I read once a story of Muhammad, which I recall went this way: once he was rejected from a city in some shameful manner, and as he went out into the desert the voice of an angel of God came to him. "Look back, and choose," it said, or something to that effect. Turning back, he saw an archangel poised over the city with a flaming sword, and understood that he had been given power to elect to save or destroy the city.
According to the story, he chose to save the city, and explained this as the moment in his life when he was in greatest peril of falling.
Muhammad doesn't get a lot of good press around here, but that story always struck me as having a particular wisdom to it. I'm not sure how legitimate a part of the Islamic tradition it is, though. It's just something I read, once.
There are two Mohammeds, the peaceful proselytizer, like Jesus, and the warlord jihadist later on.
Peaceful conversion and teaching got him about 100 Muslim converts in some odd decades. In the few years he went jihad, however, by the time he died all of the Arabian peninsula was Muslim. Some of them were Muslim in the sense of being tributes, they were only Islamic because their warlord was, but after Mohammed died, Abbas and the rest pulled them in line as an empire.
Looking at the history of Islam, Mohammed had many chances of being destroyed by superior forces. And his early time resembled Jesus Christ or any other true prophet of God, in that they attempted to reform the human society and morality, to counteract the human nature and corruption at work.
In the long term however, Mohammed could not withstand being ridiculed, so he asked his god to give him the strength to punish his enemies. What he was too stupid or ignorant to understand, however, was that only enemies of God would accept conversion by the sword as a divinely approved method. Divine level entities don't seem to care about how many people you kill, so long as you give people a choice at the end or obey whatever law/convenant they seem to have. Islam's Slavery 3.0 did not give a choice, not the choice of the Israeli Covenant of the Ark nor of Jesus/Baptism by water/fire. Mohammed's answer was "become Caesar", while Jesus' answer was "God isn't Caesar". And the Israelis had a god that was so tired of human flaws that they pushed the reset button and produced a flood that wiped out most life, except for some leftovers in an ark. People in sci fi even call spaceships that leave a destroyed earth, an "ark". The "ark" back then didn't have windows, it was like a submarine. How were they supposed to build a submarine out of wood back then... that's not a concept they should have understood. They were primitives that couldn't even count past 20 without the use of roman numerals and didn't even have the concept of the zero from India.
Lucifer obtained one of his own prophets, like they are fighting a grand tug of war between who gets human resources. Lucifer is described as having convinced 1/3rd of the host of Heaven that his way was right. One doesn't do that without charisma and military genius, at some level. Washington was offered a similar choice, when his men pushed the king's crown on him. It would take some kind of convincing to make people think free will is wrong. But I see all kinds of ways people justify it.
The utter superstitious dread of the ancient Israelites and tribal herdsmen and raiders back in the ME, makes it extremely difficult, especially given the lack of interpreting the original language or what is left of it, to make sense of eye witness reports back then. Soddom and Gommorah are good examples of cities, God supposedly destroyed. Maybe they were having too much homo sex and produced the HIV plague. If God wiped out two cities, that would probably be something that might cause a problem given the small genetic diversity and numbers of humans at the time. Again, it's hard to interpret, even assuming the translations are correct. Which I assume are erroneous translations, since I know how difficult it is to translate from Japanese to English, even with modern online tools and dictionaries. It's more of a linguistics and cultural gap.
If we made a solar system, put some primitive species on a planet and watched, in fast motion as their lives are simulated and calculated using the model, we wouldn't want them wiped out by some evil plague either. We would sterilize the affected parts and preserve the base stock. So what is the nature of God or the face of God? That's what people have been wondering for thousands of years. Just as they keep looking for the basic unit of matter, they got a long way to go.
4 comments:
If DC disappears in a mushroom, I'll consider it some angel's work.
If enough people hate evil, they may call down a miracle, but only if they actually want a change.
Before 2012, I would say that Americans were still sleeping. They are still sleeping, of course, but some of them actually woke up, surprisingly.
I read once a story of Muhammad, which I recall went this way: once he was rejected from a city in some shameful manner, and as he went out into the desert the voice of an angel of God came to him. "Look back, and choose," it said, or something to that effect. Turning back, he saw an archangel poised over the city with a flaming sword, and understood that he had been given power to elect to save or destroy the city.
According to the story, he chose to save the city, and explained this as the moment in his life when he was in greatest peril of falling.
Muhammad doesn't get a lot of good press around here, but that story always struck me as having a particular wisdom to it. I'm not sure how legitimate a part of the Islamic tradition it is, though. It's just something I read, once.
There are two Mohammeds, the peaceful proselytizer, like Jesus, and the warlord jihadist later on.
Peaceful conversion and teaching got him about 100 Muslim converts in some odd decades. In the few years he went jihad, however, by the time he died all of the Arabian peninsula was Muslim. Some of them were Muslim in the sense of being tributes, they were only Islamic because their warlord was, but after Mohammed died, Abbas and the rest pulled them in line as an empire.
Looking at the history of Islam, Mohammed had many chances of being destroyed by superior forces. And his early time resembled Jesus Christ or any other true prophet of God, in that they attempted to reform the human society and morality, to counteract the human nature and corruption at work.
In the long term however, Mohammed could not withstand being ridiculed, so he asked his god to give him the strength to punish his enemies. What he was too stupid or ignorant to understand, however, was that only enemies of God would accept conversion by the sword as a divinely approved method. Divine level entities don't seem to care about how many people you kill, so long as you give people a choice at the end or obey whatever law/convenant they seem to have. Islam's Slavery 3.0 did not give a choice, not the choice of the Israeli Covenant of the Ark nor of Jesus/Baptism by water/fire. Mohammed's answer was "become Caesar", while Jesus' answer was "God isn't Caesar". And the Israelis had a god that was so tired of human flaws that they pushed the reset button and produced a flood that wiped out most life, except for some leftovers in an ark. People in sci fi even call spaceships that leave a destroyed earth, an "ark". The "ark" back then didn't have windows, it was like a submarine. How were they supposed to build a submarine out of wood back then... that's not a concept they should have understood. They were primitives that couldn't even count past 20 without the use of roman numerals and didn't even have the concept of the zero from India.
Lucifer obtained one of his own prophets, like they are fighting a grand tug of war between who gets human resources. Lucifer is described as having convinced 1/3rd of the host of Heaven that his way was right. One doesn't do that without charisma and military genius, at some level. Washington was offered a similar choice, when his men pushed the king's crown on him. It would take some kind of convincing to make people think free will is wrong. But I see all kinds of ways people justify it.
The utter superstitious dread of the ancient Israelites and tribal herdsmen and raiders back in the ME, makes it extremely difficult, especially given the lack of interpreting the original language or what is left of it, to make sense of eye witness reports back then. Soddom and Gommorah are good examples of cities, God supposedly destroyed. Maybe they were having too much homo sex and produced the HIV plague. If God wiped out two cities, that would probably be something that might cause a problem given the small genetic diversity and numbers of humans at the time. Again, it's hard to interpret, even assuming the translations are correct. Which I assume are erroneous translations, since I know how difficult it is to translate from Japanese to English, even with modern online tools and dictionaries. It's more of a linguistics and cultural gap.
If we made a solar system, put some primitive species on a planet and watched, in fast motion as their lives are simulated and calculated using the model, we wouldn't want them wiped out by some evil plague either. We would sterilize the affected parts and preserve the base stock. So what is the nature of God or the face of God? That's what people have been wondering for thousands of years. Just as they keep looking for the basic unit of matter, they got a long way to go.
It's a story about going to bed at night, not knowing if you'll have a country in the morning.
Valerie
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