The Abrahamic faiths were born from suffering.
The major theme of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the mythologization of suffering and serves as a gateway to heaven. Indeed, the death of Jesus Christ is a testament to the value given suffering. Candida Moss in her new book The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom testifies to this phenomenon. The early Christians made suffering a cornerstone of their faith - to die for Christ. They were so enveloped in that concept that Moss' book shows how they even provoked Roman official's into killing them! Sounds familiar, this is precisely the same reason why during the Intifada young Palestinian men willingly, actually happily blew themselves up apart. To these young men, brainwashed by the machinations of their mullahs as well as the purpose-giving life provided by Hamas and the PLO, dying for Allah means a direct route to heaven and a welcoming committee of no less than 71 virgins. It is also safe to say that these men were as much motivated by the concept of the 71 virgins as meeting god himself, I think even more than god himself. It also shows that these men, more than anything, and despite everything they think they believe, are actually sex starved and sexually repressed.
I was born into Catholicism, and Catholicism is very good at instilling the value of suffering. It actually glorifies suffering in an almost masochistic manner.It's obsession with pain, suffering and guilt is its crowning achievement - it's symbol, the cross, is an unequivocal signpost of Christianity's passionate embrace of pain and suffering.
When I was in college studying for my first degree, philosophy, I went on evening walks for one month with a German SVD professor of mine who gave a few bags of food every night to some really poor people who lived around our school. One night, we visited an old lady in her ramshackle, really nothing more than cardboard boxes for walls, a few used corrugated sheets for a roof and almost nothing else except the clothes on her body. Approaching her "house," which was really more of a toy house in fact, I greeted her and exchanged a few felicitations as is customary in the Philippines. I asked her how is everything and her curt but telling reply was: "I am good, this is what god has given me so I have to accept it." Suffering, again glorified into needless heights in the name of god. This is what religion is, this is what the Abrahamic faiths are good at.
This obsession with suffering, really institutionalized sado-masochism, is sickening and immoral. Karl Marx captured this well when he said that "...religion is the opium of the people." Religion makes suffering ok, to accept it with joy and surrender even. The Islamic faith actually induces its adherents to die if need be, to die to defend Islam, to die to ensure that those who question its tenets die too!
This fetish with suffering engendered by religion, especially by Christianity and most recently, by Islam, is also the root cause of the institutionalization of violence. Violence then becomes a tool, a sacred tool in the defense of the faith. Because suffering is given a pedestal in the pantheon of religious beliefs as incarnated in the bible and the koran, violence becomes a god-instrument in the proselytization process. Although Christianity has outgrown its psychotic, murderous past, Islam has nonetheless taken its place, apostates are fair game. The koran actually encourages their murder, and this is extended to gays, women who disobey their husbands, women who do not cover themselves up (especially in Muslim countries were Sharia law is the law) and those who do not readily convert to Islam.
According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if the west adopts a philosophy of life, Islam subscribes to a philosophy of death, and I might add, Christianity believes in a philosophy of pain and suffering. The Abrahamic faiths values and cherishes pain, suffering, and death because of its obsession with an afterlife. That is the fundamental distinction of the "people's of the book." A tradition rooted in the early lives of a largely rural, poor, largely illiterate desert people making sense of the world around it.
As a secular humanist, I subscribe only to the idea that man is what is important, science and philosophy is what will provide us with the best answer to the riddles of existence, the amelioration of our sufferings, the cultivation of our potentialities, the maintenance of the environment and the fulfillment of a meaningful and happy life. As the great French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, we are brought into this world to create our own meaning. The meaning we create is what will determine who we become, what we can become, what we are and what we hope to be.
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