My 84-year-old mother-in-law is a devout Catholic and
as a result, I’ve had to spend most of my Sunday’s taking her to mass every
Sunday evening at Novena Church. Although I am not Catholic (I am a Buddhist
student of Christian Theology who has inevitably been blessed by Muslims, Jains
and Hindus) I listen in and take in what’s being said. Today’s priest came up
with what I thought was a valuable soundbite, which everyone seems to forget.
The service was about the “end of times,” or Judgement
Day when Christ returns to judge humanity and the righteous are supposed to be resurrected.
The priest made the valuable point that judgement day is not about a check list
of how many commandments you broke and kept but about how you treated people,
specifically the least, the last and the lost.
What made this resonate with me, is the fact that it
seemed to touch on who Christ is and for that matter the Christian and just
about every other religion. Read the Gospels and you will notice that Christ is
a champion of the downtrodden. He is the ultimate rebel who showed up the
respected members of society like the scribes and the pharisees for being
hypocrites of the worst sort and offered to solace to the downtrodden like the fishermen,
the tax collectors and prostitutes. The man wasn’t interested in collecting
money from his followers but told the rich to sell all their possessions to
become followers of his. Christ is the first God in human history who made
suffering part of the ultimate divine glory:
I bring up this beautiful sound bite of the Least; the
Last and the Lost because too many people get carried away with what I believe
is the “wrong” thing (which I am aware makes me sound as dogmatic as the people
I’m slagging off). Too many people get carried away with what I would call the “magic”
of religion. Its as if you religion is a bargain where you pray to this or that
God in the hope that by doing a certain number of prayers you will get health,
wealth and happiness.
Now, I’m not denying the presence and probability of divine
miracles. What I am saying is that the miracles are not actually the important
part of the faith. Faith, as the Dalai Lama once said, should make you, “A better
person.”
I think of the time I went to meet a Rinpoche in the
airport. The man had a small entourage who had organized his trip to Singapore.
The coffee session was very enlightening. The entourage had plenty of stories about
all sorts of monasteries where there were monks who could do all sorts of
miraculous things because they meditated on this way or that for decades of
their lives and thus achieved so much merit.
Whilst these guys had plenty to say, the Rinpoche (who
is supposed to be a living reincarnation who remembers his last life like it was
yesterday) sat there looking rather bemused and whenever someone asked him
about the magic, promptly said he didn’t know anything.
Now, this is a harmless story about people being
focused on the wrong thing. It’s funny and cute in a certain way. What is not
funny is when the focus on the magic becomes public policy and it comes a tool
of oppression against the very people that just about every religion claim to
champion. Think of India, which is officially secular but contains most of the
world’s Hindus. Whilst the concept of “Untouchability” has long been abolished
in the Indian constitution and legal system, you still get a large segment of
the population getting the s**t kicked out of them because someone many
thousands of years ago considered them unclean. Economic reforms have been
doing their work in uplifting people beyond cast beliefs but its not happening
fast enough.
Then, there’s the proverbial Holy Land to the Abrahamic
Faiths. Three religions call this spot of the desert Holy and yet a host of very
Unholy Things keep happening there in the name of the one God that all three
religions claim as theirs.
If you leave you the main protagonist of this conflict
(namely the Israeli Government and Hamas), you’ll find that the single worst
group of people in keeping things in the Holy Land anything but Holy, you’ll
find that they are inevitably the Zionist Christians. This refers to the group
of Churches that believe that Christ will come again when the Israelis controls
all the land. This is a group that has tremendous wealth and power or at least
enough power to remind American politicians of both parties about which side
they need to support. Hence, whenever a conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians breaks out, you’ll find the most powerful man in the world doing
what the Prime Minister of a strip of desert tells him to do.
Again, I don’t want to disparage belief in prophecy
and whilst my study of theology is rather rusty, I don’t see how supporting a government
that has on record killed 0.5 percent of a population of a territory (as
reported by the Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/
) could be an act of Holiness.
Let’s remember, the Gospels are very clear. Jesus was
on the side of the least; the last and the lost. As horrific as the October 7
attacks against Israel are, indiscriminate bombing of people who are the
definition of the least; the last and the lost and calling it self-defense if
not something Jesus would condone. If anything, the Zionist Churches who are actively
supporting the bombings need to ask if getting Jesus to return is in their
interest at all.
1 comment
Hello Supporter of Hamas
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