11/19/08

Deliver us from Evil

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. - Thomas Merton, US religious author, clergyman, & Trappist monk (1915 - 1968)

A man writes:
I still find it difficult to get my head around the so-called civilized world’s reactions—or rather lack of them—over the treatment being méted out to the Palestinian people by the state of Israel (and ably assisted by the West). In fact, I find it inconceivable that the actions of the Zionist state—comparable to that of the Nazi’s treatment of Jews and other minorities—elicits only brief 'news’ items from the Western media and rarely without its usual 'embedded’ commentary that it reserves for the opponents of Israel. Overall, the impression is created of two equal, but opposite sides, F-16 fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships, billions of dollars worth of the most sophisticated weapons of destruction on the planet versus crude, home-made Hamas rockets for example.
It's true. People don't want to look at the suffering of the Palestinian people. It might be upsetting. It might cause some guilt or remorse. It might cause some discomfort for nice Jewish people if we rudely notice Israel's barbarity against innocent children and expect someone to rise up in outrage but they just don't for some reason and it cannot be explained so just don't go there.

The same goes for those Iraqis whose country we destroyed. Don't look at the poor children in their suffering. You might feel bad and have to rethink everything you thought you knew about this country and that would really piss you off but good so just don't even bother to look and save yourself the trouble.

Because as everybody knows, recognizing the suffering of the Palestinians (or the Iraqis, or the Afghanis, or the Lebanese...) might cause suffering and discomfort to Israelis and Americans. Therefore, it is frowned upon.
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Source
Don't you understand? Racists believe that some people were created to suffer and others were not.
The idea that we are not all God’s children by reason of different belief systems was the starting point. Ergo, if you are not one of God’s children then you are less than human. It follows therefore that such creatures are not bound by our laws, they are little more than animals, or at best 'children’ and hence do not fall under the protection of 'God’s’ laws, they can be exploited just like any other product of Nature.

Thus explains the atrocities and ethnic cleansing orgies running through human history like a river of blood to this very day, as if nobody can ever be made to understand a thing and we are doomed to suffer forever and ever. Kill or be killed. Kill those other people so that we can protect what we have and thereby avoid suffering. This thinking is so stupid, and so old, and so ignorant, and so easily disproven with a very modest and sincere effort to seek the truth, that to still be living in a world of hate overwhelms God's people with despair. And the racists feed on that, too, because they feel threatened by everyone, and especially by those who they suspect could live in peace, meaning God's true people who are found in all times and places.

The little suffering the racists would endure by sacrificing their racist beliefs -- beliefs held so dear that they would rather cling to them in self-righteousness than suffer remorse in humility -- they will not pay that price. And they believe that God will preserve them from suffering in the end. It boggles the mind and belies their utter estrangement from God. Truly, people who foment war and steadfastly refuse to live in peace with their fellow human beings are the most miserable creatures on earth. It behooves us to pray for them, that God may touch them with profound regret before they rot in hell for all eternity.

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