You will rarely see me use this work, but that’s what this blog is: a waterway for moving my excess energy downriver. Love is not “virtue”, it is an OUTCOME. You cannot command “thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself”. This is not on a par with the Ten Commandments. You can command “thou shalt not steal”, or “thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain”. But you cannot say “thou shalt feel happy to be alive next Tuesday, Skippy, because I said so”.
What happens when you do that? People FAKE it, if they are not already sufficiently advanced to generate those emotional states. This is counterproductive. How on earth have wars been fought by adherents of a religion supposedly based on love? Either abandon the religion or the war, but you can’t have both. As I have said, “Christianity” likely would have been more useful preserved as an esoteric sect, or having served its purpose then been abandoned before decay, like a Tibetan butter sculpture.
Wars are plainly needed at time, but not those of the sort fought for most of human history. Most of those have been one set of sons of bitches taking over the land and women of some other set of sons of bitches. Often, it’s hard to feel too much sorrow for either side.
Rightly or wrongly, I congentically seem to feel more pity in such conflicts for women. Women in most cultures are undefined on their own. Even in our own, it is common enough for women to keep their married name even when they get divorced. This is a strange practice, but women seem much more adaptable and emotionally strong than most men. They deal in ambiguity and emotional flux much better than most men. They seem to suffer more, but be better able to do it. That they seem to develop stronger spiritualities in turn, seems an almost inevitable outcome of this seemingly innate propensity.
I dream a fair amount. Some nights see no dreams, but normally if I have them they are emotionally resonant. I have fought, and defeated, Voldemort on several occasions in the last month alone. That he would pop into dreams as a symbol of evil shows the brilliance both of Rowlings idea, and its cinematic rendering by Ralph Fiennes, his costumers, his directors, and script writers.
Last night, I befriended a 15 year old runaway girl, who had a beautiful spirit, even though she plainly had seen some terrors. She had run away to be with her boyfriend, who had then abandoned her. In the end, her experiment on her own was unsuccessful, and she asked me to return her to her father, who was a cruel Muslim, and who, out of my vision, savagely beat her to death for having had a boyfriend. This was deeply painful to me. At the same time, there was so much love in her I felt gifted to have met her. That sentiment is the source of this post.
One could, I suppose, psychoanalyze this, but as I process these things, I feel I am being granted visions of other people and cultures. Any culture which systematically abuses women as much as Islam can only be called cursed. Any man who engages in this sort of thing will not go to heaven: most of them will go to some lower level of hell.
Why was it wrong for Muhammad to marry a 7 year old, and deflower/rape her when she was 9? Because it betrays a fundamental lack of emotional development. Why is it so important that a woman be a virgin–to MEN–that they consider it acceptable to emotionally abuse small children, who are not ready for such things? This cannot be seen as other than a power relationship, and the seeking of power over others as an end in itself is, as I have often argued, a principle symptom of evil.
Oh, so many of the Earths’ problems can be solved. Islam would self reform if allowed to, which is why the fanatics fight so hard for a construction of the religion that never existed. Most people born on this earth are not hard and cruel. They are taught this, and any system of thought or social habit that teaches this is wrong.