thoughtmechanics

I’m getting tired of it. More than that, I am becoming ashamed. Ashamed of some of the people who call themselves Christians today, yet live nothing like the text on which their faith instructs them to act.

For those who don’t know, I am a Christian. Lately I have found that I don’t like using that term to describe my faith. It seems that every time I do, I get lumped in with the current conservative movement, a movement I neither want to be associated with, nor want associated with my faith. God is not a god damned republican!! He isn’t a democrat either for that matter. He isn’t Baptist or Catholic. He isn’t Shiite, and he isn’t Sunni.

Without getting into a theological argument on the precepts of my faith, I would like to say that I am a Christian in the “born-again” sense. I believe the bible to be the word of God, some of it I take literally, some of it I take metaphorically.

Christianity today has become corrupted. Christians have either forgotten the principles and commandments on which the faith was founded, or sold them out to secular elements for perceived political gain.

Relax, I don’t intend to launch into a piece on fundamentalism here, just wanted to point out a few things after I stumbled across this website, and becoming ashamed that its authors claim to share the same faith I do.

I grow more and more weary of the fundamentalist “Christians” supporting politics and policies that not only have nothing to do with Christ; but seem to me to go directly against his teachings.

The afore mention site spews ignorance and hate that runs directly counter to instructions in the Bible. Under a thinly veiled guise of Christianity, these bloggers espouse a belief that all Muslims should leave the planet, among a plethora of other ignorant conservatism.

Why is it that most people who are more than happy to call me “brother” on Sunday, are people whose beliefs are so twisted, so opposite of what the man their (our) faith is founded on taught, that they make me ashamed to call myself a Christian.

No they make me ashamed to say that they “share” my faith.

Are they blind? Have they sold out the precepts of the faith for perceived political gain? I don’t know.

In the meantime all I can do is apologize.

To the rest of the world I tell you this. This is not what my faith is about. This isn’t the peace and love that Jesus taught. Whether you believe or not, I want you to know that not all Christians are tolerating this gross mutilation of our faith.

and mostly…

…I am sorry.

Why would a man of obvious intelligence, as President Ahmedinejad of Iran surely is, want to provoke the West by inspiring a conference meant to look at the Holocaust? What is really behind the ‘Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision’ conference?

Throughout Western media, from the day this conference was announced until today, and for many more days to come I am sure, nowhere is this question asked: Why is this conference being held? Rather, we see a lot of fingers pointing at Mr. Ahmedinejad’s ‘obvious’ anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. Furthermore, it is taken for granted that this is the case. President Ahmedinejad cannot be anything else other than an anti-semite who is bent on exterminating the Jews living in Israel.

Yet, no one has bothered to ask why he doesn’t start with the 30 000 or so Jews living in Iran. Why doesn’t he start, for example, with Moris Motamed, an Iranian Jew who just happens to sit in Iran’s Parliament. How did he get to be a member of the Iranian Parliament, anyway? Was he elected? I thought there was no democracy in Iran. Hmmmm.

Could it be that Mr. Ahmedinejad is not interested in picking up where Hitler left off? After all, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to kill 30 000 people. Look at Iraq. Unless of course he is afraid that the whole world would spring into action. After all, we all know that the life of one Jew is worth the life of a thousand Muslims. Right? To kill 30 thousand Iranian Jews would mean killing the equivalent of 30 million people. The world would most certainly not allow that. Right?

What if Mr. Ahmedinejad is doing one of the most sane things in the world? What if he is merely calling the West’s bluff? Remember a while back, how the Islamic world was up in arms over the publication of a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammed? People in the West pointed to Islamic reaction and said “See, these people are backward. Look at how they react to something as self evident as freedom of speech.”

Well, it seems to me that Mr. Ahmedinejad has made a fool of the West by tricking us into behaving in the same way. Mr. Ahmedinejad pinpointed the one thing that would stir up controversy in the West. Just as it is a sacrilege to depict the prophet for Islam, so it is a sacrilege to question the Holocaust in the west. Being an intelligent man, and knowing full well that the Holocaust happened, Mr. Ahmedinejad has not questioned the Holocaust itself. Rather, he questioned the myth that has grown around it and how it has been used by Israel and the West in order to deny the rights of the Palestinians. A smart move by the President of Iran.

I don’t think that Mr. Ahmedinejad believes that some new evidence will be brought forth that will help the world see that the Holocaust did not happen. He himself knows that it did. What he wanted to achieve with this conference he did: he got the Western media and governments to overreact and by this to show the Islamic world that the West is untrustworthy and carries a double standard when it comes to Muslims. It can offend them at will, but they will not stand for their ‘holy taboos’ to be questioned.

Surely the West is now behaving as if a taboo has been broken. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for people in the West to reflect on the necessity of respecting the taboos of other people, and to see that they serve a purpose and are not just there because people are ‘backward’. Also, it may help us to question our own taboos. What if the Holocaust has been used as a weapon against the Palestinians? Is that an impossibility? What if a mythology has been built around the death of 6 million Jews? There’s no denying, to my mind, that millions of Jews were killed, but how has this fact been used ever since? Has it been used to beat people into submission? Has it been used to intimidate North Americans especially, into an uncritical attitude towards Israel for fear of being called anti-semites and racists? Perhaps. It may not be such a bad thing for us to think about these things…