The horrible slaughter of human beings at play last week in Amman, Jordan once again highlights the presence of evil in our world.
Fanciful as it is to speculate that the CIA is brainwashing idiots into committing acts of horror, it is more probable that fanatics of many descriptions are hijacking various religions to fight a last ditch struggle against the secular forces of reason that have been in the ascendency for some time now.
This piece was written in rage after the murders of hundred of children playing in Bali some years ago.
Now i see that a woman, part of a married pair has condfessed to blowing up a room full of wedding guests. She is a failed bomb and a bomb cannot be expected to have any morality.
Lyndon Johnson was alleged to have spoken in a cavalier fashion about America’s prospects in Vietnam. “We are killing ten of theirs to one of ours.” he said,”So we must win, cause we got more people.”
Alexander HAig said much the same thing in the great european civil war 1914-1918.
AT the moment the bombers are scoring twenty to thirty per hit so if we’re not careful ‘we’ whoever ‘we’ are who are the presumed objective of all this terror may well lose.
Weblog 17/10/02
The Butchers of Bali
‘What we obtain too cheaply we value too lightly’
I read these lines of Thomas Paine, American
Revolutionary, and secular pamphleteer
as I heard
The news on the Television
About the horror attack on happy
Young
Human
Beings
At play in Bali.
Once again the world of unreason
Has intersected with that
Of the rational.
Democracy and human ingenuity versus the
Nature of the human at its worst
This struggle between the forces of reason
And unreason, millennia old
Has persisted in force now for 500 years: is it finally
Showdown time.
How does one react to a barbaric act?
What could motivate a human being to
Deliberately plan and then execute
Such an horrendous crime
Against ordinary people.
What war are these people fighting
That makes it possible to demonise a room full of children
So completely that their destruction leaves them cold?
Is this the true face of evil
Acting in defence of some irrational good?
In this strange war between the
Secular forces of progress, the law,
The democratic process and the frequent flaw
Of reason
Against the insidious poison of
Unreason how does one define the
Line
Between good and evil
Other than to extend beyond
Both.
Is it the taking of life itself that is evil?
Should evil be fought with evil?
Should we argue that an eye deserves an eye?
Or would it be more certain to argue
That an eye deserves the entire body when
Those who preach and then practice bloody murder
Perpetrate such acts in defence of the indefensible.
If we gave this behaviour any other motivation than religion then we should call
Those people madmen
And we should incarcerate them in a place of safety
For both themselves and us, for they
Act on behalf of a conjecture
Raised to a fantasy.
If evil lies in ignorance then
How is one to judge
A creed that holds an unbeliever to be
Evil
And pursuit of their own creed
To be the only truth.
Is it then truth?
To live in blissful
Ignorance
Of the real nature of death and the illusion of the life
Ever after
Is this not substantiating one evil by recourse to another?
And is this not in conflict with the law?
At best it is deceptive advertising.
So what Now?
Firstly it is beyond obvious that we are engaged in a circumstance Mao
Tse Tung once defined as the
‘War of the Flea.’
The scratch, scratch, scratch has already made its mark
Upon us
In the form of sagging, markets, declining
Productivity and terrorised citizens.
Airlines have collapsed and millions have had their lives
Disrupted, many terminally, by this scratch
Scratch
Scratch.
This ‘War-’ is being motivated and prompted by
Unreasoning fanatics who hate the world
As it is, or even as it could be, probably because liberated citizens have no need
Of fantastical nostrums to leaven the horror of their
Lives.
No these unreasoning fanatics seek nothing less
Than a return to
A more congenial form of Stone Age: where inequality
May be rationalised
Through invocation of some of other
Sacred message justifying the inequality of human beings.
For the Secularists of the world
The way forward is terrifyingly apparent.
We are under siege by people, who it seems believe in ghosts and goblins
And in their desperate search for
Simplicity
Seek a future more deeply rooted in the 8th century than in the 21st.
It is an essential ingredient
Of the democratic viewpoint that
Those strange human beings who are terrified of the
Dark and seek solace in strange antediluvian
Philosophies and pastimes are entitled to those beliefs and practices
Provided they remain
Private and personal.
When those beliefs transcend their correct place in moderating
Private behaviour then, as they say, the buck must stop.
Any system of belief that condones
The butchery of citizens
Whether in Bali, New York or the remotest villages of
Algeria or wherever else this pestilential
Terror has struck over the past decades of increasing horror,
Has to be evaluated in terms of
Its final objective, which is to enslave the mind
And shackle it to darkness.
This layman and secularist has to
Interpret that desired outcome of the Fundamentalist
(Of whatever creed)
Using the objective evidence
Presented by those places which have succumbed to the terror
Of religious oppression.
Away with this horror
Down with all the priests of darkness with their infernal cargo cults.
What priests and other brainwashed acolytes may choose to believe in the sanctity of their heads in private places
Is their right.
It is not their right
To demand that if the rest of us do not share their onanistic
Obsession that we must die.
This is both barbaric and absurd.
To put it more simply their position is the metaphysical equivalent of
Claiming that all those
Who will not drive, say, a Mercedes Benz
Should be put to death for failing to drive the ‘true motorcar’
Or failing to achieve ‘the true driving experience’.
We see this
As absurd. Why is it that the marketers of
Soul food should expect us to see their musings as being any different or
Subject to alternative rules just because
The product they sell
Is more intangible than
Life assurance or the sales of advertising space?
At best they sell a conjecture at worst they peddle
Lies.
Increasingly we citizens of a secular State
View people of such a fanatical disposition (favouring
The world of unreason)
As objects of pity: the lunatics of Bedlam, at best
Sad confused people who seek the certainty in ghost stories, ghost written
For them by countless nameless monks
Who gathered about them nostrums,
Like so much unsophisticated advertising fluff
And public relations hype.
That we should let them kill us
In their despair at our amusement
Is intolerable and may require that we set aside
Our indulgence in the
Interests of our own survival.
.NiK(2002)
God is a thought that makes cooked all that is straight, and
Makes turn whatever
Stands. How? Should time be gone and all that is
Impermanent a mere lie? -. Evil I call it and
Misanthropic all this teaching of the One and the Plenum
And the Unmoved and the Sated
And the Permanent. All the permanent — that is only
A parable
And the poets lie too much.
Nietzsche
After Bond: a Haiku for Leigh Matthews: *
Sweet child lies here
plucked too early left
cold one winter’s night.
.NiK[04]
Student and loved child of distraught parents: abducted at random from the car park of Bond University in Jozi, was ransomed and then murdered. 2004. R.I.P.
There is no greater calamity
Than lavish desires
There is no greater guilt
Than discontent
There is no greater disaster
Than greed.
Lao Tzu
The judge quoted these words when sentencing Donovan Moodley to life in prison for the abduction and murder of Leigh Mathews on the eve of her twenty first birthday. He pleaded guilty and took the secret of who had helped him [if anyone] to prison.