From its start right on to the present day, the mullahs of Iran and their followers have called for, chanted en masse, practiced, and seemed to have orgasms over the very idea of killing. No group, not even the Islamist jihadists who state quite believably that they "love death" more than their opponents "love life," have made such a fetish of death.
The Geek has little use for religion other than the manifold ways in which institutionalised expressions of internal beliefs in some deity or another have been employed to political ends. That is, the ways in which religions have sought to obtain, retain, expand, and exploit their creeds, their dogma, in order to directly and substantially exercise power over the perceptions, beliefs, and actions of people generally.
As part of his checkered and all-too-lengthy educational career, the Geek has compiled credits in comparative religion, the sociology of religion, the anthropology of religion, and the history (often bloody) of religion. This study has included not only the three largest monotheistic religions but those with many deities as well as none at all. Looking at Iran and the actions of the Islamist jihadist groups has only reinforced a conclusion reached tentatively many years ago. Of all the religions, great and small, past or present, Islam holds the record as the faith most given to death, most preoccupied with hell, most willing and able to capitalise on the pervasive human fear of death.
While the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, contains more than a little blood drenched prose, the portions dealing with purported genocide so often pointed to by apologists for Islam constitute only a very small portion of the faith history of the ancient Hebrews--and modern Jews. Beyond that, as archeology demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, the destruction of cities and slaughter of peoples which blemish the Hebrew Bible simply did not happen.
While faith per se did not require the addition of mass killings which did not happen, the existence of the Hebrew religion as an instrument of state did. The state, its kings and priests, needed belief in the power and ruthlessness of the Hebrew deity in order to preserve and expand their power over a people which, the Hebrew Bible shows, had a powerful tendency to factionalisation. The myth of deity-inspired genocide was a propaganda tool of the rulership.
The message of Jesus, the Wandering Sage and Healer of Galilee, made no mention of death, of hell, of a killer deity. His message was one of the inclusiveness of the deity, of the ever-present nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the reality that God existed lovingly within each and every human, that the love of God was expressed by the will and ability to love one's neighbor.
As such, the message of Jesus, which resided comfortably within an emerging strain of Jewish theological thought, was a danger to the state. It banished the need for intermediaries between the individual and the deity. It eliminated the requirement for the Temple, for sacrifices, for the surrendering of the individual to authority. Worse, it dispensed with the notion of a specific Chosen People, replacing that concept with one in which all humanity was equally chosen.
Without meaning to be such, Jesus was a clear and present danger to all authority both sacred and secular at a time when there was no meaningful separation between the two. From the rational perspective of those in authority, particularly religious authority, Jesus deserved to die. And, so he did.
Only later, only after Paul and his successors took the simple to state but hard to live message of the Wandering Sage and transformed it into an institutionalised church did death, hell, fear, and authority creep into and eventually transform the message beyond all recognition. As a Church, the Christians needed both a hierarchy and a creed by which an identifiable, controllable structured community could be created.
The Christian Church required the use of fear to promote its power among people. Not surprisingly, the leaders of the emerging Church in the first few centuries of its existence seized upon the human fear of death and its aftermath as the tool. The Church promised that by strict observance of its creedal requirements and obedience to its officials, a pleasant eternal life could be achieved. At the same time, the Church promised eternal punishment of the worst imaginable sort to those who existed outside its ambit or who violated its instructions.
To the present day there are Christian denominations who play the same cards of fear. There are Churches which promise reward to those who hear and obey and eternal hellfire for all others. Since human nature and its basic fears have not altered appreciably since the days of eating cold meat at the mouth of a cave, the "fear-up, fear-down" technique is still effective.
That having been said, let the record show that over the centuries the Christian communities have backed away from the fear soaked messages regarding death and hell. Over the years the Christians have increasingly rediscovered the life oriented, the here-and-now based nature of Jesus' original message.
Similarly, since the fall of the Temple in the wars against the Roman occupiers, the Jewish tradition, the rabbinical tradition, has placed the emphasis where it was in much of the Hebrew Bible. On life. On duty. On service. On the here-and-now. On making the most of the one opportunity we all know we have to live.
Islam is in many, if not all respects, a pastiche of previously extant religions within the Arabian Peninsula. Read in conjunction with the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament as well as what is known about the nature and character of the religions indigenous to the area beyond these two, it is clear that the Koran and accompanying works and sayings of Mohammad are a compilation of that which already existed.
For whatsoever series of reasons, much of that which was stitched together from the fragments of earlier traditions placed an undue focus on death, on hell, on the need to escape the latter when the first inevitably occurs through complete, unquestioning, and absolute submission to the words of the Prophet, the final prophet, the designated ultimate agency of the deity.
The resulting less than edifying pastiche depends upon fear over all else to compel belief, force obedience, assure unanimity of action. The sacred literature of Islam exults death, visions of hell, thoughts of paradise to an extent that surpasses the aggregate of all other religions.
The practice of Islam shows that blood, killing, and dying in the name of the faith persists to a greater degree and a greater longevity than the equivalents in other faiths. A (very) brief review of history shows this.
The crude Christian land grab covered with the vestments of "saving the Holyland" called the Crusades represents a brief period of Christian history. The so-called "religious wars" of Europe in the early Seventeenth Century owed nothing to the doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protestant and everything to the temporal ambitions of princes, kings, and popes.
The exploitation of the New World by the ever-so-Catholic Spanish might have been conducted under the sign of the Cross but it was carried out by the sword for the reward of gold--not God. The British and to a lesser extent, the French were honest enough not to involve theology in their conquest of what Kipling would eventually term, "the lesser breeds without the law."
And, as the record shows, even these colonialists got over it. Ultimately British reformers, for example, employed Christian theology and terms to squash slavery and eventually abandon colonialism. It may have been rather late in the day, but the message of Jesus broke through the conscience of the colonisers whether French or British or even Spanish.
The same cannot be said of Islam. Particularly the expression of Islam in Islamist jihadism. As has been shown again and again over centuries--and certainly in recent years, the Islamist interpretation of the Koran and other sacred writings expresses itself in an orientation toward killing and dying which boggles the civilized mind.
As if the death orientation were not sufficient to churn the stomach of the observer, regardless of that observer's religious affiliations, then there is the barbaric actions of Islamist jihadists ranging from the stonings and other summary executions in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia to the mere maimings purportedly demanded by Sharia law.
The Islamist understanding of Islam deserves--no--demands the condemnation of all civilized people everywhere. Most of all it demands the most severe condemnation and rejection by people who are practicing, observant Muslims.
Islam's sacred writings do contain positive, life-affirming portions which are the equal of any such found in the literature of other religions. The responsibility of observant Muslims is to seize upon these and reject those parts which celebrate death and killing, worship hell with an almost pornographic focus, and capitalise on fear for the purposes of political power.
Unless and until observant Muslims, those for whom the Five Pillars are the centrality of faith, unite in rejection of the Islamist jihadists whether clerics or not, they must stand indicted as co-conspirators in the hijacking of Islam by the worst in their midst.
A religion in order to be a real benefit to those who follow it must focus on life, not death, must serve to promote an openness to other communities rather than to separate, build walls, and foster fear and distrust. A worthy religion is one which recognises in its practices the dignity of human life, the creativity of people, the genus of people for good.
Islamism, whether in Iran or elsewhere, does not serve life, does not celebrate love, does not portray a deity worthy of worship. Islamism is simply the tool of the seekers after power who are willing to climb to the summit on slippery mounds of bloody bodies.
Unless and until observant Muslims unite against those Islamists, those jihadists who worship death and hell, they have absolutely no complaints to make against those who express their revulsion at the evils committed in the name of Allah.
