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12 March 2002 (Tuesday): them's fighting words

I'm putting my head in my hands. This is the posture I tend to assume when I read the news. To turn back to the subject of earlier posts, religion has been wounding a hell of lot more than it's been healing, of late. There's a lot of God-as-the-big-guy-on-my-team thinking going on, it seems, which is understandable once your children have been gunned down or burned alive by the enemy. Oh, man. Oh, humankind. What are you doing?

Salman Rushdie frames it provocatively in a Saturday column for the U.K. Guardian:

The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of "respect".

What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.

So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.

- Salman Rushdie, "Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood"

(I'm going to have to watch myself. I've been reading a lot of articles lately with strong opinions that resonate with me, and they've all turned out to be from the Guardian. Time to seek out another perspective.)

On the other hand, today I woke up in a comfortable bed with food in the pantry, clothes in the closet, ideas in my head and gratitude in my heart. People yielded for my lane changes on the crowded freeway; they smiled at me in the cashier line, held doors open after they'd passed through, asked me for help and thanked me when I gave it to them. All of it was mere politeness of course, just social conditioning, but I felt a tiny ephemeral connection with each of those people anyway. We were a split-second happy moment in each others' lives. I can live with that.

Love will never conquer all. But it's a good reason to get up in the morning.

posted by enjelani @ 03:06 PM PST

Replies: 1 comment

There isn't much as gratifying to me as making an effort to make someone elses life a little bit easier, and then getting a little thank you (be it smile, verbal, or physical) in response. I think it's that whole "Namaste" vibe that goes on with me when that happens.

Very very pleasing :)

But I spoze i'll be truly enlightened when I don't even want a thank you. Oh well... I'm nowhere near that enlightened yet ;)

posted by syndromes @ 07 07 2002 01:30 AM PST