My brief skirmish with the armed forces taught me little except to avoid all of them whenever possible, together with the legal profession, and the recognition that when I saluted my superior officer I was not saluting him but his uniform. We wear no uniform but when I salute anyone now I focus on the unseen to the physical eye.
What troubles me is the way that the military maxim and might found its way into just about every religion. Let’s face it almost every war ever fought was in the name of God, Allah or a myriad local deities. Each professes peace as their purpose but will stop at nothing to accuse, condemn and kill in His name. I always thought that Buddhists were not a religion but propagated a peaceful philosophy. Who would have thought they could kill Muslims and burn their villages with no apparent pretext than hatred? Something went wrong there in the state of Myanmar. Is this a disease that is catching?
Even in the west we are content to allow an army onto our streets to lead us in Christian hymns led by their brass or silver bands which have become a feature of high days, holidays, Easter and especially at Christmastime, singing carols on street corners, in the malls and also hymns around Cenotaphs on poppy day, and we all join in putting a few coins in their collection boxes. And what do they call themselves?
The Salvation Army!
The kind of threats issued under the banner of a religion are no longer within the boundaries of countries, but worldwide for simply stating your opinion or writing a book. It seems that freedom of speech in your own country no longer applies since we are all now at the mercy of the fanatics of other realms, and since security cannot be guaranteed 100% we are all forced to watch what we write or say so as not to offend the delicate, but in my view misplaced, sensibilities of others!
Heresy I know does not concern God for we are just exercising His gift of Free Will to accept or deny, but it sure as Heaven upsets the leaders and the fanatical followers of certain factions of the religious communities worldwide, who have the temerity to impose their views on us as if they were the views of our ever loving God, and incidentally although they refuse to accept it – their ever loving Divinity whom they call by other names which is of course the very same One.
But in Christian churches we even have the Hymn, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. We were given arms to reach out and help each other, not to indulge in an arms race and to facilitate killing each other!
How many warnings and opportunities must be given to the USA for them to come to their senses over gun control? How many of their young men and women need to be killed in foreign fields or come home maimed in body and mind for them to accept that they are not the worlds vigilantes or peace keepers, free to kill anyone they consider a threat? But of course they only have arms to deter others from fighting them. Has it worked? How many more children have to be murdered in their own classrooms? They make it too easy for this to continue happening, so they have now made guns available to their teachers, and I wonder how accessible these loaded deterrents will be to disenchanted students?
And how many other countries are just as much to blame? World War II should have taught us all a big lesson and how strange that the term Holocaust seems only to refer to the Jews in the popular press when:
Six Million Jews, twenty million Russians, ten million Christians, and
Nineteen-hundred Catholic priests were ‘murdered, raped, burned,
starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated.’ Now, more than ever, should we not be finding the real remedy? It’s out there if we only had the wit and the courage to find it. The remedy is beyond politics if we value at all the human race.
I’ve never liked titles and have never used the letters after my name, to which I am entitled, but if you want to be called Christians then how about Christian Carers?
I have been called many things and leave that to others to determine.
But apart from names and titles we have a long way to go as we appear to be fostering the same predilection for annihilation in the kind of games that we are putting out on the internet for the young to play. Viz: 3000 spaceships gone to space dust in a 5 hour marathon! Games? Where are we going? Oh! Of course it’s only a virtual game! What remains though in the deeper regions of the psyche? The veterans in the US and other men who have been trained to kill and gone to war will tell you!
The warlike video games started in the 80 ’s with Pac-Man! So thank you Japan, is this them getting their own back?
We are all space travellers hurtling through space on a globe shaped spaceship, and there may come a time in the not too distant future when we find ourselves in a not so virtual but real race through space, but by then I sincerely hope that we will have realised the beneficent nature of the Universe, so that we are not travelling in a ship bristling with lasers and atomic weapons!
Fellow Space Cadets, I salute you, hands together with a bow …
Namaste
(The Divine in me recognises the Divine in you)
Which has the same meaning anywhere in the Universe.
Peace be with you. Love, David
clear
Angel Messenger 