TheBanyanTree: Zeta

[PJMoney]

That was a lovely story Roger.  

Wouldn't the world be a lovely place if everyone was as helpful, caring,
non-discriminatory, and kind to animals as that little boy?  (Well, at least
kind to furry animals, birds and even some reptilian ones.  I have to admit
that I don't much care for spiders, insects, snakes and cane toads.  I don't
care for them being in the house.  They certainly have a job to do in the
great outdoors.  Would that they would stay outdoors!)  

Wouldn't it be great if everyone accepted that everyone else is as worthy of
respect as they are; that there is no owner and no slave; no "Jew" and no
"Greek"; no male and no female; that everything and everyone is spiritually
"clean" in the eyes of God and that what makes a person "unclean" is what
comes out of their own heart, mind and mouth?

What I think is that most "Muslims" are about as Muslim as so many
"Christians" are Christian.  That is, they were born into it and haven't yet
learned that God doesn't have any grandchildren.  But identity politics can
be horribly binding.  You get born to, say, Catholic (or Muslim, or Baptist)
parents, and learn to identify as Catholic (or Muslim, or Baptist) long
before you've decided, or bothered with the effort of deciding, what it is
that you really, truly believe.  Responses to events in this world are, too
often, reflexive, self-referential and spiritually uninformed.

So someone mocks the Pope (or an Imam, or whoever runs the Baptist Church)
and the traditionalist takes it personally, gets mightily offended and wants
that someone's head on a plate, demonstrating thereby that the
traditionalist is running on identity politics, suffused as it is with human
weaknesses and nastiness, rather than on what they have suffered and learned
through their close personal relationship with the Creator.

The hardest thing for me (since 9/11, Bali, Beslan, etc., etc.) has been to
keep reminding myself that God loves ratbag Arabs, and people of other
races, who identify vociferously, and violently, as Muslim, as much as he
loves every other human being in the world.  But God's love is not to be
identified with human state-craft.  It is above and beyond that and,
quietly, beneath and behind it.

All those years ago, when you were stationed in Aden, Muslim countries were
poor and powerless.  Now they're rich and powerful.  My guess is that their
populations are full of those who have bought into the identity politics of
Islam.  They will get very irritated about depictions of themselves and
their prophetic leader as being less than admirable examples of human
goodness.  

A few of them really believe that a theocratic Muslim world is the optimal
solution to all humanity's problems; too bad about the dogs.  They are the
ones who seriously want to destroy our freedoms, including the freedom of
women to, say, dress themselves according to the dictates of the weather, go
to school, or be something more than a domestic, sex partner and/or child
producing machine.  The rest will go along with the murderers because, well,
otherwise they might get murdered.  

Which reminds me; one thing that has long been known scientifically is that
even the wealthiest Arab Muslim societies have infant mortality rates that
are comparable with the poorest of the poor non-Muslim Third World
countries.  Why?  Because of their attitude to women and to the education of
women.  It seems that they'd prefer that their children, including boys, die
in prodigious numbers rather than that their women be educated enough to
care for children properly.  I can only think that it's a death dealing
culture.     

Sorry.  I didn't want to get all political but this is the world and
relationships in the world are all about politics.

Janice