Imagine no religion,
it's easy if you try.
Nothing to live or die for,
above us only sky.
Imagine all the peoples,
living life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.
I hope some day you will join us
and the world will live as one.
These are the lyrics to John Lennon's seminal song, Imagine, and the words are as relevant today as they were back then, maybe even more so.
The Sikhs felt that Indira Gandhi, the original Iron Lady, had insulted Sikhism by ordering the Indian police to storm their holiest shrine in Amritsar - she died in a hail of bullets fired by two Sikh bodyguards on 31st October 1984. Mahatma Gandhi (no relation to the former) was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist, on 30 January 1948, opposed to his idea of granting the sizeable minority Muslim population the same rights as the majority Hindu population. The bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-salaam on 7th August 1998, September 11th 2001 and the monumental folly that is the invasion of Iraq were faith based initiatives. Ariel Sharon, with a posse of riot police, provoked the 2nd intifada in September 2000, by stomping around Temple Mount, the 3rd most important Islamic site after Mecca and Medina. In the name of Christianity, the slaves taken from Africa to the Americas and the West Indies were whipped to within an inch of their lives if they failed to accept their massa given name. Acceptance, meant repeating the name after the massa and once that particular resistance had been broken, the real brainwashing began. From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the ongoing civil war (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in Iraq, religion has been at the heart of virtually every major conflict.
This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New Statesman,
".....No one is a Christian or Muslim at birth; people are made so by the community they are born into, or which they later join. They can choose not to be Christian or Muslim, and can convert to another faith or none. But they cannot choose to be other than ethnically white or black. Ultimately, membership of a religious group is a voluntary matter - even if the coercive effects of brainwashing in childhood and social pressure to conform can make opting out difficult. This puts all religions on the same footing as political parties and other voluntary organisations: they are self-selected interest groups, defined by belief, aim and personal conviction......"
The Sikhs felt that Indira Gandhi, the original Iron Lady, had insulted Sikhism by ordering the Indian police to storm their holiest shrine in Amritsar - she died in a hail of bullets fired by two Sikh bodyguards on 31st October 1984. Mahatma Gandhi (no relation to the former) was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist, on 30 January 1948, opposed to his idea of granting the sizeable minority Muslim population the same rights as the majority Hindu population. The bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-salaam on 7th August 1998, September 11th 2001 and the monumental folly that is the invasion of Iraq were faith based initiatives. Ariel Sharon, with a posse of riot police, provoked the 2nd intifada in September 2000, by stomping around Temple Mount, the 3rd most important Islamic site after Mecca and Medina. In the name of Christianity, the slaves taken from Africa to the Americas and the West Indies were whipped to within an inch of their lives if they failed to accept their massa given name. Acceptance, meant repeating the name after the massa and once that particular resistance had been broken, the real brainwashing began. From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the ongoing civil war (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in Iraq, religion has been at the heart of virtually every major conflict.
This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New Statesman,
".....No one is a Christian or Muslim at birth; people are made so by the community they are born into, or which they later join. They can choose not to be Christian or Muslim, and can convert to another faith or none. But they cannot choose to be other than ethnically white or black. Ultimately, membership of a religious group is a voluntary matter - even if the coercive effects of brainwashing in childhood and social pressure to conform can make opting out difficult. This puts all religions on the same footing as political parties and other voluntary organisations: they are self-selected interest groups, defined by belief, aim and personal conviction......"
2 comments:
i have been reading your blogs. VERY INTERESTING, i must say. If it was a book, i woud have used the term "un-put-downable" :-)...
To comment on this particualr entry, i would like to say that one of my most favourite questions to myself is "who am i?" i often ask myself which one is my most important identity? that i am a Muslim by birth? that i am South Asian? that i am a daughter? that i am a sister? that i was a girl-friend of someone? that my skin color is brown? that i am a 30 years old? or that i am woman? ofcourse i have multiple identities but which one is the most important among all? i asked my professor while she was teaching us castes systems of south asia, which she thought is actually my primordial identity? she told me that it is my skin color or my sex!! but what if i change it? i go back to my own musing.
green-eyed girl
Thanks for your kind words re the blog - I'm having a good time writing it.
Ultimately, I would say that your primordial identity is your skin colour because while you could change your sex you can't REALLY change your skin colour, Michael Jackson's attempts notwithstanding
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