generalspeaking

Defending Religious Freedom

Strange, isn't it? The very religion that claims vociferously and urgently that it is being discriminated against world-wide, accelerating a concomitant rise in self-protection through violent jihad has clamped down hard on the presence or even the whiff of other religions having a presence in land sanctified to Islam.  The very thought that the contaminating presence of another religion might share soil with the followers of Islam is simply too disturbing to contemplate for the Muslim faithful.

The fanatics who have perfected global violent jihad to inspire terror and an ever-present fear of when the next attack will occur, scream "Islamophobia" with abandon, in justification of their acts of atrocities and rampant bloodshed throughout the Muslim world as well as the world of the despicable West with its notions of freedom and democracy. The two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia simply cannot tolerate the presence in close geographic communion of one to the other.

Iraq, Syria, Iran have created a phalanx of Shia terror squads with their proxy militias and their Republican Guards and their auxiliary militias who inspire fear and loathing in the Sunni populations that they seek to oppress and diminish in presence. The Sunnis, who have taken with huge alacrity to their responding violent militias have perfected their own methods of mass gore, slaughtering Shia civilians in suicide bombings, even engaging children on both sides to carry out these missions.

In countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan where heresy is deemed to have been committed if a Muslim determines that Islam does not adequately fulfill his or her spiritual needs, and looks elsewhere for communion with God, these individuals are either sentenced to life in prison - which, given the state of torture and privation in those prisons is not very long-lived - or execution.

A like fate, through violent martyrdom, awaits the courageous among the Muslims who believe that people should be free to exercise their private decision-making in selecting their mode of worship and religious choice.  And if one happens to be a Christian in a Muslim-majority country, the inexorable growth of fanaticism within Islam ensures that life will be uncertain, sometimes painful and occasionally deadly.

Just as the Jewish presence of ancient lineage has been cleansed in Arab and Muslim countries in which a variety of religious minorities once lived, the Christian communities in those countries have become increasingly endangered and as a consequence, increasingly fewer in number, as desperate people, having a wish to live lives of certainty free of everpresent danger, migrate elsewhere to save their children from misery and deprivation.

Roman Catholicism has seen the ascension of a new pope. One of that living embodiment of man's striving for ennoblement in spiritual devotion and attention to the needs of their great flock, is to create a spirit of collegiality with other faiths. The purpose being straightforward enough; to hope that each religion will choose to view the other kindly, and teach their followers to give equal respect to the beliefs of other religions.

The new Pope Francis I will have his work cut out for him in attempting to bridge the gap between Roman Catholicism and Islam, given the unstoppable trend to Islamism.  Within Islam, the ayatollahs, the mullahs and clerics in their mosques preach not brotherhood towards others of their faith who practise their sectarian faith, but vicious reproach that they practise a vision of Islam held to be 'haram' by the opposite sect.

The kind of barbaric and intolerable inhumanity that Christian sects once practised toward one another until enlightenment and practical intelligence eventually led to mutual acceptance.  Islam continues to heark back with enraged relentlessness to the time of the Crusades, vowing vengeance and a return to Islam of the lands of the West that were once conquered in the military evangelizing of early Islam.

Where most world religions have adapted to the modern world with an emphasis on human relations and human rights and reciprocal respect for one another - with occasional third-world lapses of gravely injurious results - Islam appears to have reached a stage where it decided it should look backward to its violent inception and conquering evangelism, and a growing tide of barbarism has resulted, in the name of God.

How to resist and protect the world against that relentless tide? A world vastly complicated by instant communication, by weapons of mass destruction, by human beings incapable of speaking the language of peace, too busy raging belligerently in the language of conquest and bloodshed? Deranged minds from North Korea to Iran, Hezbollah to Hamas and al-Qaeda, infest the future.

Labels: Conflict, Controversy, Human Relations, Islamism, Religion, Terrorism, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Friday, March 15, 2013