus? Of course the answer was yes. The implication is frightening, non?
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