"Pot. Kettle. Black." Is The Problem Really A Bloodthirsty Religion (Islam) Or The Bloodthirsty Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)That Came Out Of the Middle East And Spread Worldwide?
Militant Christians are fond these days of talking about how kill-happy the Koran is. They need to read their Good Book. From Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative reporter and ordained Christian minister, son of two seminary students, his father also an ordained preacher, Chris Hedges:
"There are far more calls by the God of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Book of Revelation for holy war, genocide, and savage ethnic cleansing than in the Koran, from the killing of the firstborns in Egypt to the wholesale annihilation of the Canaanites. God repeatedly demands the Israelites wage wars of annihilation against unbelievers in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and the Book of Revelation. Everyone, including women, children, and the elderly, along with their livestock, are to be killed. Moses ordered the Israelites to carry out the “complete destruction” of all cities in the Promised Land and slaughter all the inhabitants, making sure to show “no mercy.” From Joshua’s capture of the city of Ai to King Saul’s decimation of the Amalekites—Saul methodically dismembers the Amalekite king—God sanctifies bloodbath after bloodbath. “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes,” God thunders in the Book of Joshua, “But you shall utterly destroy them.” Joshua “struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10:40, 11:15). And while the Koran urges believers to fight, it is also emphatic about showing mercy to captured enemies, something almost always scorned in the Bible, where, according to Psalm 137, those who smash the heads of Babylonian infants on the rocks are blessed. Whole books of the Bible celebrate divinely sanctioned genocide. The Koran doesn’t come close. The willful blindness by these self‐proclaimed Christian warriors about their own holy book is breathtaking...."
Hedges' list does not even mention what happened next: the Inquisition, the "holy" wars that tore Europe apart for centuries, the witch burnings, the worldwide conquests to force Christianity down the throats of whole continents, vicious ripping of Native children from their parents to make them Christian, Christian defenses of slavery, and -- to bring the savagery closer to today -- the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and the Roman Catholic and Evangelical epidemics of child rape.
I'm certainly not glorifying Islam. I agree. I'm saying "Pot. Kettle. Black."
The three Religions of the Covenant, from a very small area of our world, are Judaism, Christianity (which incorporates the Jewish Torah or "Old Testament") and Islam (which incorporates both the Torah and much of the Christian New Testament, revering Jesus as a great prophet but rejecting his divinity on the grounds that it violates the First Commandment.) Do these organized religions, with beautiful passages and their remarkably violent paths, perhaps ALL need to seek a far higher plane of spirituality?
Like basic morality?