By Eric Alexander
Shahada: an ambiguous word, to judge from the Web. Sometimes
it means martyrdom, sometimes something else.
So when a Muslim woman writes in her diary that she wishes
her husband “the highest form of shahada”, is
it merely a coincidence that he is, at the same time, planning
to end his life by blowing up a planeload of innocent people?
If nothing else, this episode reminds us that the Jihadi
sworn to such a barbarous act expects Allah to reward him
with a place in Paradise.
Meanwhile the Israeli government is acting coy over whether
its secret service was responsible for the murder of a prominent
member of Hamas in a Dubai hotel. Is it merely a coincidence
that the murder team were using forged British passports in
the names of people in Israel at the time? Or that the victim
belonged to an organisation regularly targeted by the Israeli
military?
Another reminder here, of a larger-scale operation against
the same organisation: Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Or should
it have been called Operation Cast Phosphorus? One of its
most appalling aspects was the lobbing by the Israelis of
white phosphorus shells into schools and hospitals.
A few months after the conflict, a group of Israeli peace
activists published, under the title “Breaking The Silence”,
several interviews given by servicemen involved in the Gaza
campaign. Their findings could be viewed on the Web. One was
that a group of rabbis, sanctioned by the authorities, had
been quoting passages from the Old Testament to the troops,
in effect to show that using white phosphorus against Israel’s
enemies is a sacred duty.
Both sides in the conflict call upon a god who glories in
the slaughter and maiming of innocent people. What sort of
god is this?
Is this question relevant to Christians? They share with
Jews a reverence for the Old Testament, which apparently sanctions
barbaric practices in wartime. It is also the source of some
traditional Christian attitudes, notably those towards homosexuality
and contraception.
I am reminded of something I discovered in the letters of
Victorian writer William Makepeace Thackeray (author of Vanity
Fair). He and his mother were both evangelical Christians “of
the Clapham Theology”, but they could never agree about
the importance of the Old Testament. In one letter he wrote
to her: “What right have you to say that I am without
God because I can't believe that God ordered Abraham to kill
Isaac or that he ordered the bears to eat the little children
who laughed at Elisha for being bald?”
There are some gruesome episodes in the Old Testament: Genesis
Chapter 34 (prototype honour killing) is a prime example.
Holy Writ? According to modern scholarship, exemplified by
Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: The Biography, different
parts of the book were written at different times by different
people, then lumped together with little thought for creating
a coherent entity. Certainly not the work of one God-inspired
hand.
One would expect senior churchmen to ponder long and hard
how seriously Christians should take the Old Testament. Yet
I’ve seen no evidence that this topic is even on their
agenda. Could this be because they are frightened of similar
questions being raised about the New Testament?
You don’t need much scholarship to know that the four
gospels have different authors. Now scholars say that these
authors are not who they purport to be; that they compiled
their gospels many years after events described therein; that
details of their accounts are sometimes incompatible; and
that other versions of the same story have been suppressed
because they detract from the agreed teaching. A dispassionate
observer might well conclude that Christianity is a vast conspiracy
to enslave the human mind; enabling crusaders (including modern
ones like George W Bush) to go to war, and priests to spread
misery by acting out their erotic fantasies on their parishioners.
Not so different, then, from Judaism or Islam. Go back to
Abraham, and it seems that all three religions worship the
same God. What sort of god is it?
Eric Alexander
Feb-March 2010 |