“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”―Voltaire
By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- I learned from my 70-year-old Indian-American chess rival here in Queens that in order for the EJK or extra-judicial killings in the Philippines to end, Filipinos may embrace the religion of Janism.
"Master Sam" said followers of this ancient religion wouldn't even hurt a fly--literally.
He was saddened by reports that more than 2,000 suspected Filipino drug addicts and traffickers of illegal substance "have been murdered like animals" in the streets and in their houses in raids since the Duterte administration launched a "no-nonsense" battle against illegal drugs in the Philippines.
The Philippine National Police (PNP) boss, Chief Supt. Ronald "Bato" De la Rosa, handpicked by President Duterte to "cleanse the country with criminal elements," denied the PNP had initiated the mass killings saying "they adhere to the due process and respect the human rights of the suspects."
Janism is one of India's three ancient religions, along with Buddhism and Hinduism.
MAD
"Master Sam" said because of this religion, he could not even get mad at chess hustlers in the park who bilked him.
"I'm a peaceful person. When I beat you in a chess match once, I felt I humiliated you in front of your friends. When it was your turn to beat me (eight times in another meeting), I felt it was necessary to compliment you and tell people around that you are a better chess player," enthused "Master Sam," who once lost $1,500 to Filipino chess hustlers at Elmhurst Park in Queens.
Despite the fact that it has only a few million adherents and is confined almost entirely in Southern India, Janism's philosophy of non-violence has spread through the world, according to "Master Sam."
To Janists, he said, the world is divided into the living (or the soul) and the non-living.
They believe that the soul is invaded by karmic matter, or negative passions, that can dominate people's lives. These include violence, greed, anger, and self-indulgence.
This karma reportedly bonds to the soul and impedes the search for perfect understanding and peace.
STAGE
To reach the heavenly stage, "Master Sam" said Janists must stop the inflow of bad karma and shed the karmic matter that has already bonded to their souls.
Once this has been accomplished, he explained, they reach moksha or a level of pure understanding where the soul is liberated from all earthly matter.
Master Sam said achieving this heavenly stage is quite an ordeal. An individual must spend 12 years as a Janist monk and go through eight reincarnations in order to get there.
Along the way, each must also adhere to the Three Jewels of Right Faith, Right Knowledge, and Right Conduct. More extreme worshippers deny themselves even the most basic of life's pleasures by fasting and wearing only the simplest clothing.
"God will never give you anything you can't handle, so don't stress." Kelly Clarkson
By Alex P. Vidal
HILLSBOROUGH, New Jersey -- On the eve of the Paris-based Charlie Hebdo massacre first anniversary, Charlie Judeo crossed my mind.
Charlie Judeo is the gatekeeper, inspector, and elevator operator of a synagogue in Upper Manhattan, New York City I recently "housecleaned" for five hours.
The place was a Jewish congregation, a worship community equivalent to a chapel for the Christian faithful.
While waiting for the assembly to conclude at 10 o'clock in the morning, I sat outside the synagogue and the old man Charlie Judeo engaged me in a brief but thought-provoking conversation when he saw the cross pendant on my necklace:
CJ: "You're a Christian, aren't you?"
APV: "Yes sir, I am."
CJ: "You believe in Jesus (Christ) as a Messiah?
APV (Digging from my Christian Living memory lane, I hesitantly replied): "We, Christians, believe Jesus Christ was a Prophet yes, a Messiah."
SUPERNATURAL
CJ: "Man, Jesus could not be a Prophet or Messiah because he possessed supernatural qualities and was a product of a virgin birth."
APV: "Please elaborate."
CJ: "Jesus could not have possibly fulfilled the messianic requirement of being descended on his father’s side from King David. A Messiah is born of human parents and must possess physical attributes."
Charlie Judeo is a dyed-in-the-wool Hebrew believer, thus I relinquished any attempt to engage him in a debate over faith, which I thought was unnecessary.
I came to operate a dust pan, a sweeper, a rag and a vacuum cleaner; wash the plates, glasses, cauldrons and other kitchen utensils and collect garbage, not to join the Holy Bible versus Torah slugfest.
The steely admonition and religious lecture had to be interrupted.
I needed to hit the ground running; the assembly was over and it's past 10 o'clock.
CHECK
A good and pleasant person, Charlie Judeo entered the synagogue to check the progress of my work after two hours.
A garbage collector beat him to the draw by 15 minutes.
"Where is the garbage?" Charlie Judeo demanded.
"The collector had taken it away," I retorted.
"OK," Charlie Judeo snapped back, his moustache gyrating.
Three o'clock in the afternoon. Time to go.
Charlie Judeo was waiting outside the synagogue.
The old man escorted me to the building exit and bade goodbye, half-smiling.
"Thank you, Charlie Judeo. Hope to see you again soon," I quipped, waving my right hand.
"That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not." THOMAS PAINE
By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- This is one of a kind book about the Holy Bible.
Written by a biochemist from the University of Boston, the book supports critical thinking, and the author did not take his analysis as gospel anymore than the Hebrew and Greek scriptures.
Because he was a Jew, Isaac Asimov’s (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov) commentaries and observations of the bible are from a Jewish point of view, modified by his science fiction background and thinking.
KING JAMES
Asimov brings us through the books of the Bible in King James Version order, explaining the historical and geographical setting of each one and the political and historical influences that affected it.
He went further as providing biographical information about the main characters. In essence Asimov seems to consider the bible as one of the most important history books ever written, and treats it as such.
What is so extraordinary about the book is it is just purely information and no commentary.
If we want to know what's really going on as well as what's happened before this book to the Old and New Testament includes biblical verse, footnotes, references and subject indexes.
We should not miss this book.
"When the solution is simple, God is answering." Albert Einstein
By Alex P. Vidal
THIS article may be biased against the atheists since the primary question here is, WHY does God exist?
How have the three dominant monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--shaped and altered the conception of God?
How have these religions influenced each other?
In a stunningly intelligent book, Karen Armstrong, one of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present.
The epic story begins with the Jews' gradual transformation of pagan idol worship in Babylon into true monotheism--a concept previously unknown in the world.
Christianity and Islam both rose on the foundation of this revolutionary era, but these religions refashioned "the One God" to suit the social and political needs of their followers.
CLASSICAL
From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Karen Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one superbly readable volume, destined to take its place as classic.
Armstrong admits that as a child, she "had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God."
She believes that there is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.
"I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory," writes Armstrong.
"I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here in earth was good or beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed."
MEMORIZE
When she was eight years old, Armstrong had to memorize this catechism answer to the question, "What is God?": "God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections."
"Not surprisingly, it meant little to me, and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect," she points out.
"As I grew up, I realized that there was more to religion than fear. I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T.S. Eliot and some of the simpler writings of the mystics. I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to Him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality.
YOUNG NUN
"To do this I entered the religious order and, as a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith. I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart.
"Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to focus my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent.
"The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics.
HISTORICAL
"Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about 'God,' seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean?
"Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate--and highly self-contradictory--doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?
Armstrong admits that the more she learned about the history of religion, the more her misgivings appeared justified. "The doctrine that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the vision and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown," she explains.
CHILDHOOD
Despite her years as a nun, Armstrong does not believe that "my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas. I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in kindergarten."
She adds: "Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years."
Her study of the history of religion has revealed that "human beings are spiritual animals." Armstrong believes that "there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religious." Men and women, she says, "started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art."
Armstrong believes that all talk about God "staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality."
The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who--in some sense--speaks. His World is crucial in all three faiths. The World of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decided whether the word "God" has any meaning for us today, she concludes.
