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Religious Bullying: Dangers Ahead!

Swat Pakistan

We seem to be passing through a phase in which people worldwide are displaying low level of toleration towards other religions or points of view. The growing suspicion is leading to bullying and hostility. This is posing a serious threat to world peace.

An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor throws light on the subject. Writes Walter Rodgers: “Today political and religious leaders tend to snooze their way through the various manifestations of religious coercion and intimidation reminiscent of a darker medieval world.

“Religion should have a humanizing effect on its adherents. Civilizing barbarians was an original aim of Islam. Christianity is supposed to cultivate charity for all mankind. The original idea of loving thy neighbor as thyself was first articulated in Jewish Scripture.

“Yet when religion loses sight of its potential civilizing leaven, it risks merely becoming tyranny in subtler guise…Intimidation is intimidation, whether it’s found in Pakistan, Jerusalem, Florida, or northern Virginia.” More here…

Interestingly, there may come a time when the bullies, who are in minority but manage to hold the society to ransom, are sidelined by the majority.

Our colleague Holly has drawn my attention to an article in The Washington Post. “The threat of ‘Talibanization’ is being denounced in (Pakistan) Parliament and on opinion pages, and the original defenders of an agreement that authorized sharia in Swat are in sheepish retreat.” More here…

And here is The Economist’s take on Pakistani Taliban…

There is another must-read article:Pakistan is Already an Islamic State. It has been written by Ali Eteraz, an Outstanding Scholar at the U.S. Department of Justice who later worked in corporate litigation in Manhattan. He is a contributor to Pakistan’s Daily Times and Dawn newspapers and the author of the forthcoming prose work, Children of Dust (HarperOne). His website is: www.alieteraz.com.

Eteraz writes: “Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false.

“Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the ‘official’ religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s ‘Iran moment’ — when the government made itself beholden to religious law.”

Read the full article here…

  • Ryan
    Religion threat to world peace. Sky blue, water wet, rumors of Pope's Catholicism incoming.
  • Silhouette
    And speaking of catholicism, it is the only religion that comes to immediate mind when talking of using violence to shove religious agendas down people's throats in the most vigorous and widespread intellectual plague in human history. Remember Latin America about 3-400 years ago? "Latin" American. Didn't always used to be that way..

    We are hyopcrites, shams, fools living in a double reality. Time to leave Pakistan to the Pakistanis and Afghanistan to the Afghans. Come hell, high water or maybe even peace... I sometimes wonder way in the back of my mind if the Roman Catholic inquistion isn't still going on..in a weird and vestigial way. Like the only thing still left from it is this zealotrous idea of conquering other people's faiths in the ultimate goal of instilling "democracy" [code for "judeo-christianity?]

    I don't know...I guess I've read too much history and picked up how it repeats itself in funny little ways..

    ********
    Many of the gods that Romans worshiped came from the Proto-Indo-European pantheon, others were based on Greek gods. The three central deities were Jupiter (who was the god of rain, thunder, and lightning, of Proto-Indo-European origin), Mars (the god of warfare), called Ares by the Greeks, and Quirinus (who watched over the senate house), one of the truly Roman gods who was associated with the Sabines and with the founder of Rome, Romulus.

    From simplest form of such private worships and religious practices, religion in ancient Rome developed into an elaborate system, with temples, altars, rituals and ceremonies, priesthood, beliefs of traditional paganism and the cult of the Roman emperors. The power of ancient Rome spread ever further across a vast geographical area and Romans met with other cults and religions, like cults of Cybele, Bacchus, and Isis, as well as Judaism.

    With its cultural influence spreading over most of the Mediterranean, Romans began accepting foreign gods into their own culture, as well as other philosophical traditions such as Cynicism and Stoicism. There were even attempts by many Roman and Greek philosophers to accept other gods that countered their religion, such as the Jewish deity Yahweh (viewed as the only supreme God by the Israelites) by stating that the Jews merely worshiped Jupiter but just under a different name and therefore there should be an acceptance of the Jewish culture. With the fall of the Roman Republic and the start of the reign of the emperors which created the Roman Empire in, the Roman emperors were considered to be gods incarnate...[almost identical to today's Pope]..

    ..Emperor Constantine switched allegiance from Apollo to Christus as his patron, and won the battle of Milvian Bridge in 313. Under Constantine's direction, the Council of Nicaea (325) was held to decide the elements of orthodox Christianity, although Constantine himself was only baptized shortly before his death. Through all this, a few pagans clung to the old Roman religion – even enjoying something of a brief Renaissance under Julian the Apostate (361–63) – and continued to be tolerated until the reign of Theodosius I, who finally outlawed paganism in 390...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_ancient...
    *********
    Ironic. Most people don't know the history of how the roman-catholic institution came into being, the roots of it's various strict heirarchies of priests and so forth..and how basically all forms of christianity, except perhaps the Essenes, sprung from this very-human political agenda that sought to weave past pagan rites into the new popular faith via the Council of Nicaea..you know, a PR stunt to make it palitable and keep a cohesive psychological adhesion of an ever-more-difficult-to-control boundary expansion..

    People get way, way WAY overboard with power-mongering.. Jesus himself would not have wanted it this way. According to the Essenes anyway.. There is no human appointed to intervene in the sacred relationship between an individual and God. Only perhaps Jesus [I really don't know for sure], and from what I've read of the Gnostic Gospels, he himself would have nothing to do with much of what is done today in his name.

    Imagine wanting to take over the world? Talk about megalomania...
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