This is Yvonne's musing, nobody else's. Feedback goes to her alone.
The countries now labeled Ireland and Northern Ireland have been the scene of untold sorrow and grief, the scene where thousands of lives have been aborted, wasting their talents and their skills and their potential, visiting grief and loss on their families and associates in needless warfare laid on the land by--whom else?--by religious leaders. We ourselves in this generation are living witnesses to essentially the same pattern being inflicted today on the Middle East, in Africa, in North Korea--again--by religious leaders.
So whether the front lines of battle be official or guerrilla or catch-as-catch-can, where are the self-appointed old men who daily urge murder and destruction in the name of their religion? Why, they're at home, thanks, clean and comfortable, well-fed, safe from danger, with time on their hands to think up new accusations against the Enemy, those faceless humans who bear the artificial label "to be destroyed for not believing as I believe."
Let's indulge ourselves a moment in the name of fantasy. What if, in the Middle East, people were to say something to this effect? "Hey! Let's knock off this nonsense and go home to what's left of our life. Let's let the old men meet with wooden swords in the soccer stadium to fight out their own battles if they're so deeply troubled by their aging prostates. It's not really our problem. Didn't Allah tell us somewhere in the holy book that it's okay to live and let live? Let's all cut each other a little slack and do something beneficial--just for the novelty of it."
But that's only my fantasy. It probably won't amount to anything.
Occasionally I fantasize about what might have happened in the Emerald Isle if the touchy old religious leaders had all gone away and some sensible person (probably a woman) had said, "Let's dump these dominator religions altogether, each with their malevolent juju-on-a-stick, and let's return to the gentle worship of the Lady Who was here before any of these soreheads hit town."
Just a fantasy. Never mind.
Blessed be those who refuse to buy into the propaganda. Yvonne
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1 comment:
I appreciate the sentiment, but it's a tad more complicated than mere religion. That's certainly it in part, but another factor is resistance to domination by the Anglican Church, as an arm of the British Empire.
The Irish are by nature free-spirited and independent minded, and unfortunately this tends to manifest in bloody ways when they are crossed.
Another more recent and far more positive development was their wise rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, which would have bound them forever to the yoke of the EU (i.e. Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, etc.), an artifice which would have compelled them to forget about quaint little notions such as national autonomy.
Blessings.
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