6.23.2009

Fear Not

As I'm sitting here watching a show on the History Channel, called The Next Nostradamus, I realize that the reason the Middle East is in such turmoil is, of course, religious-based - but more specifically, because they believe everyone should believe as they believe. And if they choose not to, the consequences are "death to the gentile."

It makes me wonder, what if the [militant] Islamic people didn't have a clause in their doctrine that required them to go out and convert or kill anyone who accepts or rejects, respectively, their beliefs. What if the [Israeli] Jews weren't so obsessed over a particular piece of land that it rose to heated conflict. What if [Dark-Ages Catholic] Christians didn't go out in their crusades "back in the day" and kill all the "heathens" or perform all those "witch hunts."

What if everyone just lived their life - asked questions to learn what other people believed, why they believed it...and then applied it to their own lifestyle if the moral fit. I'm not talking about accepting a better belief system because of the "mystical" rewards in the afterlife. That should be a separate post about choosing religion based on greed.

I'm simply wondering how the world would be if the militant sect of Islam wasn't militant. If their neighboring countries, including Israel, took it upon themselves to show love (the same Love that their God represents - technically the same God that the Islamic people believe in) and compassion to have the half-brother relationship the two people have. If the old-skool Catholics didn't hate the Jews for killing Jesus (when it was the Romans...the same people that created Catholicism...that did).

Granted I have a very naive understanding of the intricacies of the Islamic, Jewish, and Catholic interpretations of religion. But as with most things, I don't have to have such intricate knowledge to explain concepts - concepts that those WITH the intricate knowledge would understand how to carry out.

Consider a world where there were no wars among different people in different regions, and instead there were talks, lectures, documentation of how a particular society lives their life - why they follow certain practices - how those ideas have developed over time - and provide some kind of quantifiable proof for what benefits and disadvantages their particular methodology has. And then the different nations of the world share their "best-practices" in some sort of forum with the rest of the world to gain and benefit from. How different would everything be?

Different industries do this in business. What works for an automobile manufacturer assembly line does not necessarily work for food production. You can't reasonably pass down a hamburger bun to the next person, let them apply the mustard, the next apply the lettuce, then another tomatoes and so on. However, in concept - allowing particular people to be in charge of a particular part of the meal as a whole DOES work. So you have 3 people working on one meal (hamburger, fries, drink) at the same time and it comes out in 1/3 the time as it does with one person doing it all.

If you have one nation that uses a particular kind of seed it has developed that can produce 3x as much food as the seed another country is using - yet that country has equipment that allows them to harvest food 3x as fast as the first nation - why not combine the ideas of the two. Grow the first nation's seed on 3x the land, harvest it with the second nation's equipment 3x as fast, and you can produce the combined effect of 9x the food output.

There are herbal cures deep in the African and Amazon jungles that a lot of modern doctors probably have never heard of. If they ventured into the jungles to learn about these techniques and herbs...and left behind specific knowledge of other cures to diseases the people die from (common cold, small pox, etc) then both communities benefit...and so does the rest of the world.

I think - no, I know that most of what drives people's division and purported hatred is simply a lack of understanding about something. I know that my parents had a strong hatred for those Magic Eye books (the kind where you crossed your eyes, and an image popped out). They said it was demonic and it was inviting you to relax your spirit for the devil to enter in - and then would scour the seemingly random patterns of dots on the pages to try and find sequences of dots that resembled (in one's mind) the image of a face/demon/devil.

Had they only understood how the eyes actually work, and that one eye sees from a certain angle, and the other eye does as well - the book takes this mathematical knowledge and through the instructed process causes your eyes to find the precise angle for which the image was designed so that the dots on the page became an image in the brain.

That's all it was - math and biology. There's no demons, no devils, no relaxation of the spirit.

Fear is what drives everything apart. Understanding is what brings everything together. If you can understand how something works, you no longer have to fear it. You should still respect it - and the consequences of it's output if used incorrectly - but you don't have to live in fear of it.

The phrase "fear not" appears 62 times in the King James bible...maybe there's something to it.