The End or the Beginning

We are either at the end or the beginning, depending on who is left when it all plays out, and whether God thinks us worth retaining as a somewhat worn and violent experiment in free will. For five thousand seven hundred and sixty five years (if we are to start with the Jews, which is arbitrary for we could start with Krishna and Arjuna and it would be the same) we have waged war, slaughtered our brothers, raped our neighbor’s women, burned their homes, and razed their fields. And in the name of what? Tribalism, nationalism, monotheism, pick your favorite. All to be able to say, "My tribe, nation, god, is better than yours.” Greed, Fear, and Fear’s child, Hatred, have all played their part in these despicable deeds. And despite the gifts of Buddah, Lau Tzu, "Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, and the many other saints and prophets known and unknown to the world,” we have never, to my knowledge, waged Peace.

Not once.

Not ever.

Is this God’s punishment for our having lost our innocence in Adam’s garden? Or is it our own punishment meted out by our own hands for having forgotten what and who God really is?
Wrap your mind around the figure one hundred and twenty million. That is how many human lives we took during the 20th century. Never before in the history of the world have we killed so many of our brothers and sisters in a single century.

" Thou shalt not kill,” said the Almighty to Moses, "Love thy neighbor,” said the prophet. "Begin in the name of God who is Mercy and Compassion,” reminds the Koran at the start of every chapter. Yes, every chapter! Yet the battle rages. So we wonder: "Can the Mullah’s read? Are the Christians deaf?

Yet, the name of God is passionately close to our hearts as we set about slaughtering our neighbors without mercy or compassion, or even the faintest thought as to what effect these crimes have upon Spirit of the Earth. As Pogo said many years ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Peace has never been, nor will it ever be, the reward for war. War is its own reward and the victor go the spoils, but peace is never one of them. Peace is a way of life that must be taught from the cradle to the grave and practiced daily.

Maybe part of the problem is that we in the west don’t really "get” God. We tend to take the words "and God created Man in his own image,” to mean that God is just like us, rather than that we are just like God. It’s a subtle distinction. If God is like us he keeps a nice, neat heaven for the good ones, boils the bad ones in hell, and offers 77 virgins to anyone who successfully blows himself to smithereens taking one or more innocent people with him. Hardly worth praying to, is he? But if we are like Him… ah, let’s consider that one.

Maybe, just maybe, God is subtler than we think. Maybe God is not a name, not Allah, not Jesus, not Yahweh, neither "She” nor "He” nor the righteous punisher our western minds would have us believe. Maybe God is Being itself, the very stuff of which our consciousness is made. Maybe God is the act of perception, the trinity of eye, sight, and the world-we-perceive all rolled into one. Maybe we ourselves are all just little pieces of God who have forgotten the way home, who, because we have strayed so far from his commandments, fail to realize as Plato suggests that we are not the shadows on the cave wall, but the light that projects them there.

So, which is it? Are we at the end or the beginning? God is waiting to see. That’s the problem with free will, it’s still up to us. Maybe it’s time to forget about democracy and religion and who’s right and whose wrong, and start feeding the hungry, building homes for the homeless, and rebuilding the lives that have been shattered by the endless self righteousness of the world community. Maybe its time to let go of the past, stop waging war, and, for a change, wage peace.