My God can beat up your God!

Human affairs are complicated enough without bored philosophers and theologians arguing about the number of angels one can fit on the head of a pin, and as a rule I try to avoid highly conjectural fluff like that in my life as if it were a highly contagious disease.

I’m not always successful in this aim, however, since every five minutes some aspect or another of contentious religiosity and theological bickering among ‘believers’ surfaces to screw up the otherwise quite natural bio-geographical mechanisms of nature that have evolved over the past several millions of years to serve our needs so perfectly.

Among the most recent such dissonances are the religiously inspired tribal dynamics underlying the present outrages being committed in Syria. I refer specifically to the Alawite Militias that have allied themselves with the Assad regime, thereby strengthening Assad’s determination to not step down. Approximately 74% of the Syrian people are of the Sunni sect of Islam, while the Alawites are a Shia sect (constituting about 16%, along with Druze, of Syria’s inhabitants), and as we all know, the ongoing thousand or so year old religious schism between the Sunnis and the Shias has been responsible for almost all of the endless violence occurring in the Southwest Asian (read: Middle East) area.

Against that important backstory, the current allegations of use of chemical weapons (nerve agents, specifically Sarin, a highly toxic form of organophosphate first formulated as an insecticide by the I.G. Farben Company in Nazi Germany) by the Assad regime against Syrian citizens in the Damascus area are quite interesting for a number of reasons. First, whether many of you recall it or not, very interesting evidence emerged back during the Iraq War II that, despite Allied Coalition Forces inspectors’ determination that Saddam Hussein had NOT in fact actually still had chemical and biological agents before GW Bush’s war, he may well have had them after all. This evidence was presented by witnesses associated with the former Hussein regime’s inner ruling circle who stated that covertly (under cover of night and using several large commercial B-747 transport aircraft) Hussein evacuated his chemical/biological weapons stocks and shipped them all to Syria for safekeeping before the Gulf War II action had started. Assuming that there was any truth to the statements, this would suggest that the Assad regime became the new owners of all those stocks of former Iraqi chemical/biological weapons when the Hussein regime fell to the Allied Coalition Forces…stocks of chemical weapons that Hussein most assuredly did have, back in 1991. Since Syria has always been so very carefully protective (paranoid would be a more apt term) about its internal affairs, it would have been nearly impossible to actively investigate the truth of that allegation, at any rate. This startling assertion was therefore never fully nor completely researched, neither was it ever proved or disproved, but it certainly would help explain where Syria got its war-grade Sarin nerve agent.

Cut back to the present situation, wherein evidence strongly suggests that Sarin was used against Syrian citizens in Damascus. There are two possibilities, assuming any truth to the allegations that Syria ‘inherited’ former Iraqi chemical weapons. The first is that they were used by the Assad regime (perhaps in cooperation with the Alawite sect) against the Syrian people, while the second is that chemical weapons stocks were somehow ‘captured’ by Syrian rebels and used against their own people as a ploy to provoke strong international condemnation and military reprisals against Assad. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would be so heartlessly desperate as to kill one’s own people simply to achieve a political victory, but given the heated emotions and ever-chaotic conditions that characterise Islamic conflicts in this region, nothing may be assumed without extraordinarily careful analysis and much further study.

While Islamic extremist religious contention enjoys the reputation of being one of the greatest dangers the world presently faces (QED the above scenario that is currently unfolding), in our haste to condemn Islamic extremists we often lose sight of the fact that Mohammed isn’t the only half-cracked pot on history’s kitchen shelf.  All human ‘religion’ that invokes ‘faith and belief’ in the whims of a supernatural deity has the potential to turn ugly in our all-too human scramble to make sense of the nonsensical circumstances of our earthly existence. Just about every religion one can think of has had its violent extremists, including Buddhism (which is really more of a philosophy than a pure religion); hundreds of thousands of Buddhists have been slaughtered (think Cambodia and SEA) because of their beliefs in prior decades. The Roman Catholics had their inquisition and torture, responsible for the death and suffering of who knows how many innocents accused of witchcraft (and other diabolical sins), and the Christian Puritans were quite equally fond of burning to death those they accused of being witches (etc.). Even the Amish, those erstwhile gentle, bucolic recidivists to simpler ways and lifestyle, have stood accused of having a dark side (the so-called Amish Mafia, a secret sect within that group who are reportedly violent ‘enforcers’ of Amish custom and traditions).

My point remains that any time you have one person (or a group of similarly minded individuals) who claims he has spoken personally to ‘god’, things do not generally bode well for humanity as a whole (or in part). Since in my view, organic life is merely a fluke of biochemical circumstance, all this talk of gods, partisan moralities and ethical codes based upon what some hypothetical supernatural spiritual being ‘wishes’ us to conform to is absolute horse exhaust. As a matter of fact, another of my favorite cartoonists (Wiley Miller) has recently mirrored my own outlook on the matter of gods, belief and faith in a most whimsical manner, evidence the 18 August 2013 installment of his delightful ‘Non Sequitur’ cartoon strip. Wiley calls his personal outlook of how human life began as the ‘Theory of Unintended Consequences’. I think those of you who still possess unclouded reasoning and acute secular analytical abilities will find it MOST amusing, and hey, it’s as plausible as anything humankind has come up with yet to explain the collective uncertainties that underlie our earthly existence.

At any rate, given the all of the above context, I was recently (as in ‘yesterday’) inadvertently exposed to more of the ‘faith & belief’ contagion I referenced at the outset of this blog, as I shall explain. I had just arrived home from the office yesterday, sweating like a pig from my 5 miles bicycle rise on a hot summer day, and as I rolled down the street to my home I noticed a couple of pamphleteers (one black, the other white) who appeared to be going house to house with the (I presumed) usual marketing and advertising stuff one gets used to having appear on the doorstep.

Having a strong distaste for this sort of solicitation on the home turf (we have a sign on our front door saying ‘No solicitations’, as a matter of fact), I quickly nipped into the garage and hung up my bike to avoid having to encounter these chaps. For all I knew, they might have been evangelicals out to save me from sin, or Mormons trying to make a pitch for their own whacko take on life.

Once in the house, my wife, who I might add is a devout member of the local Chinese Bible Church, mentioned something about them having been around most of the afternoon, which struck me as rather strange, since pamphleteers normally drop off a leaflet and quickly disappear down the street. Being soemwhat hot & sweaty, and in my usual hurry to get cooled off after my ride, I didn’t pay much further mind to this until about an hour later, when I encountered a nearby (Chinese-American) neighbor (we’ll call him ‘Chet’, although that is not his actual name), who lives two houses down from us (and is a dentist in a nearby community).

Chet walked over to me as I rounded the corner with our two Siberian Huskies, fresh from their afternoon ‘sniff and squirt’ rounds of the neighborhood. I noticed that Chet had been previously talking to my neighbor who lives directly across the street before he joined me, but we greeted each other as usual and Chet then began to ask me about the two pamphleteers I had spotted earlier, asking if I had received any printed handouts from them (he also apologized for any ‘inconvenience’ the two pamphleteers appearance may have caused me, of which I assured him none had, naturally).

I hadn’t yet seen the handout in question, of course, since I had gone out of my way to avoid the two, but Chet began to tell me of a rather bizarre matter involving his church, coincidentally the same ‘Chinese Bible Church’ my wife belongs to (Chet and his wife are good friends of both my wife and I). Long story short, the pamphleteers were passing out a three page single-spaced and typewritten harangue titled “Get to know your neighbor, Dr. Chet X”.

Turns out that the author of this diatribe is a former parishioner of Chet’s church who has had a running argument with Chet over certain matters involving that church. He is also a black person who I am told has a Japanese-American wife (so I am informed by wifie) and lives in a nearby community. Not your normal or ordinary demographics, to be sure, although there’s nothing that says that only Chinese people have to be parishioners of a ‘Chinese Bible Church’. According to Chet, who is one of the Chinese Bible Church ‘elders’, the guy is a certified religious nut who is about six chapters short of an epistle.

This person, Chet went on to tell me, has been a ‘disruptive’ element at the church for quite a while, being a particularly outspoken Christian fundamentalist who apparently had a falling out with the church’s previous minister (now retired), details unclear to me. He had also been a ‘Sunday School Teacher’ and I gather from what Chet had told me that his views were so extreme that he had been asked to step down in that capacity. Reading through the pamphlet that had been passed out (Chet gave me a copy), I can see why, since it was full of fundamentalist references to scripture, etc., etc., and was most accusatory of Chet himself as an ‘immoral’ person who was unqualified to be an elder in that church owing to various ‘violations’ of scriptural admonishments.  One of the consequences of that ‘falling out’ Chet mentioned had been a legal injunction invoked by the Church to not just keep the fellow in reference out of the congregation, but also away from the church’s physical premises, since he had apparently camped on the sidewalk to harangue parishioners after church services, after being told he was persona non gratis. A bit of a whacko by any reasonable person’s definition, I thought.

It all sounded a bit off the wall to me, but I finally got my two huskies back in the house after parting with Chet, having assured him that we weren’t at all put off by the pamphletters, and managed to ask my wife if she knew anything more about all this. She was able to provide a few more details on what appears to be a truly screwy situation.

Turns out that after receiving the legal injunction to stay away from the church, this whacko vowed he would go door-to-door in Chet’s neighborhood for the purpose of telling everyone what a sinner and  ‘un-Christian’ person Chet was. Since he made it a point to discover Chet’s residence address, sure enough, there he was with a buddy, passing out his off-balance and religiously off-base complaints against our friend and neighbor Chet.

I suppose I should say here that Chet, who is a very highly qualified doctor of dental surgery, with a highly educated wife and two excellent sons, is a prominent member of his church. Each year they take a month off from their normal activities to go on a health mission to Mexico, where he provides free dental care for poorer rural people. As such, he is a rather exemplary individual who is completely undeserving of the sort of Looney-Tunes attention being directed towards him by this ‘disruptive’ individual.

Unfortunately, the person in reference is another one of those moderately articulate individuals who don’t lack a certain ability to put things in grammatically correct (to his credit he even indents sentences!) writing. His major problem appears to be that his religious views and beliefs are so absolutely far out there in left field (like those of so many other ‘extreme believers’, sadly) that he might as well be illiterate (what a waste of words); it’s also a fairly safe bet that he likely has some other (mental) issues as well, judging from what I read about his references to scriptural imperatives, biblical mandates, Second Comings, God’s will, the Anti-Christ, etc.

Clearly, my friend (and devotedly Christian neighbor) doesn’t deserve this sort of unfortunate attention, but it struck me yesterday as a good example of what’s wrong with most people. That is to say, everyone is entitled to their own personal opinion, no matter how crazy, half-baked, illogical, misinformed and blatantly WRONG it is, but when someone starts putting that opinion into the mouth of some fanciful Supreme Being and claiming that it’s actually ‘God’s Word’, that, my friends is where the bulls**t hits the wall and stops with a resounding ’SPLAT!’ We still have far too much of this in the world today (just as it’s always been, since the very first humanoid primate piled a couple of rocks atop one another and worshipped it as ‘GOG’), despite having progressed a peg or two up the evolutionary rope ladder. I can only feel extremely sorry for Chet, who doesn’t deserve anything like this to further complicate his own life.

And having said all this, I suppose I should once again state that it is my considered opinion that all human beings actually share the same belief that there is some higher order, no matter what they may choose to label it. Something beyond our own unbelievably feeble, abysmally ignorant perceptions of what the human experience is all about. The problem is that we’re all still stuck in the precursor stage of understanding called ‘agreeing on what to call it’. Blame it on semantics, on our limited ability to think clearly and communicate thoughts precisely to each other, or on any other aspect of our earthly sojourn, if you wish, but do not make the mistake of thinking that simply because someone doesn’t agree with you r personal take on what it’s all about that they are somehow condemned to eternal perdition. That’s simply ignorance of the worst kind.

My wife and I do not agree on many things, least of all on subjects like deities, but to her credit she also understands (as do I) that what matters most in this often pathetic world of chaotic human life is relationships, since they help us navigate our way blindly through this black hole of awareness called the human life experience and serve to remarkably soften the often cruel whims of fate and fortune. It further helps, I’ve found, to keep a bottle of expensive French Cognac (Martell Cordon Bleu) around the house and a couple of great big furry sled dogs to help keep your feet warm on cold winter nights by the hearth. Anyone so blessed (if I may perhaps capriciously borrow that religious term), is blessed indeed, and who then needs gods and complex theoretical things like that that greatly transcend our understanding?

Oh yes, have you hugged a eugenicist today?...